Faith Works 6-8-13

Faith Works 6-8-13

Jeff Gill

 

Thoughts on leaving Fairmount Cemetery

___

 

Depending on when or where you're reading this, you may not know about the delightful sixteen year old young woman who died in our county after an accident on Memorial Day.

 

If you don't, it is enough to say she was well loved by family and friends and classmates and many, many more. She was, as is obvious, far too young to die – as if there is an age where it ever feels entirely right.

 

After a memorial service which attempted to sketch out the depth of our feeling and the breadth of our love for her, a procession longer than I ever hope to see again, and shorter than the number who would have gone if they could, wended its way from Lakewood High School to Fairmount Cemetery on US 40, the old National Road.

 

We passed milestones one after another, worn and weathered, some of the words obscured by the years, "Cumberla…" and "Wheelin…" above numbers once incredibly important, now so small in terms of modern speed as to be no more than the historical curiosity they now are.

 

Others have passed these milestones of course, wagons and carriages and sulkies and carts and buggies and Model Ts and Packards and Hudsons and Mustangs. Earlier funeral processions have gone by them, and more will no doubt do so in days and years to come, while the milestones sit and stare, declaring their sullen distances to no one in particular.

 

The family of the young woman we've lost has been to this cemetery before, for older family members whose days had become a burden, and yet even then it didn't seem like the right time. So much more so today, bright and clear and even beautiful in a way I could only be thankful for later.

 

With the saying of the last formal words at the graveside, and the singing of one last song, we turned and walked away, back to our cars. There were more gatherings to share, stories yet to tell, but for now we were done here.

 

At the top of the hill where the cemetery sits is a small brick church, and matching in bulk next to it, a mound. Some twelve to fourteen feet high, it's a mound from a period that archaeologically goes back about 2,500 years, a period we label today as "Adena," from a typical such mound on the grounds of the Adena Mansion down in Chillicothe.

 

Most Adena mounds are cemeteries themselves, rising up where our contemporary graveyards spread out. Each new usage, from the ground level to the peak, represents a set of interments in most cases, a collection of remains from those who had died in the family or clan over a multi-year period. So some are cremated remains, some bundles of bones, and occasionally a complete, "extended" committal in the middle, likely a person whose death either triggered the next usage of the site, or simply the one who died most recently before the time for burying had begun.

 

Today, the emotion is raw, ragged, painful and deep. Like any fresh, major injury, it is impossible to imagine healing and calm satisfaction ever again while you are hurting with the initial impact. Maybe after a healer's care, perhaps in a day or two, you won't be there yet, but you can conceive of it happening someday. Not in the moment.

 

Yet there, looking down at all of us, is a sign, as are the stones set into the ground all around us, of how that day will come. When those honored dead were brought here, on a litter carried by family (we would imagine), their grief was no less real, no softer-edged, not something you could quickly dismiss. It was over two millennia ago, but you know, you just know, that the pain was sharp and vivid as the remains were covered with earth.

 

You don't want to call it, or imagine it, as detachment, let alone uncaring, but there is a time and season for each wave of feeling in turn. The tide will recede, and when it comes up to fullness again, it will be a different time altogether. The layers mount up towards the sky on the mound, our rows of tombstones extend further towards the horizon. Walking along them, we spot a name we know, remembering that earlier day when we came.

 

And we pass through the gate, and drive down the road, but know that we will be back. One way or another.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County. Tell him about a cemetery dear to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 6-6-13

Notes from my Knapsack – 6-6-13
Jeff Gill

Vertical challenges in Our Fair Village
___

Philmont Scout Ranch is out in the northeast corner of New Mexico, on the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range that you look at from the west if you're in Taos.

75 years old this summer, the property was given to Scouting by Waite Phillips for exactly the purposes to which a group of some seventeen youth and adults will put it in a few weeks: backpacking and hiking. All our food and gear for sleeping and cooking will be on our backs, 35 to 50-plus pounds worth.

And the hiking starts at Base Camp outside of Cimarron, NM at about 7,000 feet of elevation, and our trek (Trek 22 for those who know the process) will cover 81 miles over ten days on the trail (plus a day of orientation at the start, and a day of celebration and check-out at the end, for twelve days total).

The high point on our ten day journey is Baldy Mountain, 12,400 feet, and we don't just hike from 7,000 steadily up to 12,400 and down again over the trek. It's up and down and the whole Grand Ol' Duke of York routine. So training for us tenderfeet is important.

You can put on miles in Ohio, but what about building up those muscles for going uphill, and even more critically, downhill, with loads of water and gear on your back – and properly stowed, on your hips, weight-wise?

For that, you need vertical elevation, and that's not what central Ohio is known for. Add in a busy schedule of clearing the decks so one can be gone for almost three weeks (we're taking the train there and back), and there's not much time to go to places like Zaleski or Shawnee State Forest's rigorous backpacking trails, or put in sharp steep hikes at places like Fort Hill. So what to do?

First, they tell us that eastern woodland hikers sometimes run afoul of thinking their bodies are trained, but hit challenges and injuries because they were in woods on dirt trails for their mileage pre-Philmont, and out west the trails are hardpan and rock. So they actually recommend lots of miles on pavement, and stair-climbing.

Two places I've made extra trips when I have just a spare moment, and my ministerial schedule permits: Licking Memorial Hospital, from the cafeteria area in the basement to the stairs above the sixth floor, gives you virtually nine levels of double staircases from bottom to top and back again, and a second loop for luck; also the Don Hill County Administration Building in downtown Newark gives me five (ten with twice). So there's some stair-based endurance and pounding for my joints.

But right here in Granville, I've found a ten mile loop that gives me almost enough vertical to be challenging, although the real test will be when I hit the true mountain trails, and I'll let you know how it compares.

Anyhow, if you go to the Bryn Du Mansion, head down Jones and west on the walking path; take the side spur after The Colony, then the first turn left, into Bryn Du Woods – bear steadily west, across the main drag to the road that curves up towards Alligator Mound Hill, and then take the emergency access road, walking around the two gates, wheezing your way up to the ancient Alligator itself. Enjoy the view, catch your breath.

Now head down (a couple ways to do this, some of them legal) but end up at College and Granger, turn south, cross Broadway and go up Mount Parnassus; down the backside of it to the gates of Maple Grove, west on Maple to the Pearl St. connector to the bike path, bike path to Main St., and turn right, up the hill past the Old Colony Burying Ground.

Through the Four Corners, up President's Drive to the crosswalk, up the stairs to Swasey Chapel. If you're lucky, the chapel doors are open, and you can go up the steps to the balcony, across, and down the other steps. Then down to Slayter and the stairs behind the commons to Deeds Field and Piper Stadium, wend your way around to Washington, and out Pearl, now North St. to the Bioreserve. Take a loop there, then back to Bryn Du by as much more of this as you can stand, or the direct route of Pearl to Broadway and home.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your favorite local hikes at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-1-13

Faith Works 6-1-13

Jeff Gill

 

One foot in front of the other, one eye on the sky

___

 

Some call it Cowboy TV.

 

Others call it The Nature Channel.

 

You look up, or from the right vantage point, you look out, and see a widescreen, 3D, high definition vista.

 

The high def is less so if you have big droplets of sweat on the inside of your glasses, but it's the work of a moment to wipe them off, mop your brow, and gaze.

 

The sky is filled with the slow motion boil of cumulus, glowing white on top, hints of glowering purple below on some clouds.

 

As yet, there's no front, no wall cloud, no solid shadow of approaching rainfall. With the right gear, in the right location – even if that's not under a wide, overhanging roof – you can enjoy that sight on its own terms.

 

But more pleasurable is this collection of ever changing monuments to evaporation, condensation, and potential precipitation. There are fair weather cumulus, no greys or dark blues showing the clouds as heavy with water, but all cotton ball puffs as a child would glue to their tempera-painted sky.

 

And then there's cerulean itself, a cloudless sky. Usually even a "cloudless" sky has one or two somewhere in the distance, down by the horizon, just for contrast. Not always: sometimes you get, with crisp air of a clear morning, what the pilots call CAVU: ceiling and visibility unlimited. You still have something to look at, though; a pure blue sky has a contrast all its own, and compels your eye to search deeply into the color.

 

Ohio in the summer is more given to a milky blue, when humidity promises both clouds to come and the weight of dampness across your back heavier than the pack you're carrying.

 

That kind of not-quite blue always ripples from stratus to cirrus mixed with cumulonimbus, when humidity takes on both solid form and generates the slashes of lighting that bind heaven to earth.

 

Storms pass, as they always do, and then the calm, the recovery of nature's concert as you walk from bugs to birds to occasional amphibians and animals in the underbrush.

 

Then night falls; you have your camp set up, your fire banked or maybe you never lit more than your stove, and with its roaring off, you just watch the stars come out.

 

If you get out into the townships, or further afield, you see the night sky as startlingly active. Yes, some of that will be the lights of high flying jet planes, flashing their steady blink across the sky from horizon to horizon, but there are higher, faster, steady points of light that move with stately grace from north to south. Satellites, you learn with a good long viewing of a clear night sky, are not all that uncommon.

 

Once in a while, if you're fortunate, a brighter glob of light will angle across from western horizon to your east, more diagonal to your view than most of the aircraft. It's the International Space Station, humanity's outpost beyond the atmosphere, with a few intrepid souls (Americans, Russians, Canadians, sometimes others) looking back down on our planet during their work breaks.

 

We look up, watching the sky, now brightly washed through the middle, from northeast to southwest, with a path of milky illumination, the ISS flying perpendicularly to that starry band.

 

And beyond? How can you not think of beyond? Even the brilliant sunlight filled blue draws your thoughts past the mere accident of color to what lies behind, above, beyond. But moreso now, by night, the moon not yet up, the stars glittering in their field of intense black.

 

Tillich spoke of God as "the ground of being," and there's a life to the blackness of space, a vibrancy to it that does not force you to think only of vacuum, of the void. You feel a presence.

 

What kind of presence? That's what we discuss in churches, in our worship centers and home study groups. In one form or another, we all stand against the spirit of the age to say we believe in a meaning beyond our moment, a person bigger than personality. We start with that truth claim, that there is more than material substance to this cosmos in which we hike, swim, fly, and then we reach out a little bit further, to ask "Who are you?" What kind of presence: one of love, or of indifference? Of care, or of oblivion?

 

To which Christians whisper, as they look on the night sky: "Jesus."

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; you're likely to see him dishing out shortcake at the Newark Kiwanis Strawberry Festival this weekend. Tell him what you see in the sky at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-25

Faith Works 5-25-13

Jeff Gill

 

Prayer on the move, on foot

___

 

My friend and colleague Martha Grace Reese, author of "Unbinding the Gospel" and Newark native, pointed me years ago towards "walking prayer."

 

She cheats and uses snowshoes and cross-country skis part of the year up in Minnesota, but the idea really is the same. You don't have to sit, or kneel, or stand in a church building let alone in your "prayer closet" or what-have-you to pray, to pray meaningfully and effectively.

 

You can walk.

 

Walking prayer is a tradition going back to the desert fathers of monasticism in the Egyptian wilderness, and you can even look back to Jesus himself in his forty days of preparation, where it's not at all said that he sat and prayed. He moved through the desert, even as he walked up a mountain for spiritual retreat.

 

I doubt he waited to start praying until he got to the top!

 

"Long Wandering Prayer" by David Hansen has been a touchstone for me since Martha Grace recommended it, who uses so beautifully Tolkien's phrase about Strider "not all who wander are lost."

 

Recently, many of us in Licking County, in Franklin County, and beyond, had to say good bye to Mark Welsh on his recent, unexpectedly sudden death. Mark walked through his life into a deeper understanding of Native American culture, both as it relates to our local landscape, and to the Indian nations now mostly resident in the West, but with vital ties still to the eastern woodlands, to our own Newark Earthworks.

 

He and I got to lead together a number of walks around the remnants of the walls and enclosures and mounds scattered between the more formal parklands better known, and Mark would gather us in a circle on a grassy plot by Union Street to lead in prayer. That spot would be full of industrial noises and many distractions, but his voice and words would remind us of the many ancestral voices once raised in the "Ellipse" where for hundreds and thousands of years the honored dead were laid to rest.

 

But he would always refer to the walk itself as a form of prayer, and tease me about not having yet made the walk from Chillicothe's mounds to Newark, as he'd done repeatedly. I hoped to make it with him someday.

 

On Tuesday, the Newark Earthworks Center has one of the four "open house" days at the Octagon Earthworks, at 33^rd St. and Parkview near Licking Memorial Hospital. It's a weekday, and school not out yet, but we're going to use the time, in part, to invite folks to come at either 10 am, or 5 pm, to take a walk that starts and ends at the Octagon (135 acres of earthworks that's but one component of a formerly four and a half square mile complex), and walks through the streets and alleys of modern day Newark, looking at traces of the 2,000 year old architecture.

 

It's an interpretive walk, taking about two hours and covering barely three miles or so, but some of us will be remembering Mark, and his reminders to us to be aware of the ancestors, and of the deeper meaning of walking.

 

And at my church, we've been talking about taking this the next step, and doing some "Scripture walks," Bible studies on the move if you will. We'll have one in nature with pauses for readings and reflections, which we'll do out at Dawes Arboretum on a Saturday in July, and then a walk through the streets of the city, because Isaiah and others in the Bible have much to say about urban life, too. Prayer, reflection, and health for body and spirit.

 

In fact, I'm focused on walking and spirituality because of my summer plans to head to Philmont Scout Ranch in just a few weeks, where backpacking means everything we do is tied to walking, being centered while on the move. And my training time with full pack has reminded me again of how well walking prayer suits me.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; yes, he's looking forward to ten days and 81 miles without a shower. Tell him where you find peace and connection at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

draft two!

Notes from my Knapsack 5-23-13

Jeff Gill

 

First, you have to escape yourself

___

 

After the Cleveland captivity story came out in the news, I was surprised by how many people asked "why didn't those women just walk out?"

 

If pressed, folks would usually agree that it would have been hard at first, but later? Across a decade? They should have found an opening, an opportunity.

 

That attitude assumes that, like a POW, your every moment is consumed by the passion and the focus to escape. In fact, survival would quickly start to trump escape as a topic for intense reflection and anticipation, and the need to focus on what it takes to stay alive, to stay fed, would surely make escape a more distant consideration, and then over time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

"No one has come to rescue me" after about a year becomes "No one will rescue me" and resignation, acceptance, and adjustment to your fate. Urges to break out and flee are tamped down with small, occasional reminders of your captor's power over you, and before long . . .

 

In fact, we have a local example of this, if two centuries old. Billy Dragoo was somewhere between twelve and sixteen when he was captured on the other side of the Ohio River, up in the western Virginia mountain valleys, at the headwaters of the Monongahela.

 

As the American Revolution ended, the dispossession and dislocation of Native Americans increased, even as the instigations of the British at Fort Detroit, continued albeit on a lower-key level. So it was that some landless, desperate Shawnee youth went across the Ohio, hunting for unguarded cabins, stealing weapons and supplies, picking through gardens, and occasionally taking captives.

 

In a raid near present-day Barrackville, West Virginia, this group ran across two families, and in the unexpected encounter a flurry of gunfire ended with most of Billy's family dead, he and his mother taken captive, and halfway back to the security of the Ohio River, a fall crippled Mrs. Dragoo and she was killed and scalped in front of him.

 

As the group made their was diagonally across Ohio, Billy became the third European American to leave a record of having passed through Licking County as it would be a few decades later. Even as a captive, even as a youth, he saw what a beautiful place it was.

 

Traded, adopted, married into villages of Indian people, by the time Dragoo is thirty, he has become in all outward means an Indian himself. When he travels to Pittsburg to find a better gun around 1803, he's startled to run into his brother, who survived the attack unknown to Billy, and has little English.

 

There are many sources for "Indian Billy's" story, and they reward the re-reading. But the upshot of it is that he only slowly, and partially returns to Western ways. His first wife follows her tribe west with their two daughters, and with their two sons Billy Dragoo goes to Virginia, and re-marries, has many more children . . . and ends up living in Licking County for the last thirty years of his life, buried here in 1856 somewhere in his eighties.

 

People wondered why he didn't escape when he could, but Indian Billy struggled to explain in later years: he was hungry, he'd seen most of his family killed in front of him, he needed the help of his captors to survive, and then he finds himself with a wife and family who need him to help them survive, and the years rolled by.

 

Living in two worlds is harder than it looks, and it doesn't look easy.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about the worlds you live in at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-18

Faith Works 5-18-13

Jeff Gill

 

Winds of change, flames of celebration

___

 

Happy Pentecost!

 

We Christians occasionally note that the prevailing culture likes to snap up religious holidays and turn them into occasions for merchandizing. Which it does, because that's what our culture does.

 

In a capitalistic market economy, opportunities to make money will be seized by someone, and if there's a better way to find a profit, competition will either push the prices down or make the product more widely available . . . which is how you get mountains of junk shipped here from Shanghai every November for Christmas presents at every possible price point and color combination.

 

Even Easter, with evocations of Spring and hints of fertility across the landscape, gets everyone of whatever faith tradition the chance to buy pastel candy eggs and brightly colored new clothes.

 

So it might be a good sign, from a religious leader point of view, that no one has figured out how to make a buck off of Pentecost.

 

Fifty days after Easter, hence "pente" like pentagon, but with the ending for "times ten," Pentecost is described in the New Testament book called "The Acts of the Apostles," or just "Acts," in the second chapter.

 

It marks the descent, or "pouring out" of God as Holy Spirit on the gathered community of believers, praying together in the upper room where they had last been with Jesus less than eight weeks before. They were united in a spiritual experience that both spoke to each of them individually, and bound them to one other in an ecstatic awareness of the divine presence that filled them and overflowed them so much that . . .

 

Well, the stated initial reaction was "Yo, Peter, a little early in the morning for hitting on the cheap wine!" (You can look it up. Acts 2, remember.) They were happy, and joyful, and singing, and shouting, and apparently the neighborhood reaction wasn't entirely out of line, and Peter was very understanding.

 

He explained (yep, still in Acts 2) that they weren't drunk, but filled with enthusiasm over what God has done, and is doing – en-theos, literally enthusiastic because they had God, "theos," in them, "en-" and around and with them. And the listeners were invited to join in with the celebration.

 

So it's also called the "birthday of the church." Some congregations will even have cake, or a lunch followed by cake (that's how my church is celebrating, because that's how we roll).

 

It's a little surprising, actually. Folks could sell church birthday cards, or special cake toppers, or just party hats that look like little flames on top (sound odd? Read Acts 2), and the list goes on.

 

But what neither we within the church nor the world around us has managed to do is to make this spiritual celebration too tangible. There's just not much stuff you can attach, and market, and sell, when the focal point is spiritual intensity. The only real connection you could make to the event to be commemorated is through a gathering, around 9 or 10 o'clock in the morning as they did that day in Jerusalem, where people get together from a wide variety of backgrounds, earnestly seek the presence of God in their lives, and then sing or even shout for joy when that presence is felt.

 

And that marketing angle is already pretty well covered. Drop by any congregation you like and see how they sell it: they may even have cake, with candles.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your celebrations of God's presence at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 5-16

Notes from my Knapsack 5-16-13

Jeff Gill

 

First, you have to escape yourself

___

 

 

Beneath the news that's so horrified and transfixed us out of Cleveland, there's a question that keeps popping up.

 

Why didn't those three women try to escape?

 

In fact, it appears that they did try, and that their captor is said to have been quite adept at mixing physical restraints on the doors (multiple locks, boarded windows) and on their persons (ropes and chains) with psychological manipulation. It even looks like his decision to let one woman have a child six years ago might have been to give him even more leverage over his tragic, twisted household.

 

If you live a life filled with choices and possibility, where you have options and autonomy on an everyday basis, you may be a bit slow to realize just how tightly circumstance can bind a person, no less than cords and chains. But we have in our local history another point of contact with these sorts of situations, even if two centuries intervene.

 

Billy Dragoo was a boy of twelve or a bit more in 1786, along the upper reaches of the Monongahela River in what's now West Virginia. His family had recently moved to the area  following the formal end of the war with Great Britain we call the American Revolution, with peace in 1783 ending, it was hoped, overt hostilities between the western parts of the colonies, now states, and the British fort at Detroit.

 

Col. Henry "Hair Buyer" Hamilton was no longer paying bounties for American scalps, but the Ohio country on either side of the river was still unsettled: in both the lack of permanent farm communities, and unsettled as well in the mood of the Shawnee, Mingo, and Wyandot peoples whose way of life was severely compromised by the withdrawal of British support. Hunting was hard, the old ways undermined by the arrival of guns and trade goods and the collapse of the beaver market, and alcohol kept the pot on simmer all around the region between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River.

 

So it was that a raiding party, years after such raiding was supposedly no more, came through today's Barrackville, West Virginia. A party of young men, dispossessed Native Americans, were stealing horses, grabbing stores from gardens and unguarded cabins, and on this October day in 1786, they killed most of two settler families in a surprise encounter. Letting a few run off to escape, they kept with them young William Dragoo.

 

He became only the third European person to have left a written account of passing through Licking County (after Christopher Gist & Rev. David Jones), and though he was a captive led against his will from the Muskingum watershed through the heart of our area, its beauty made an impression.

 

Known at the end of his life as "Indian Billy Dragoo," his story is more fully told elsewhere, but he found himself as winter came in the Detroit area adopted into an Indian family to replace a lost son, then married to a widowed woman who needed someone to hunt for her.

 

It was not until 1804, a year before Granville was "settled", that the now at least thirty year old man returned to Pittsburgh, in search of a good hunting gun, and learned in a chance encounter that his father and brother had survived the attack that killed his mother and so many others, and even then, he was slow to return to "his people." Ultimately, he remarried another Euro-American woman, and came to farm and live out his days in Licking County. The full story of his life can be found elsewhere, and is well worth the reading. He died in 1856, and is buried off Briarcliff Road west of Perryton.

 

Did "Indian Billy" just like the lifestyle in the woods, with his adopted family? Or did he reach a point where he simply couldn't imagine being welcomed back home? We don't know. Seeing his mother die at his feet, and the distance he traveled, and what he had to do to survive: slowly, the very idea of escape can become distant, dim. And you stop believing that you even can.

 

I suspect only William Dragoo could understand the courage it took Amanda Berry to even imagine escaping, let alone to do so.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your favorite story of escape and rescue at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Newark Central "Knapsack" 5-14-13

Newark Central – Notes from my Knapsack 5-14-13

 

To print or not to print, that's the question

 

Jesus says in Matthew 13:52 "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."

 

On the other hand, the Board of Governors of the US Postal Service just said to the Postmaster General that they want him "to evaluate further options to increase revenue, including an exigent rate increase to raise revenues across current Postal Service product categories and products not currently covering their costs."

 

That would include bulk mail like our print newsletters, which are estimated to need at least a 30% rate increase just to cover the actual cost of processing and delivery.

 

Now, even if just that happened, our costs per newsletter for postage would still be half of what it would cost to put a First Class stamp on them. But you add on the increasing delays, and generally erratic delivery times for Second Class/Bulk mail . . . but talk among direct mail professionals is that the threshold for those rates is likely to go up from the current 200 piece minimum to something like 500, or more. We put out about 220.

 

I'm coming up on my one year anniversary of serving you in pastoral and administrative leadership, and probably no subject, no change or adjustment in congregational life has gotten me more questions, more concern, and yes, more anger than the decision I made to shift to every other week print newsletters. We've been accustomed to a weekly newsletter for many years.

 

"The Newark Christian" began 74 years ago as a monthly, and as we head for a diamond jubilee commemoration in 2014, it has been a key part of our life as a faith community, right along with the building at Mt. Vernon Rd. & Rugg Ave. and our Cedar Run Lodge. We use it to communicate with each other as much or more than the telephone.

 

Of course, before 1939 we didn't have a newsletter. But the cost of technology and staff to produce such a thing, along with cheap postal rates, made it feasible, and it has been incredibly useful.

 

Now we spend (with new USPS regulations) about eight cents per piece to create (not counting staff time) and moving past twenty cents to mail. Which arrives anywhere from the next day (as it used to be mostly for most addresses) to two weeks later for many of us just a few miles away.

 

And then there's e-mail. Not everyone uses it, but many do. It arrives pretty much when the office hits "send." In the face of that technology, our "peers" in size and type of church around the area either have stopped mailing newsletters, or have monthly only, with few "snail" mailed and those First Class.

 

So as your pastor, I'm thinking about all of this, and about Mt. 13:52. We will still be mailing some, of something, in 2014, of that much I'm sure. And Lisa and I still want your e-mail if you don't get this already on your computer!

 

In grace and peace, Pastor Jeff

Faith Works 5-11

Faith Works 5-11-13

Jeff Gill

 

Writing, Reading, and Being Read, Word by Word

___

 

Last week we were talking about electronic communication and social media in the life of faith communities.

 

Answering machines stand largely silent, as voice mail, texts, and those little message boxes on sites like Facebook, let alone tweets are now how we learn someone has gone to the hospital, or even better, than someone came home. It's not all bad, and in fact, it can be pretty good for pastors and others in religious leadership.

 

Electronic expression is a parallel, but separate shift we're experiencing right now. Reading and writing and sharing of documents, articles, and books themselves is often something that never touches paper.

 

Many of you, I know, read this column online (and thanks for subscribing online, which also gives you full access to an e-version of the paper layout if you like!). It still amazes me to realize, having written this and another column for Gannett's Media Network of Central Ohio for over a decade, that from my first articles for print in the 70s in junior high to my local paper, to today, I've gone from typewriter to paperless.

 

And when I say paperless, I mean there's not a physical artifact anymore in four weeks out of five (or more) from idea to outline to final product . . . and if you read this online, then it never hit paper for either of us at any point.

 

I use Evernote on my Kindle Fire and computers when ideas hit me, or to start my usual sermon note pattern; occasionally if I just have my fairly-dumb phone, I'll text a tweet note with the tag #NTS (Note To Self) which I'll scrape and re-copy later off of Twitter. My draft outlines and close-to-final columns go onto my own laptop and sometimes to Google Drive so I can fiddle with them from some of the other computers I'm on through the week.

 

Then my editor gets the final version from me by e-mail, marks it up (and fixes errors, thanks!), and zips it off into the Advocate's electronic sausage factory where it gets placed and printed or put out onto the internet under the proud banner of our newspaper. Newspaper: there's an artifact of a word right there.

 

Does my writing and reflecting on the world, and in my sermons, on the Word, change when it is developed on screens and touchpad's, as opposed to in ink scratches across a legal pad, or tapped one letter at a time onto foolscap wound into a Smith-Corona?

 

It's hard to imagine that it doesn't. The process of engaging ideas to text has be influenced in some ways by such radical changes in format and technology. Of course, some said this about the typewriter, back when the first novel (I'm told) written on one was the high tech fast-moving story of . . . Huckleberry Finn.

 

So maybe not.

 

I can't identify particular ways typing on a computer keyboard causes me to put out different strings of words or to craft certain sorts of images than I did when I was working with a device I had to reach up and actually "Return" at the end of a line (which is why that key on the right, kids, says "Return" – no kidding!). I didn't start using computers regularly on a personal level for word processing until 1999, by which time I'd been writing for quite a while. So I may just still be channeling old manual cosmos habits even while writing in an entirely virtual manner today.

 

This becomes a concern when folks see, as worship gets to the Scripture reading, lots of others open up a device, see the glow shining up from a screen, and people don't flip pages, but tap to get the right passage as they read along. With the best of intentions, some ask "Is that really Bible reading?"

 

My answer is "Of course it is." I encourage it. Your smart phone Bible app and e-reader access to the readings for the week mean that you can have your devotional time anywhere, and I don't think – although I'm watching with a certain questioning curiosity – that reading the Word on electronic words scrolling past is any more or less appropriate than if someone showed up in church on Sunday with a scroll under their arm, and when they sat, started opening the thing up and twisting their way across Isaiah with me.

 

Just don't jab the person next to you with the scroll ends, and we'll all engage with the words, because it's all about how we start to come to an understanding of what it means to understand the Word, the Logos, the Subject himself.

 

And I think Jesus can speak through our technology just fine.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; you can send him mail and he will read it, but mostly he gets e-mails at knapsack77@gmail.com, or you can follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-4-13

Faith Works  5-4-13

Jeff Gill

 

Pastoral care and electronic relationships

___

 

It's all quite fashionable to bemoan the rise of the machines, the SkyNet of 24/7 electronic devices now supposedly controlling our frontal cortexes and cerebellums.

 

I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords. (That's a "Simpsons" joke, gang.)

 

Seriously, I have to tell you that while I knew that widespread use of e-mail would be a game-changer for ministry and pastoral care, and I didn't mind setting aside my beeper (someone explain to the young'uns what a beeper was), I had no idea in my head that by 2013 we'd be using technology in the life of a pastor the way we are now.

 

24/7 access can be a burden, no doubt, but for clergy at least as long as I've been alive, there's been an assumption of 24/7 access: when crisis strikes, when ambulances are called, when the funeral home is involved. Just as the doctor and EMT and mortician came when called, so did the pastor.

 

But in the absence of cell phones and wifi, that often meant your presence was needed long before you got there; you had to get to where the message waited for you before you knew where you had to go next. And those locations were the church office, and at home, making for a ministerial day that was a bit of a daisy, with petals of pilgrimage out, and back, away, and home, off you go, then late you'd return to the house . . . and possibly learn you needed to go back to the same building you just left.

 

My average day "in the saddle" mapped out (another thing you can do easily online!) now looks more meandering, but with much less retracing, than it used to. I've got a cell phone, and I get more texts on it that voice mail messages. The administrative manager at the church I serve can ping me with updates as to who went home, who just got transported to Columbus, and who is on their way to the ER. I can skip one hospital call, head to OSU Medical Center, and stop at LMH on the way home. Not long ago, that could have meant three out-and-back runs, one of which would have been to an empty bed.

 

The new devices also mean that there are places where I can't call or text because of no signal . . . but I have wifi access, so out comes the tablet, and on social media messaging I'm conversing in near-real time with the church office. I've stood outside a hospital cubicle while asked to "step out briefly" and finished editing a church newsletter before the doctor says "you can come back in now."

 

Downtime is what it has long been for clergy, a matter of personal discipline and persistent, loving reminders that you are trying to set aside one day a week when folks need to not expect to get ahold of you. That wasn't easy in 1983, and it can still be a challenge in 2013. Your definition of emergency (bleeding, dying) may not be the same as some parishoners' (editing, wondering), but it's a little easier, IMHO, to sift those requests to speak to you on that Sabbath set-aside when you are getting the question by e-mail or text message.

 

Much to my surprise, coming up on one year back in full-time ministry, my answering machine is quiet. For many years, the confrontation with the one-eyed red blinking monster was the last battle of the day. You'd come home after a long haul, pull off your shoes, brace yourself, push that cursed button, and learn Aunt Hattie went to the ER five hours ago. So you'd put the shoes on, and head over. And after a warm and meaningful time with Hattie and her kin at the bedside, and a prayer for the night's rest, you'd head home . . . and the red light would be on again, and out you'd go a second time at 9:30 pm.

 

That doesn't happen anymore. I'm thankful for that, and so is the Lovely Wife. I may have more e-mails to answer, and have to sort out which message pop-up box I'm responding to next on my laptop at home, but the trade-offs so far have been a blessing.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how you like to stay in touch with work & faith at knapsack77@gmail.com or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 5-2-13

Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-13

Jeff Gill

 

Beyond the screen in the big wide open

___

 

Turning off your screens can be an admirable decision.

 

The balance needed to keep them on, candidly, keeps me thinking about this subject. I have nothing but admiration for Julia Walden at the Granville Public Library and Lesa Miller at the Granville Rec Commission for their intentions, but I also remember how many of us are doing much or all of our work these days on the aforementioned screeny-things.

 

So when a few commentators enjoy the angst over hints of academic studies that repeated or prolonged (or both kinds) of exposure to screen glow and twitchy images can cause ADHD or impetigo or a third arm to grow from our foreheads, I lean back just a little.

 

In general terms, I think a) a Turn Off Your Screens week once a year is an excellent idea, but also that b) there should be moments in every day when we ask ourselves as our forebearers did during World War II, "Is this Log-on necessary?"

 

(Or "When you surf the internet unnecessarily, you surf with Hitler.")

 

Seriously, the whole "Is this trip necessary?" campaign during wartime fuel & rubber rationing became a community wide cause, with stickers and posters and newspaper filler blocks, so that the question was all around you: "Is this trip necessary?"

 

It wasn't just about economics or personal connections, because there was a black market on fuel coupons and a little counterfeiting of the chits, but basically everyone realized there was only so much gasoline around, and if you used it for a pleasure trip to Sausalito or West Jefferson, you were potentially taking fuel away from one of Patton's tanks (and Patton wouldn't like that, but Hitler would, hence . . .).

 

Now we think we're back to cheap unlimited energy, and yes, even at three bucks plus a gallon, we've got cheap energy. And with coal and now gas-fired power plants, we don't think a minute about leaving our screens running for hours. The cost, as far as we know, between wear on the device turning it on and off versus the energy cost to run it means it seems like a good idea.

 

Slowly, we're starting to hear, and think, about the energy costs of charger plugs left in the wall between uses, and to see the value of an Energy Star rating. But the fact of the matter is that if we had to lay down a $5 every time we logged onto our computer, or juiced up an internet enabled device, we'd probably do it less. That's basic economics, where price and psychology meet.

 

It may be, however, that there is almost that sort of expense incurred in our screen time, and the cost, that $5, is being deferred to future generations, who will wish they had the energy sources we used up, or have to clean up the environment from the impact we made, or live in an ecosystem powerfully affected by our choices now.

 

There are many reasons to go out and take a walk, and shut down and cool off our neurons with some nature therapy. This week, and for many weeks to come.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's burned his share of carbon-releasing energy into the environment. Tell him how you ease up on usage, ironically, at knapsack77@gmail.com or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-27

Faith Works 4-27-13

Jeff Gill

 

Returning to where you started (again)

___

I've warned the congregation where I serve that they need to get used to hearing an excess of sermon illustrations about journey and path and walking and trails and maps and how we are a pilgrim people, living in earthly tents, and so on.

 

My son and I are part of a backpacking trek this summer, our two crews from a local troop going to Philmont Scout Ranch in this, its 75^th anniversary of operation.

 

On one level, we've been planning this for about two years, but we just got our specific trek assignment, a route covering two of the major peaks in the vast reserve in New Mexico's northeast corner.

 

We will do 81 miles over our twelve days, starting above a mile high at Base Camp with a pinnacle at Mount Baldy of over 12,400 feet, then back touching at the Tooth of Time. We'll carry our gear, get resupplied twice along the way, but otherwise carry all our gear in thirty to fifty pound packs, water included, packing out what we pack in so the tens of thousands coming to Philmont behind us can enjoy the views, the experience, and nature (plus a few bears) the way we will, as Scouts for 75 years have done so to prepare a way for us.

 

So the training, building up over the year for this over-50 over-the-hill hiker, is reaching a peak of its own. I'm putting in the mileage that I hope will prepare me for the journey, and reflecting on the mental challenges as well. As an adult member of a Philmont crew, we let the youth navigate and plan (and carry) the main loads, and encourage them to support each other. We adults have to largely keep our mouths shut, but we also have to help the crew deal with the very idea of self-sufficiency, which can be overwhelming at times.

 

We expect the Scouts to chew up the miles and carry their packs with little or no problem, while we adults expect to consume a fair amount of ibuprofen most mornings. On the other hand, I believe I speak for my fellows when I say we're looking forward to being away from the phones and cells and computers and TV and everything for two weeks, while the Scouts are more than a little unnerved at this prospect.

 

Last week I offered some of my thoughts about a book coming out this month, "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming" by Rod Dreher, who recently moved back to his childhood hometown after his sister's untimely death from cancer. I admire the emphasis this narrative places on what Rod calls a "Benedictine value" from the "Rule of St. Benedict," one of monasticism's founders, the value of stability. He himself moved in pursuit of his career, many times, and still has a powerful hankering for Paris from time to time, and his message isn't that we all should stay in, or move back to our old hometowns (something many of us these days don't even have if your family moved often in your youth), but that there's a certain connection to place that we need to grow spiritually.

 

So what to do with the contrast between these two models, these two images of the Christian life? And in fact the same tension is in the metaphors used by other world faith traditions. Are we called to be on a journey towards God, to the Beloved Community, or is the divine call really to finding our place in the City of God, that we should enter the sheepfold and listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd?

 

The challenge of the earthly life as preparation for the heavenly is that it really has to be seen as both. We do travel through life, in time if not in distance, undergoing change even if we never move from the address we were born at. And the journey of faith is largely a going deeper, within and through the self to a place where the still, small voice can tell us how we are connected already to all and everything around us where we are.

 

And every journey, as Bilbo Baggins can tell you, is both a road that goes ever on, and is fulfilled when your travels lead you to where you began. The original title of that estimable hobbit's memoir, after all, was "There and Back Again." The journey of faith is always a journey home.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your travels, widely or close to home, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-20

Faith Works 4-20-13

Jeff Gill

 

The revelatory properties of terrorism

___

 

"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love." (I John 4:18, KJV)

 

If I were to get all mathematical about matters of the heart, I might wonder if you could reverse that statement. Does perfect fear cast out love?

 

That's the theorem of terrorism. An act so horrible, so senseless in itself but done in service of a cause, that through the inconsistencies of the human heart does not attach itself to the original intention (and to be fair, most terrorism is done in service to groups of people who would disavow the act taken in their name if they could).

 

Instead, the mechanism of terroristic acts is to provoke a counter-reaction that undermines the authority, moral and official, of the opposition to the terror group's agenda. You blow up the oppressor's guardhouse, the occupying force is, in response, harsher and more capricious towards the general population, which then drifts a little closer to being in your camp, whether they were against you to start or even just indifferent. Terror, terrorists like to say, reveals the "true nature" of the group being attacked, while is a regrettable necessity for those using it.

 

What gets complicated is when either there's no vicious response, or when the people in general turn against you for having used too much violence, or being too random, or when there are too many innocent victims.

 

Let's just say right now, whether it's Andrew Kehoe in Bath, Michigan in 1926, or the Unabomber in the 1990s, sometimes the person setting the explosive devices is simply mentally ill and horrifically disturbed, even if their stated concerns about taxes or the environment are shared by many. When you have a Jane Alpert in New York or a Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, the line between psychosis and a mad passion for a cause gets blurry.

 

And when you have a large movement, with numbers of people involved, you reach a point where sanity seems beside the point somehow. Al-Qaeda or the Weathermen, Anarchism a century ago or the Ku Klux Klan more recently, and more locally: you can't just call them crazy. They terrorized and killed with an intent to drive public policy and societal behavior in the direction they desired.

 

"Perfect love casts out fear," and we might well ask, "does perfect fear drive out love?" To look at the rest of the equation as John puts it, then "one who loves does not fear punishment, but if anxiety can do the same, love might leave." Or something like that.

 

If terror can control our thoughts, our emotions, it will certainly guide our actions as much as TSA gets to guide us in packing for an airplane trip. That's the goal fulfilled on a small scale. We fear the impact, the inflicted punishment of another plane disaster, so we let fear guide us more strongly, and it becomes hard to even imagine another way.

 

That's why, in a muddle headed but somewhat understandable way, officials said after 9-11 that we should go out and shop and visit malls "because otherwise, the terrorists win." That quickly earned some well-deserved scorn, but there was a nubbin of a point to it. And the counterpart is that line at the airport, where we shuffle in our socks to the metal detector.

 

But we are told, if we are New Testament people, that "perfect love casts out fear." It is the only real counter-terrorism that works, in the long run. It's not hearts and flowers and candy sort of love, but the Greek root "agape" that C.S. Lewis wrote so powerfully about, a love that empties self and is open to understanding and learning and listening and yes, even forgiving.

 

That sort of love casts out fear. It doesn't screen for bombs or defuse improvised explosive devices, and there's no promise in this verse that if you can use love as your lens to look at "the other" you will cast out all future harm. Jesus did say something about peacemakers and those who stand for righteousness.

 

But if you can stand with and for and IN love, even as you are attacked, I wonder if you aren't reversing the reversal. That terror, spending itself, whatever the motivation, on those who refuse to hate them in response, might well cast itself out, and leave room for something more.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; tell him when fear was cast out for you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 4-18

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-13

Jeff Gill

 

A monastery, of sorts

___

 

President Dale Knobel was speaking to a roomful of Denison University faculty & staff recently, about his retirement in just a few weeks, the last fifteen years, and the future of the college.

 

In talking about the role of a president in higher education, he made the observation that the job is less like a king than a mayor. Presidents don't declare or mandate, they "nudge," he observed, and they spend most of their time working with constituencies. Alumni, bill-paying parents, Granville residents, as well as the more usual groupings of students, faculty, and staff each have a vision, some sense of what the institution is or should be, and the president of a college is moving between them listening, rephrasing, and "nudging" perhaps a bit the dialogue towards their own goals for the campus community.

 

Mayor doesn't seem like a bad metaphor for that sort of role at all, but Pres. Knobel's reflections made me think about another way of looking at the occupant of Monomoy House, one deeply rooted in the history of colleges and universities even if largely forgotten today. You could consider him a sort of Abbot.

 

In the late Roman era of the Christian West, monasteries were the bastions of classical learning, the holders of ancient records, and the final defense of communities as Goths, Vandals, and Visigoths, let alone Vikings came and picked over the corpse of Empire.

 

When the world began to re-form into semblances of nations and political structures, and safe passage became a little more certain across at landscapes, some monastic communities with a healthy population of monks having learning to spare opened schools. The "Oxbridge" tradition of higher education in England began with two islands of stability where learned clerics gathered students around them, formed colleges of shared interests, and enough of these collegial groups in Oxford and Cambridge clustered together for shared  efforts that added up to a breadth that was nearly universal in scope . . . the first English speaking universities.

 

And yes, they spoke little enough of English in their chapels and refectories and dormitories (see films of Potter, Harry, Hogwarts setting of), all elaborations on the already almost 1,000 year old traditions of monastic life in common. They spoke and wrote their charters and constitutions and diplomas in the church Latin which was on of their common stocks in trade, since work in the church was the destination for most of these scholars.

 

So we still have in academia our quads and convocations, hints of "Sic transit gloria Latinam" at least in official documents, and job titles like Provost and Chancellor and Dean, all of which came out of a roster of Priors and Cellarers and Sextons in churchly tables of organization.

 

There became many titles for the Head of such institutions, but most of them related back to the original presiding official of a monastery: the Abbot. The word goes back not just into Latin, but Greek, and before that the Aramaic that might be familiar to readers of the New Testament: Abba, Father. "Abba" as the Aramaic term for father, but a term in fact of endearment, a "Dad" or "Pops" more than a formal "Dear Father." That's why the significance of Jesus' address to God was preserved in the original to help us remember the weight of such personal relationship: Abba, Daddy.

 

When the very earliest communities of those devoted to their profession of faith were formed, this relationship, and that word was preserved, and monks called their mentor, their guide, their daddy in the family gathering, an Abbot. It's become a formal word in modern usage, but it cuts both ways.

 

So in history, in tradition, and in the vital sense of personal relationship that has marked his tenure, I think it would make a great deal of sense to call Dale Knobel a sort of secular Abbot. Pointy hat optional, but even there, academic garb holds onto some of those more peculiar prerogatives of church leadership: the leader's mace, the silk-lined hood over the simply cut preacher's robe.

 

And in all that ceremony four weeks from now, it won't be as President that I'll start to miss Dale Knobel during his last commencement in office, but as an Abbot, an Abba for our many constituencied community.

 

Thanks, Dad.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been part of the Denison community for years, too. Tell him what you'll miss about Dale & Tina Knobel's departure at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.