From the Newark (OH) Advocate OpEd page, A7

Jeff Gill back in the saddle again

In Ohio after the Revolutionary War, it was common to have a preacher on horseback ride into an area and preach wherever he found a willing audience. It might be in a cabin, a store, a school, a tavern or even in an open field. These men were called “circuit riders” or “saddle-back preachers.”

In 1825, one of these saddleback preachers, David Montgomery Glancy (a.k.a. D.M.

Glancy), traveled across Licking and surrounding counties on horseback from his home in a log cabin in Rocky Fork, down the road a piece from Newark. D.M. Glancy, who was my great-great-great-grandfather, a physician and a licensed Methodist minister, handed out many Bibles and preached more than 2,180 sermons to his flock, which was spread out in Ohio.

Presently in Licking County, we have a modern day roving preacher who has been serving the churches and organizations in our community for more than 20 years. Jeff Gill’s life reminds us of the dedication of a saddle-back preacher, as he has served where called each week.

Maybe you’ve seen him educating a group about the Indian mounds, swinging a hammer to help build a house for Habitat for Humanity, announcing in a boxing ring, mediating with local youth, serving on a community board or leading a group of Boy Scouts in song.

He always is there to support a charitable cause whether making fries at the Fourth of July celebration, serving as master of ceremonies at the Midland Theatre or even portraying a historical character dressed in colonial attire in a cemetery. He has preached in many different churches, assisted with various organizations, pitched in for numerous events and he has been available for the people. Fortunately for a local congregation, Jeff recently agreed to modify his itinerant ways and to serve as their minister.

A modern pastor who reads his Bible verses from a Kindle and is connected to the community and to the world by Facebook, Twitter and his weekly column in The Advocate, Jeff is a master storyteller and a historian capturing and holding the attention of his audience through current stories and parables.

We are having an installation service for him at Central Christian Church, 587 Mount Vernon Road, at the 10:30 a.m.

service Oct. 28. Please join us to congratulate Jeff as he continues his ministry.

I’m sure D.M. Glancy and the other saddle-back preachers from the past are proud to have him follow in their footsteps.

Janice Large Newark 

Faith Works 10-6

Faith Works 10-6-12

Jeff Gill

 

Faith walking, prayer talking

___

 

 

While I'm probably the last person who should be surprised by this, the spiritual side of our walks around ancient earthworks this summer has left me both amazed and delighted.

 

For those who aren't aware of it, I spend a fair amount of time (too much, my spouse might say) leading hikes and walks and rambles around and along our local earthworks and ancient mounds.

 

This summer has given me a chance to branch out a bit, not just across the expanses of Licking County, but along our newly developed Ancient Ohio Trail, an idea and a website which is a production of the Newark Earthworks Center with Ohio State, and the University of Cincinnati's Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites (or CERHAS, for obvious reasons).

 

With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio Humanities Council, and support from the Ohio Historical Society (OHS), the National Park Service (NPS), and the Licking County Convention and Visitors Bureau, we've tied together 2,000 year old culture and architecture from Cincinnati to Coshocton. I've gotten to be part of interpretive hikes since last November from Hopeton Works across the Scioto River from Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Spruce Hill up the Paint Creek valley from Chillicothe (managed by NPS and the Arc of Appalachia), down at legendary Fort Ancient, the first site OHS took under care in 1885, and of course around our own Newark Earthworks . . . and many more.

 

My hat on these walks and tours is one of guide, with an emphasis on the historical and archaeological, but we are getting better at adding the cultural aspect of these engineering achievements, with the involvement of more and more Native American folk. The Newark Earthworks Center has been pioneering efforts to make contact with and renew connections between Indian tribes with historic connections to Ohio before 1832 and "the removal period," along with other Native nations whose people show in DNA and oral tradition that their heritage runs back through these valleys as well.

 

But the pastor hat is in my pocket, I have to admit. And occasionally, quietly, it goes on my head. When people talk about their own now deceased relatives, and their ties to these sites through memory and affection; when visitors ask "do you believe that there is a curse here?" as we journey through areas of destruction or loss; when a group stops at a point where hundreds, likely thousands of burials once were placed and are mostly still in the ground beneath our feet, and we struggle to find the words and sense to honor what the place means today.

 

And joyfully so, I feel the pastoral role as I've gotten the chance to walk along where ancient avenues once led, and hear a man talk about his own alienation from his Native traditions and customs, and his sense of renewal in a sweat lodge ceremony, and how our stories here about what Native Americans achieved in this place has changed how he raises his children.

 

This isn't all about book learning. It's about heart shaping, and story telling. We have facts, we have theories, we have legends and traditions, and we have the quiet steady certainty of the sun's rising and moon's setting, and the seasons within that cosmic frame.

 

So I invite you, as this long Ancient Ohio Summer comes to an end next weekend, to meet at the Great Circle Museum off Rt. 79, next Saturday, Oct. 13th at 9:00 am. Come walk three miles and change, spend a couple of hours seeing some of the hidden remnants of the Newark Earthworks. Or travel down to Chillicothe on Saturday if you've already journeyed with us on one of the local walks, and participate in the NPS Discovery Day down there (see www.nps.gov/hocu for details).

 

Then come out to 33^rd St. and Parkview on Sunday, Oct. 14th to experience the last Octagon Open House of 2012, one of four this year, when you can ramble the 50+ acre Octagon or 20 acres of the Observatory Circle. Some of us will be there to provide tours, but you may just want to experience the site, and consider the past, and the peoples then and now on the landscape.

 

Is it a spiritual or historical experience? My thought is, why choose?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he's delighted to show you around next Sunday at the Octagon Earthworks. Let him know where you've been inspired in Ohio at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

World Communion Sunday 2012

Newark Central – World Communion Sunday 2012

Isaiah 28: 23-29, John 12: 20-26

"The Baker's Lament" presented by Dennis Kohler

           by Jeff Gill

*  *  *

So, where were you at 4:30 am?

I was where I always am. You know where the baker has to be, don't you?

This is not a complaint. A baker's life is a good life. My father was a bricklayer, and his father was a farmer. Their lives were up with the sun, and down with it, but their fortunes were just as up and down. The frost or the rain or the economy could cut them off or build them up, and just as quickly bring them down.

Me, I bake the bread. People eat bread in good times and in bad; they may want a wedding cake once in their lives, and some cookies for Christmas, but week in and week out, they need bread, and I bake it for them.

In return for the stability of my livelihood, I don't get up with the sun, I get ahead of it. The sun rises to see me already covered in flour and half done with filling the vats with dough to set and rise in the room by the ovens. And I'm home well before dinner, unless there's one of those cakes to be made . . . but that pays for the extras, so no one minds. I see the dinner table with my family more than my father ever did, or his.

You could call it cleaner work, as well, although it seems like I'm always washing my hands. I'm in dough up to my elbows as often as not, and moving from the rolls to the doughnuts to the loaves, it's all fresh and sweet. Some people don't like the smell of yeast at work, but I remember grandfather's barns, and helping shovel out from around the cows: give me the bakery any day.

And I do still smell it. Some people say the scent vanishes from over-exposure, but I've never found it to be so. Fresh bread baking is my best advertisement, and noses are my billboards, but I get the first sniff. You learn, you train your nose like you would your fingers on a piano or your eyes on sentry duty . . . the faint tinge of too much crust, edging up to overdone; yeast distinct from mold, always a hazard; the richness of bread not quite ready to be removed from the oven, but moments before you might smell something burnt if you waited a touch too long.

[sniffs the air, smiles, lets everyone imagine the scent]

But baking the bread is nearly the last part of what I do. It all starts with the flour. You know, even the Bible knows that you have to have your flour ground just right, not too fine, not too rough. Isaiah 28:28!

You seem a bit surprised, as if I wouldn't know the Good Book well enough to quote it for you?

It's true, I'm rarely in church. Someone has to bake the bread, and I assure you I haven't been sleeping in and skipping services. I'm not one of those who say "Oh, I can worship God just as well out in nature, like the fourteenth fairway!" But of necessity, my work table and my sales counter have become my communion tables. If this is where I have to be, to feed my family and carry out what I perceive to be my own calling, then I need to find my own worship in this space.

So Isaiah and Judges and Ecclesiastes know something of threshing and winnowing and grinding. To get the goodness of the earth into a loaf of bread hasn't changed as much as you might think, no matter how many machines and engines we might have placed in the middle of the process. The farmer tends the grain, and it grows as God sends; after the harvest, the grain comes through the miller to me, and it flourishes as much as I'm willing to work. I can't work hard enough to make grain grow out of season, so I let God do his part and am thankful . . . and my prayers here in the bakery won't make loaves hop on their own out of the oven. God trusts me to do my part, as well, and I know how many depend on me to do it. The mixing and the kneading and the punching down and the kneading and the rolling and proofing and the baking and the . . . well, I don't mean to imply my work is harder than God's. But I do my part.

And God's part . . . yes, there is growth. And there is death. And there is new life that comes as if out of the fire, transformed and reborn. It's right there in John's Gospel: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." My days begin alone, and in the dark, but the ovens are lit, the day breaks, and the smell of bread brings people to my shop. The seed is scattered, but the harvest comes in. The bread is baked, but it must be broken for anyone to eat.

There have been moments in my life, and I daresay in yours, that I would have preserved, untouched. [Picks up loaf of bread from table.] There are losses that hurt so much that you could almost wish you'd never seen the days that led to goodbye. There are times when you have to get up the next day, and come to the shop, and you think . . . why bother? Why must we scatter, and lose, and break? [Breaks the loaf, with half in each hand.]

Except, the perfect loaf on the shelf? It's made of wax and papier-mache. It isn't real, and can't feed anyone, hungry child or indifferent customer. [Sets down broken loaf.] A loaf, so well made you want to keep it on display, for pride and personal satisfaction? It will rot. And given enough time? Will become a thing of horror . . . plus, the health department would shut you down. "Sir, you do know that your display is filled with moldering, decaying lumps of bread?" And will you answer "Yes, but they were perfect, weren't they?" No. If they're perfect, all the more reason to break them, and slice them, and share them, and see them gone.

Because, after all, the next line after Jesus tells us about how the grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die? "Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." [Picks up broken loaf again.]

This way, I have bread that lives on. [Holds up halves.] It gets eaten, and becomes part of those who enjoy it, and strengthens them to go out and love and work and care and try. And love. You can't put the loaf back together again, but it becomes whole and everlasting when the memory of a good meal and the meaning of the time spent around that table goes into those lives. [Sets halves down again.] And that love.

And those lives are what God uses to make something eternal, something everlasting. Our lives, your lives, my life. I may only make it to church for Christmas Eve and Maundy Thursday, smelling of dough and toast and a bit of icing behind my ear, but I know enough of God's plan for this world to know this: that for all the reaping and grinding and rolling and baking we might go through, we are part of the recipe. We ourselves are invited to be fed by feeding others. Our brokenness can help make others whole. Our hunger for grace can feed others with the Bread of Life.

Me, I've got to go make the doughnuts. Cream filled, the kids love those.

[ten minutes]

Knapsack 10-4

Notes from my Knapsack 10-4-12

Jeff Gill

 

Did Jesus Have a Dog?

___

 

 

A remarkable discovery in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona has scholars buzzing around the world, and checking their closets for shirts without stripes that can be worn on TV interview programs, since stripes can create odd patterns on the set and distract the viewer.

 

Published first in the Journal of Occasional Studies, a twice-annual periodical found in all the libraries to which it is sent, Dr. Ferb Forster has written a potentially revolutionary study of the "Tucson fragment" as it is now known, since I just told you that, entitled "Did Jesus Have a Dog?"

 

While scholars of the Greco-Roman world had long known that mosaics with the letters "Cave Canem" were a dead giveaway that Greeks and Romans had dogs which could speak Latin, the status of canines in the world of 1^st century Judea is largely a Terra Incognita (all of which has used up my allocation of Latin allusions for 2012 in this column).

 

The "Tucson Fragment" is a corroded, bent, rusty partial dog license tag on which the Roman letters "…over" can be seen on the top line, "ll shots and fe" on the second, and excitingly on the third line is (pretty much) clearly the word "Jesus" followed by "Martinez" and some numbers and another, illegible word.

 

Some have pointed out that metal dog license tags are not known to have been used in ancient Israel (or even in Rome, for that matter); a few have also observed that the location of the discovery in Arizona, almost half a world away from the Galilean lake and Judean hills where the historical Jesus walked, would seem to discredit the find on its face.

 

Dr. Forster is undeterred by such nay-sayers, however, and suggests that the somewhat mysterious circumstances of the object's discovery are an indication that the "Tucson fragment" is not of local origin, but was brought over by some later traveler, such as Welsh explorers of the fourteenth century, or a wandering itinerant rabbi dealing on the side in antiquities from his homeland.

 

Prof. Kibble Conway, a long-time foe of Dr. Forster in the annual faculty picnic tug-of-war, has stated firmly to anyone who would listen that the so-called "least hypothesis" or application of "Occam's razor" to this bristly problem would point anyone with even a small dose of good sense to the realization that this is a recent, modern dog tag of an animal owned by a Jesus Martinez which either died in the desert having run off, or was running about the desert with the Martinez family on vacation when the tag simply fell off the dog's collar.

 

Forster notes the unresolved and frankly inconsistent explanation offered by his academic nemesis, and lifts up the fact that "Mar Tinez" in Hebrew could, with the adjustment of a few letters, be a reference to "Mar," the respected one, and "Tinez" an Aramaicization of Thomas, who is called "the Twin" and may even be a twin for Jesus depending on which Dan Brown novel you've last read.

 

Seen in such a light, the "Tucson Fragment" is a mysterious window into the ancient past: and what might it tell us about Jesus? There are no references to dogs in any of the canonical gospels, but Conway insists that there are a number of dogs roaming through some of the "deutero-canonical" gospels, rejected by the early church, for which he had citations in a pile on his desk just a minute or so ago.

 

If Jesus did indeed have a dog, it would radically change everything we thought we knew about the man; as a dog owner, and dog lover, his image would be much more warm, humane, and approachable claims Forster. "Nonsense," sputters Conway, "at the most, it would mean Jesus had a dog. Which he didn't."

 

Despite the best efforts of deniers like Prof. Conway, students and scholars plan to continue their investigations, and find out more about this tantalizing possibility: that when Jesus walked on water, he had a dog splashing along doing a dog paddle right beside him.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he's more of a cat person. As was Jesus. Write your scathing contradictions to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-29

Faith Works 9-29-12

Jeff Gill

 

Did Jesus Have a Dog?

___

 

 

A remarkable discovery in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona has scholars buzzing around the world, and checking their closets for shirts without stripes that can be worn on TV interview programs, since stripes can create odd patterns on the set and distract the viewer.

 

Published first in the Journal of Occasional Studies, a twice-annual periodical found in all the libraries to which it is sent, Dr. Ferb Forster has written a potentially revolutionary study of the "Tucson fragment" as it is now known, since I just told you that, entitled "Did Jesus Have a Dog?"

 

While scholars of the Greco-Roman world had long known that mosaics with the letters "Cave Canem" were a dead giveaway that Greeks and Romans had dogs which could speak Latin, the status of canines in the world of 1^st century Judea is largely a Terra Incognita (all of which has used up my allocation of Latin allusions for 2012 in this one column).

 

The "Tucson Fragment" is a corroded, bent, rusty partial dog license tag on which the Roman letters "…over" can be seen on the top line, "ll shots and fe" on the second, and excitingly on the third line is (pretty much) clearly the word "Jesus" followed by "Martinez" and some numbers and another, illegible word.

 

Some have pointed out that metal dog license tags are not known to have been used in ancient Israel (or even in Rome, for that matter); a few have also observed that the location of the discovery in Arizona, almost half a world away from the Galilean lake and Judean hills where the historical Jesus walked, would seem to discredit the find on its face.

 

Dr. Forster is undeterred by such nay-sayers, however, and suggests that the somewhat mysterious circumstances of the object's discovery are an indication that the "Tucson fragment" is not of local origin, but was brought over by some later traveler, such as Welsh explorers of the fourteenth century, or a wandering itinerant rabbi dealing on the side in antiquities from his homeland.

 

Prof. Kibble Conway, a long-time foe of Dr. Forster in the annual faculty picnic tug-of-war, has stated firmly to anyone who would listen that the so-called "least hypothesis" or application of "Occam's razor" to this bristly problem would point anyone with even a small dose of good sense to the realization that this is a recent, modern dog tag of an animal owned by a Jesus Martinez which either died in the desert having run off, or was running about the desert with the Martinez family on vacation when the tag simply fell off the dog's collar.

 

Forster notes the unresolved and frankly inconsistent explanation offered by his academic nemesis, and lifts up the fact that "Mar Tinez" in Hebrew could, with the adjustment of a few letters, be a reference to "Mar," the respected one, and "Tinez" an Aramaicization of Thomas, who is called "the Twin" and may even be a twin for Jesus depending on which Dan Brown novel you've last read.

 

Seen in such a light, the "Tucson Fragment" is a mysterious window into the ancient past: and what might it tell us about Jesus? There are no references to dogs in any of the canonical gospels, but Conway insists that there are a number of dogs roaming through some of the "deutero-canonical" gospels, rejected by the early church, for which he had citations in a pile on his desk just a minute or so ago.

 

If Jesus did indeed have a dog, it would radically change everything we thought we knew about the man; as a dog owner, and dog lover, his image would be much more warm, humane, and approachable claims Forster. "Nonsense," sputters Conway, "at the most, it would mean Jesus had a dog. Which he didn't."

 

Despite the best efforts of deniers like Prof. Conway, students and scholars plan to continue their investigations, and find out more about this tantalizing possibility: that when Jesus walked on water, he had a dog splashing along doing a dog paddle right beside him.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he's more of a cat person. As was Jesus. Write your scathing contradictions to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 9-22

Faith Works 9-22-12

Jeff Gill

 

Fundamentalism and its discontents

___

  

When you hear the word "fundamentalism" used it's often in the context of describing violent demonstrations ("Islamic fundamentalism") or intolerant displays of disapproval ("Christian fundamentalism"); it can show up on the other side of the world ("Hindu fundamentalism") and even appear in discussions of politics ("constitutional fundamentalism").

 

I think it's helpful, and also interesting to look at where the whole idea of "fundamentalism" comes from, and what gave it birth, because it has not only a history, but a fairly recent one.

 

Fundamentalism is essentially one of a number of reactions to Modernism. It dates almost entirely to the period of the late 1800s and dawn of the 1900s, when the implications of the European Enlightenment from the 1600s were starting to percolate into popular, mass culture . . . and some would argue it was the rise of mass culture (sometimes called more recently "pop culture") that not only created the context of Modernism, but virtually forced the rise of Fundamentalism.

 

There are other reactions to Modernism, the best known of which is Post-Modernism, a cultural move that's largely (in this writer's opinion) running out of gas. But if you think the end of the PoMo period in academic and artistic discourse means that Modernism died long ago, you'd be (again, in my opinion) dead wrong.

 

Modernism is Darwin, Marx, and Freud, but it's also Pulitzer and Hearst and Hollywood. It's a sense of scientific understanding combined with an awareness of "deep time" in geology and biology that evokes a little awe and wonder, and lots of irony. Modernism is the realization that things haven't always been this way, so historical consciousness looks back and a certain wry apocalypticism looks forward, nervously. Modernism says "try something new" and values it not because it continues a tradition, but because of the innovation that becomes a value of its own: cars and electricity and flight are new, and good, so something new in art and literature is very likely to be good, too – right?

 

Or not. So conservatism, with roots in the English hesitation over the twin challenges of the American Revolution and the French, starts to offer a qualification to "new equals good." Conservatism (as opposed to reactionary-ism) says "let's try something new, but cautiously, without tossing the old and traditional, not yet."

 

So liberal and conservative trends in social and cultural life began butting heads (and became political parties), but what about the church? Or the Church?

 

Some faith traditions had an innate conservatism built into them (Orthodoxy, much of Catholicism), while others reasonably would tend to a more liberal acceptance of change (Protestantism in general). But "new" and "revealed truth" are not likely to be automatic fast friends.

 

This is where "The Fundamentals" come in. They were, in fact, a series of lengthy essays, ultimately multiple books worth, edited by a group of Protestant theologians and church leaders who looked Modernism in the eye around 1910 and said "Not so fast, bucko."

 

Or words to that effect.

 

I bring all this up simply to note that whether it's Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or even Buddhism, all world religious traditions are still trying to figure out what to make of Modernism's inroads on their traditional terrain. Complete withdrawal from Modernism means a disavowal of science and culture, which is itself not in keeping with Protestant tradition, but Modernism has proven to be a sticky lint ball of a cultural trend, which is difficult to touch lightly.

 

So I actually have a smidgen of sympathy for some in the Far East, whether you dismiss them as mad mullahs or outraged imams. The Enlightenment in general, and Modernism in particular, has only relatively recently (since WWII) made inroads into their home territory, and they are only just now trying to figure out what it means to affirm or reject, in whole or in part, this strange new ideology.

 

And I'd argue that we're not done figuring it out right here, either.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he'd not call himself a fundamentalist, but he may have read more of "The Fundamentals" than most who would. Tell him what's foundational for you at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 9-19-12

Notes From My Knapsack 9-19-12

Jeff Gill

 

 

We need nature, and now more than ever

___

 

 

Yes, the election season is wholly upon us.

 

Yes, the rhetoric is overheated and the facts are being spun, twisted, mangled, and fracked beyond all earthly recognition.

 

Yes, I have no interest in joining in with the din (nor do I have bananas, I have no bananas today).

 

What I need is a walk in the woods. Or . . .

 

To tell you the truth, I've been doing a fair amount of creekwalking recently. Creekwalking is not something you should do, nor am I recommending it. You get me? I. AM. NOT. RECOMMENDING. IT. (Corporate legal, are we happy now?)

 

Creekwalking is indeed tricky because there are legal questions about who owns what or where, whose liability covers you down in the shallow waterways (I. AM. NOT. RECOMMENDING. IT.), and then there's the fact that once in a while, even around Licking County (or Legend County, if you prefer) the water gets deep.

 

Not often, though. You can pick your way from Alexandria down through Granville if you don't mind getting wet up to your armpits, and as a citizen measuring five foot, seventeen inches, that might come out a little differently for you.

 

My favorite stretches are closer to the confluences, where the South Fork of the Licking curls down from Pataskala to bounce off of the northbank of Buckeye Lake, then wandering through Hebron arcing north to Heath and joining Raccoon Creek where Newark begins.

 

Down in the lowest levels of the ecosystem, you can still see the richest span of species and types, along with the rarities not often spotted on the flat stretches we think of as the lowlands, which are far above your head when you tread the gravelly, sandy, occasionally soggy breadth of the bottomlands.

 

Sheltered by overhanging trees and high banks of shrub and sapling, a cedar waxwing perches on one bush; a kingfisher splashes into the water in front of you; a great blue heron slowly flaps a primordial path past your vantage point; scarlet tanagers and goldfinches punctuate the margins of the ribbon of blue unspooling overhead.

 

When your path allows no other way forward than into the water, you share the road with fish in shoals and schools; young and small, you tend to see only those who have the potential of being fished, since the seniors of the set stay in the very spots you intentionally avoid while creekwalking: deep pools, side riffles with overhanging brambly brush.

 

Native accounts and early settler tales remind us that once these waters were rich in paddlefish and freshwater sturgeon, in a time when the moral equivalent of caviar was a local staple, not a foreign delicacy. Clams and mussels are seen almost not at all, only as broken, long dead shell bits probably only washing down from the furthest upstream reaches. The general lack of health in the waters, even with all the progress we've made since the Clean Water Act and the EPA, is reflected in the absence still of those canaries in our well lit coal mines, the freshwater molluscs.

 

Despite that hint of concern, it's remarkable the range and number of wildlife you can see literally within blocks of the county courthouse. Yes, including bald eagles. Yet for all my creekwalking in recent months, I've seen precisely one guy out there fishing, and he said the catch was good. (Okay, I saw two other people, but they were smoking something and didn't seem pleased to see me pass by their secluded bankside hideaway. Anyhow.)

 

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has noted that the US Fish and Wildlife Service reports the number of Americans who fish has dropped fifteen percent from 1996 to 2006; the National Park Service has seen a thirty percent drop in the number of backcountry permits since the late 1970s.

 

"In wildness is the preservation of the world" said Thoreau in his magnificent essay "Walking," and it is certainly the preservation of my sanity. There's social science data coming in showing that exposure to and time spent in nature helps youth reduce the impact of things like attention deficit disorder and general anxiety, and for adults it can improve blood pressure and general well-being far beyond just the health impact of walking alone.

 

Have you had your nature today?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he DOES NOT RECOMMEND creekwalking. Tell him what you recommend at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 9-15

Faith Works 9-15-12

Jeff Gill

 

People who are not quite invisible

___

 

So many topics I meant to write about this week. Ah, well.

 

Events along the southern coast of the Mediterranean continue to erupt, and tragedies burst into flames here and there in the debris of dictatorships' end and the ad hoc workshops of nascent democracy.

 

From a faith perspective broadly understood, which is what this space is intended to address (the pastor's column is for particular perspectives, but "Faith Works" is meant by the editorial staff to speak to a much broader, non-sectarian audience), there are hints of what goes on in the Middle East as being rooted in religion. As in "see what these crazy people are doing in the name of religion!"

 

I would dispute that.

 

Not that some of the behavior isn't deranged, as killing and death always is, but whether they're really doing it "in the name of religion."

 

Perhaps I do them an injustice, but most of these terroristic acts by so-called sectarian groups are aimed at keeping control of state power in the hands of a specific ethnic group, or just keeping power for an in-group, however defined. Yes, religion gets used, but religion per se seems to rarely have thing one to do with what they're fighting about.

 

My own travels are sadly limited. But between where I have gone, and my opportunities to talk to those who have been in strange, hot, dusty places, I've developed a general hypothesis.

 

The average citizens of most countries are decent, hard-working people who bear no ill will for those from overseas who visit or work to develop their land. But their stability is also their weakness, in that they can't resist roving, rootless, often faceless armed thugs who hide behind them and threaten retaliation to those who would report or unmask them, because they have to stay put to maintain their way of life, while terror is always on the move. ALWAYS remember that, whether Russia or Libya or Egypt or Iran.

 

Or the United States.

 

In Libya, shortly after the brutal acts that culminated in the death of the US ambassador and three of his staff, a public rally was bravely held, with signs honoring Chris Stevens all handmade and small but all the more sincere. That gathering got relatively little general media play, and occupied almost no space in the overall debate about "what's wrong over there?"

 

Which is the real Libya?

 

Well, that's like watching some footage of the idiot preacher with sideburns in Florida and the vile preacher from Kansas, then seeing an equal length of footage from two other randomly chosen mainstream churches in Poughkeepsie, NY & Harrisburg, PA, then asking "what's the real American religion?"

 

In most of the world, I am quite certain, though lacking objective data, that people in general believe that they are created by Someone greater than they can comprehend, and have a purpose in this world that ties them to the next. As a Christian, I believe I know a way to understand that general belief with some very particular applications, but not in a way that leads me or anyone I know or worship with to draw a weapon to enforce; as an American, I think my personal faith has public implications, but not in a way that bars me from making common cause with other faiths which share my public positions.

 

Americans rarely have to worry about mobile militants who kill to enforce a worldview. Oklahoma City would remind us that's not "never," but rarely is still true. One of Christianity's core remembrances is a willingness to die rather than renounce our faith, but the fact is we barely have to think about that prospect, let alone face it. But it only takes one Toyota micro-pickup full of Kalashnikov wielding teenage boys to force the question. In some parts of the world, those careening caravans are a sporadic part of the landscape. They can even insist that your own teenage son join them.

 

Let's be very, very careful about judging whole peoples, whole religions, based on the murderous influence of a few. And it only takes a few.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he's not had to explain his theology in the face of anything worse than a raised eyebrow. Tell him about your non-negotiables at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 9-6

Notes From My Knapsack 9-6-12

Jeff Gill

 

Not so much the politics, but the politicians

___

 

You may have noticed that there's a major political season blowing through right now, our media version of a hurricane for the senses.

 

Soon we will see more letters to the editor on various candidates and issues, enough that these merry little columns may be reduced in number or frequency. So if I had something to say politically, now would be the time to get that in…

 

Except, of course, that the management really doesn't want these human interest essays to veer off into partisan politics. That's what the ad pages are for!

 

Politicians, though, fascinate me. Because they are, all evidence to the contrary, us.

 

Yes, there are some tendencies to dynasty (Kennedys, Tafts, Bushes, Romneys) and they don't represent the nation or state with mirror-like perfection, but I'm pretty impressed with our overall expansiveness when it comes to U.S. Presidents.

 

FDR was patrician, as was JFK, but LBJ? The anti-patrician, as was Jimmy Carter. Ford was Midwestern, while Reagan, from Illinois, was a true 20^th century Californian because of his Midwestern roots, not despite them.

 

Harry S. Truman was a Pendergast Democrat and Richard Nixon was a McCarthy Republican, but both rebelled in significant ways from their youthful patrons.

 

And this factoid will doubtless be misused in ways I can't even anticipate, but I'm doubly fascinated by the fact that: both Barack Obama's paternal grandfather & Mitt Romney's paternal great-grandfather had five wives. Five, both of 'em. It means absolutely nothing about either of the candidates, politically, but it's the kind of historic coincidence that you'd think would be feature-bait on the air and in print, but everyone is too hyperaware of the partisan sensitivities on each side to go there. So I just did!

 

Mitt's paternal grandfather was post-1890, when the condition of statehood for Utah was an official ban on polygamy by the Latter Day Saints, so he had a single wife, but is occasionally mentioned, he married in Mexico where they had George Romney, then in the tensions around the 1911 revolutionary activity in Mexico they returned to Utah; George didn't get to Michigan and the auto business until 1939.

 

Still, it's another thing that they have oddly in common, a history of dislocation and achievement in the face of constant moves and entirely new cultures while being in a strangely regarded outsider group themselves. Barack Obama, Sr. arrived in the US in 1959, part of a cultural exchange program between Kenya and America which was meant to strengthen both countries (and arguably has paid dividends beyond their funders' dreams!). He studied in Hawaii and at Harvard, a school to which his son would return.

 

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both graduated from Harvard Law School; it's generally assumed that they would have nothing else in common, but that one point of shared reference I would argue is but one of many. I can only imagine a conversation between the two over a long meal and in a private space for reflection: both had fathers who were strivers, carrying personal backgrounds of which they had much to be proud, but with many reasons to be sensitive about them. George Romney was the last of a generation to rise to executive office level without a college degree, and he was apparently always reminding people about it; Barack Obama, Sr. carried the weight of a patron's expectations who had sent him to America, and whose death essentially ended his career in Kenyan government as a new form of meritocracy took sway. Both had high hopes for their sons.

 

Soundbites aside, these are compelling personal stories.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; nope, he's not making an endorsement here, not a'tall. Tell him your preferred candidate's story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 9-1

Faith Works 9-1-12

Jeff Gill

Craft and Patience, and Faith

___

Out at the Flint Ridge Knap-In this weekend, you'll see plenty of quiet focus, silent diligence, and mutual respect all at work and on display.

Is it prayer?

To some degree, that would be up to the artisan. I wouldn't want to impose that perspective on anyone who didn't have that intention. My question is on behalf of those who would, intentionally, see their work as a spiritual discipline.

When you do flint knapping to make a "point," or arrowhead as folks mistakenly call them (since bow and arrow wasn't used around here until fairly recently in historic terms), you have to quiet yourself, settle your mind, and find a non-distracting posture.

The idea isn't to put on a show, a flurry of activity; you need to only make the motions that contribute to each step, going from flake blank to final projectile point.

Your work is steady, but slow – at least in modern terms – and you have to work with the materials. If a beautiful piece of flint has a crease or bulge of crystals, you can't force it in the direction you want the shaping to go, flake by flake.

But when you let yourself learn from your materials, you find yourself making something unexpected, but all the more fascinating for how you become a part of a larger process, something beyond your own plans and intentions.

That sounds very close to prayer for me, or at least a worthy discipline for entering a prayerful state.

Many people who work with their hands on artisan-type projects report that they feel closest to God when they are creating something. Woodworkers, quilters, blacksmiths, and yes, flint knappers; farmers working the fields at harvest, and bakers at home or at a bakery. All say that the act of creation, the simple repetitions and shaping gestures, brings them to a place where their prayers are not only more personal and clear, but their sense of God's presence is more real.

"Created in God's image" would mean we're created with an aspect of that creative urge, right? "Sub-creators" as J.R.R. Tolkien said in his writing about the meaning not of his literary creation, Middle Earth, but of the act of creation itself – the task of writing and correlating and molding character and plot and landscape, which he went on to compare to . . . woodworkers and quilters and blacksmiths.

Labor Day is an opportunity for all of us to reflect on the nature of work; our work, the work of others that shapes our lives, of the place of work in God's purpose for our lives. The union movement that gave birth to Labor Day as a holiday is itself rooted in a desire to see work honored and respected, no matter how humble; unions ask laborers to come together to protect the workplace as a setting for more than simply economic purposes. We shape our souls as we choose how we approach our work, whether it's our attitude as we scrub the grill at closing time, or how carefully we attach the spade lugs to the power supply. A casual, careless attitude toward work as just a set of hours on a pay stub leads inevitably to a casual, careless value of life itself, and all manner of ills, social and personal.

So take a trip out to Flint Ridge off Brownsville Road this weekend (they're out there chipping away through Sunday), and walk about the knappers and reflect on their work, and your own, whatever Monday holds.

Can your work be prayer? Is prayer in your work?

(first published 9-1-2007) 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he's worked closing and scrubbed more than a few grills in his time. Share your story of work and faith at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-25

Mandy -- Do you have room for a long one? I forgot about my closing quote as I was writing; if this needs radical surgery, I'm happy to do it, but if you can use it all, then I'll be glad not to!  Pax, Jeff

Faith Works 8-25-12

Jeff Gill

 

Step by step, we travel together

___

  

Poverty involves a great deal of walking.

 

It's something most people don't realize, or see beyond certain circumstances.

 

We're all dimly aware of the fact that transportation is a persistent problem in keeping our social safety net woven together; getting people from where they live, or can live, and to work or to needed services is a constant challenge.

 

There are ongoing efforts to co-ordinate taxi and bus programs here in Licking County, but they still carry – or place – a burden for the poor of irregularity and inconsistency, often not getting people where they need to be in our regimented, clock-driven society.

 

And oft-times it just isn't practical to try to get a bus token or taxi call for the assorted errands that have to be done, or for the reasons you want to go.

 

So the poor, anywhere, but including here in Licking County, walk. A lot.

 

You may see some walking along the uncertain edges of high-traffic areas and think "why would someone walk down this street/artery/highway?" Sidewalks aren't always present where you need them to get from, again, the places where people live in more affordable housing, and to where the stores and offices and entertainment are. But you walk anyhow.

 

That's not all, or even most of it; when you get off the busy streets, there's more of it even as there's even less sidewalk. From house to house to visit, sometimes carrying bags, occasionally carrying kids; maybe riding a bike but bikes have an irritating way of disappearing even when you put a lock and cable on them. So you walk.

 

I've heard it said that, because so many of the folks stuck in poverty are overweight, they ought to have to get out and work and walk more: trust me, most of them are walking. Questions of diet and nutrition in low-income working class neighborhoods are a whole 'nother column, but for now, let me assure you, the lower the net household income, the more they're walking, no matter what the BMI measures.

 

Recently, I've been doing some work with the Newark Earthworks Center on a hike around the full circuit of our remaining portions of our 2,000 year old complex. You've probably seen the Great Circle, and maybe even the Octagon, but if you know where to look, there are many little fragments and traces of all the rest of the formerly 4.5 square miles connected array of geometric earthworks, the largest such complex in the world.

 

The Octagon is leased to a country club, and has the hospital and doctor's offices around it, but almost any direction you walk from there towards the Great Circle or where the Ellipse once arced across Union St., you're walking through some working class and ultimately low income neighborhoods. I've been in and out of most of them over the last few decades, but it's different when you're on foot and tracing up and down alleys, treading out the streets, and even wading down in the creeks and rivers. And you meet people, fellow walkers. We talk. I learn things.

 

It was an unintentional experiment, but one that got me to thinking about "walking in someone else's moccasins" not only across 2,000 years, but across some more immediate divides.

 

George Orwell under took a similar sort of experiment in "Down and Out in Paris and London," a book he wrote based on personal experiences between 1929 and 1931 in those cities. It began out of necessity, when a robbery took his money and he had to take a job as a dishwasher in Paris to get by until a check could be sent to him, and continued as an experiment in participatory journalism, one emulated in recent years by Barbara Ehrenreich with "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" in 2001, another worthwhile read.

 

A friend and colleague in ministry in Oregon, Christian Piatt, is doing something like it online and in life by trying to live on SNAP/Food Stamps for a week. Yes, it's supposed to be a supplemental program, but he knows that too; we both know that there are not a few trying to get by on that as their entire food budget, and that's what he and his family are working to understand . . . just a little. You can find him at Patheos.com and search for "SNAP/Food Stamp challenge."

 

Christian and I both know something that Orwell said better than either of us can back in 1933 at the end of "Down and Out":  "At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning."

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; tell him where you've been walking in someone's shoes lately at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Canyon de Chelly, Navajo, & Wupatki

http://www.nps.gov/cach/historyculture/upload/CACH_adhi.pdf

http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/nava/adhi/

http://www.nps.gov/wupa/parkmgmt/upload/GMP_finalWUPA.pdf

http://www2.nature.nps.gov/stats/

Gen'l stats

Knapsack 8-23

Notes From My Knapsack 8-23-12

Jeff Gill

 

It's time we had a talk

___

 

This is awkward.

 

I know this will just make us both uncomfortable, and leave me sounding like the weird one, but I feel this needs to be discussed.

 

It's the county name.

 

You know what it is. You've had relatives, when you pull your car into the drive, read the sticker on your license plate, and look at you with an arched eybrow: Really?

 

Yes, that's the county name, you reply, perhaps adding "it's because of salt licks that used to attract animals that the Indians and pioneers hunted."

 

I wrote in these pages not long ago that my study of the earliest mentions of the Licking River seems to point us to Spring Valley here in Granville, and Salt Run, with prehistoric mounds near some very early historic earthworks that are all that's left of a salt works, trying to extract and dry some of this precious commodity that otherwise would have to be purchased with the cash money that was in such short supply in the earliest decades of the 1800s.

 

Bob Neinast, aka "Barefoot Bob" (long story, but you can find his blog online; he likes to hike all over in his barefeet) told me, as we walked with a group a few weeks back around the circuit of the Newark Earthworks, that his research had made him lean towards "Licking" being derived from the Lenape (Delaware) language, as Hock-hocking meant "bottle-shaped" (actually gourd-shaped) which gave rise to the Hocking River.

 

His argument is that a Lenape word for "sandy, gravelly bottomed river" would have easily transformed into "Licking" which echoed nicely our Hocking neighbors one watershed to the south. The story of salt licks was a "folk etymology" which was a later imposition.

 

He actually hasn't convinced me, but I think it's a good enough argument to go alongside of the "Salt Run" connection to Granville to account for the 1800-era label "Licking County" to both the watershed and the new political entity that was born off of Fairfield County in 1808.

 

In 1808, apparently, whatever it originally meant, the label "Licking" didn't have the snicker factor it does now. Our county government wisely created the website "lcounty.com" or we'd probably activate some web blocker programs. Other organizations do some headstands to find a name or designation that doesn't use the county name, or if they have to, they go to an acronym as fast as possible.

 

Licking County. We don't think about it, because that's how we deal with it. Nerk, Ahia jokes about their name, or at least the pronunciation of it, all the time. Jokes about "Licking"? It's almost too easy, if not too . . . well.

 

So I have a thought. The river is what the river is, and will carry the name rolling down to Blackhand Gorge for generations to come. But for the county, and for all the business and industry and civic groups that edge uneasily around our name in a governmental sense, why not make a change?

 

It will cost a little money in signage and paperwork, but not much letterhead gets printed up anyhow. We could have a transition period and use up the old.

 

Because my suggestion would be: Legend County. We've had the tag "Land of Legend" for many decades, going back at least to the 70's, tying together ancient earthworks, amazing flint deposits, pioneer tales and the growth of unique industrial ventures. Legend County – it would leave Licking County in exactly the same place in an alphabetical list, which is no small matter, and would reduce the concerns non-county folk might have about what has to be changed.

 

A name change, subtle yet eloquent, that might just pay for itself if even one company chooses to locate here that wasn't going to, because the CEO thought "I just don't want to have to keep explaining the word "Licking" in our company paperwork to people who've never been here."

 

Legend County. It's got a ring to it, doesn't it?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he's not sure how serious he is about this, either. Contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.