Notes From My Knapsack 4-14-16

Notes From My Knapsack 4-14-16

Jeff Gill

 

Trees telling a tale

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This spring has seen the decline and fall of a number of great trees of my acquaintance.  In fact, the last two years have taken quite a few old friends out of circulation, here in Granville and around the county.

 

In the last few weeks, a range of streetside trees have gone away where Mt. Vernon Road comes south to cross Rt. 16 heading into downtown Newark. Buildings are getting renovated on one side, structures are coming down and being abandoned in preparation for demolition as we get closer to a bridge widening project that will make Rt. 13 and Mt. Vernon Road two way traffic through there.

 

Since I work a mile north of downtown Newark, and come back this way down Rt. 13 all the time, it's a familiar stretch of streetscape. And it's startling how completely different the block looks with those trees down.

 

When I'm waiting for the light to turn right onto Rt. 16, the now empty block to my left where the Cunningham house is already an historical memory, there's a lonely magnolia whose spring glory is almost surely its last, the blossoms now falling petal by pink petal.

 

But coming back down Newark-Granville Road into the village, the dread plague of orange dot disease seems to be as hard on our trees as emerald ash borers and gypsy moths have been. Some gnarled old guardians of the bike path, grown in a twist around metal fence posts and utility guy wires, are gone; closer in, some trunks that clearly have little life above are wearing their sad stain, and some gaps in the foliage tunnel will no doubt soon appear.

 

In my own neighborhood, the homeowners association will meet here in another week, and we trustees will talk about the blight that's spread in our area of common responsibility, forcing the removal and ultimately replacement of some large evergreens. You learn in this work that this particular task ain't cheap. And thinking about a tree suddenly down across a corner of a house is a reminder of why it probably shouldn't be.

 

A recent photo on Facebook made the rounds of Granville folk, a view east on Broadway's end at the base of Mount Parnassus, showing the view up branching off the interurban line and the curve of the road heading into Clear Run's valley below.

 

And there's no trees. Virtually none, on the slopes, across the horizon. No trees.

 

A hundred years ago or so, the movement from pioneer settlement to the spread of agriculture had resulted in the cutting of every mature tree across the landscape. The woodsy village we're used to thinking of as timeless is a relatively recent development.

 

And if you go over to the Octagon Earthworks next Sunday (Apr. 17) in the afternoon, and join in one of the tours of the grounds, you will likely hear that, 2,000 years ago, the plateau defined between Raccoon Creek and the South Fork of the Licking River and Ramp Creek was, according to soil studies, a managed prairie. That data, along with the work compiled by science writer Charles Mann in his book "1491" indicates that it's not unreasonable to see the data as telling us much of the lowland areas of Licking County were carefully and thoughtfully managed for centuries even before the Newark Earthworks complex was constructed, a treeless terrace above the river valleys that gave clear views of the horizon. There the sunrises and moonrises and other astronomical appearances would be easily in evidence.

 

Trees are good, but they're like us, players passing across this vast stage that is the Land of Legend.

 

 

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

 

Faith Works 4-9-16

Faith Works 4-9-16

Jeff Gill

 

Sipping from the firehose

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Conversations about sermons recently have made me think about where theologian Karl Barth's most overused line meets the popular catchphrase of Marshall McLuhan's . . . do you know which two quotes I'm talking about? Either way, hold that thought.

 

There are, in this paperless age, still so many books out there. Nearly a 1,000 new titles or reprints every DAY. And that's not counting blogs and posts and various online outbursts of information and opinion. The task of a librarian or a curator is as important as ever, perhaps more so, as people look for tools and particularly people to help them figure out "what counts? What should I read, and how much can I just skip?" Curating, selecting, editing: none of this is answering questions, exactly (even the youngest students now turn to search engines for things like "what is the chief export of Ecuador?"), but the ongoing question of "what's going on in my world, and how should I respond to it?" is crying out to be answered by each of us.

 

Social media tries to aggregate and hashtag to sort and sift, media streams develop a cache of their own (podcasts are big right now, and I just don't get Buzzfeed), and there are developing bodies of knowledge online, growing out of existing data sets like those long managed by the U.S. Census Bureau or the Smithsonian Institution, or from groups like Net.Bible.Org or AmericanBible.Org with online scriptural tools. What was once only accessible by specialists is now available at a click.

 

Yet even for believers with a passion for the Bible, the 66 books of the Protestant canon of scripture can be a daunting mass of chapter headings and footnotes. A good study Bible in your hand can be a rich banquet of tools (no clicking required!) but you need some training to be able to open it up and dive deeply into the text.

 

About those two quotes: In Life magazine in 1963, Barth said he liked to tell seminarians (those in training for ministry leadership) "to take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible." Or as it often is shortened, "take the Bible in one hand the newspaper in the other." And it was the next year, in 1964 that communications professor McLuhan coined the phrase "the medium is the message."

 

Or it might make more sense to you if you think about what McLuhan is saying as being about the "Medium AS message" – that the method and format of delivery of information shapes how you receive and process information.

 

It used to seem to be a simple and reliable matter for anyone, with whatever background or training, to distinguish between a published volume (and out of the minister's library, no less) and a grimy handful of blue-tinted mimeo pages someone runs in and throws on the table. One is reliable, the other less so, right? Printed books, delivered publications, mimeographed sheets, then perhaps a look at someone's scribbled notes – they're a sort of hierarchy of what once was.

 

I'll add to Barth and McLuhan the caption from a cartoon in "The New Yorker" from 1993: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It was a laugh with two canines looking at a computer, but in reality today, there are dogs and wolves and some mischievous and even malicious coyotes out there presenting their take on the Bible, faith, church life, and much more, as definitive. They might never have gotten their views between hardback covers in the past, but a webpage can look very legit, but have content not worth wrapping fish guts in (after you'd printed it out, of course).

 

This is the new challenge in ministry and in Christian education, but it's also the old challenge in a new form. Believers have long wondered "who can I trust?" It has always been the task of pastors to shepherd the flock past hazards, getting them to still water and peaceful, fruitful meadows safely.

 

That means we have to learn new things, and be ready to share our knowledge in different ways with a congregation who have gotten used to taking in information through some very different devices than the First Century technological innovation of – a book! Yes, that's right, the first "Bibles" or "biblia" were a technology in their own right. It does no violence to the sacred sense of the contents to spend some time looking at how we use that external tool.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how you prefer to take in information by sending it to knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 4-2-16

Faith Works 4-2-16

Jeff Gill

 

Social Media and the World We Know

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As some of you online may have noticed, I tried to . . . well, cut back a bit for Lent.

 

That goes with the usual territory of personal discipline and spiritual preparation heading towards Easter; some diet, some start new exercise plans for the soul or the body (or both); we all are familiar with giving something up for Lent.

 

I knew from the start that "giving up" social media was not really going to be an option. For good or ill, and I hear from those who would say "ill" quite regularly and very loudly, social media is now as central to ministry and community as the phone was by the 1960s and until recently.

 

In my reading in congregational histories, going through stacks of old bulletins and newspapers, you can see where bold churches got phones in the 1930s or so, and after World War II, secretaries and receptionists became as standard to church life as custodians or "sextons" had been the previous few centuries.

 

And while my personal experience with congregational ministry only really starts to flicker into awareness in the 1970s, I can attest to the fact that church secretaries, as a large part of their responsibilities, answered phones and wrote out those infamous little messages on pink pads headed "While You Were Out."

 

One congregation I served in had a spike on the corner of the reception desk, and whichever of the two of us clergy came in first had the pleasure of tugging the stack off the spindle and sifting through the notes to figure out which were sales people being sneaky, which were callers with a personal need being discreet, and generally starting with the member questions or inquiries – unless you got to one that said "so-and-so just went to the hospital" and that note put the rest back on the spindle, and you back into your car.

 

I did have, thanks to the support of a church family that had a business and a large phone contract, a beeper for a stretch, and learned the tricks of how to communicate through the minimal read-out, as well as how to find and work the credit card number trick to call from a pay phone back to the church or someone else facilitating communication.

 

There's not one aspect of any of that I'd willingly go back to, especially the answering machine at home. Those evening "please call me back" messages could be anything from "I had a question about the color of the rug" to "I need help" and you had to call them all to be safe. Not to mention the last message of seven which was "so-and-so just went to the hospital" which meant, etc.

 

Now the church office phone tends to be rung by salespeople almost exclusively.  That's why so many churches have joined many other older households in cutting the cord and stopping having a land line, which has become simply an insistent scold of solicitation in our house and I suspect yours. We're blessed in that at our church we have a reason to staff the phones in certain windows of time, because we're helping support a medical loan ministry on the premises which does keep the line serving a practical purpose.

 

And this is why social media is now key to connections; as a pastor, I get notifications directly, and with the chance for follow-up questions. Almost everyone in the congregation either texts me info (or questions of their own), shoots me Facebook Messenger notes, or DMs through Twitter, along with the still robust e-mail . . . all of which I can get in my pack-of-cards-sized smartphone.

 

Add in that general communications are more through group e-mail than bulk ground mail, repeated or emphasized in Facebook and Twitter (we're not really into Instagram & Snapchat, but I know churches that are), and you've got a more immediate, and frankly more personalized series of means of communication than we had 25 years ago when it was all about the telephone.

 

I did enjoy taking as much of a break as I could from making personal posts, replying with comments and putting out tweets that were mere individual opinion. It was a chance to get some perspective, as I reflected on what I wasn't saying, and that sometimes didn't need to be said.

 

But I'm back at it now, with a hopefully more disciplined sense of how to "share" in community with today's tools.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been known to post an opinion or two. Tell him how social media is your connection to a wider community at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 3-31-16

Notes From My Knapsack 3-31-16

Jeff Gill

 

Seeking a Human Scale

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Spring is a time of possibilities that seem nearly unlimited: this is the year I will go to . . . we will travel . . . my garage will get cleaned . . . losing those pounds . . . finishing that deck.

 

It's only when you get into some of those projects, like painting or gardening or other home improvement areas, that you realize you needed to order those seeds earlier, you should have started sooner to prep the ground and clear the area, or that you just don't have any idea what it is you're getting into.

 

For many families, it's time for the final decision on college, and the realization that, in the end, you pick one. One. You're going to . . . a place. The options can't really be kept open past May 1.

 

We have limits, we do. And even in cinematic universes, we get the drama of characters like Iron Man and Captain America, Batman and yes, even Superman realizing that they have limits. What can be done, how you can do it, the amount you can accomplish.

 

Talking to a colleague in ministry during Holy Week, the lead-in to Easter, we found ourselves discussing what made for a "human scale" in life. As things get bigger, do they get more or less humane?

 

Corner groceries that were rare when I was a kid are no more; here in Granville I still hear about Blackstone's and other storefront grocery options. Today, even Ross Market is referred to as a "small grocery."

 

Sometimes I find myself needing to go to a big box retail to look for a product, and face that long row of stacked shelving, and feel my breath getting short, my heart rate elevating. Where is what I'm looking for? How many types of this stuff are there, anyhow, and what was it I was looking for, anyhow? Choice is liberating in some ways, but oppressing in others.

 

In a different role I play, I'm in pretty much every high school and middle school across Licking County (and not a few elementaries). I hear administrators and teachers talk about the challenges they face, and what parents are pushing for.

 

The general expectation is that a high school today needs to be one of about a thousand students, and anything short of that will be deficient, in tools and technologies, classes and culture to allow young people to gain and grow as they should to prepare for college. A thousand students, about 250 per class year.

 

My mother graduated with a class of about two dozen, my dad not much larger. They went on to college, they seem to have been and still are alert and aware and connected to a larger world. Of course, in the 1950s computers were a government project and foreign languages were often Latin and maybe French, or Spanish. Yes, I know, times change. But does human scale change?

 

Then I think about my wife's graduating class from her high school, which was larger than all of my son's high school and most of the middle school thrown in. She's a pretty humane individual. And we both went to a massive land-grant university, lived in immense dormitories, came out with our love of the everyday and our appreciation of individuals intact.

 

What is a human scale? How large an assembly, an institution is too much, or is small not as aspirational as I like to think? Or is the nature of human scale a both-and proposition, where we need to keep the parts as well as the whole in our field of view?

 

We need close, personal community to know us, and help us be known; large gatherings can take us out of our comfortable assumptions, and empower our individual abilities when taken together. Human scale may be, may have to be, both vast, and solitary; like most scales, it seeks a balance.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him where you find human scale at work at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-26-16

Faith Works 3-26-16

Jeff Gill

 

Three questions about God

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If you have beliefs about God, and try to explain them to someone else, you're talking about apologetics.

 

These last few columns were spurred by reading a book by the distinguished preacher and pastor Tim Keller, "The Reason for God." Tim does not just have a reason, he has many reasons, and some cogent reasoning for why belief in God, and a particular way of understanding who God is, can be called reasonable. Pastor Keller is doing apologetics, in the classical sense of the term.

 

But it also made me realize that in most situations where I'm asked to give an account for the faith that is in me, when I need to explain how my beliefs in and about God are what moves me, I don't have either the time for a book-length discussion, or the ability to hand over a volume and say "read that, then we'll talk."

 

So I started to ask myself "how do you do apologetics, on horseback, parson?" And I realized I tend to boil it down to three questions.

 

First, to someone puzzled as to why anyone would build their life around "an old man in a long white beard making you play harps forever when you die" (not what I believe in, exactly, but nevermind), I start with the question "do you believe there is a god of some sort?" I use lower-case there intentionally, because I'm not wanting (yet) to debate what kind of Divine Person we're talking about, but just to start with a basic issue: do you believe that beyond the here and now, from creation to a time beyond the time we know ourselves, there is an entity who is far beyond our everyday existence? Or "God." If someone's quite certain there's no such animal, and that life is all we know because it's all that's ever knowable, we're off onto a different conversation altogether (and another column series, perhaps).

 

But that's actually quite rare. Most people, in most of the world, believe in something, even a some One who is godlike, if not God per se. Okay then.

 

Second, I ask if you think this one we will call God is still actively involved in the world. There are not a few who believe some sort of Creator made and moved everything to the point of existence as we know it, but once the merry-go-round was turning, that Being jumped off. Deism, some call it, a Divine Watchmaker who set the cosmos spinning after winding it up, and has laid it aside until some future time . . . but this cosmic watchmaker isn't constantly fiddling with the works.

 

Again, when asked directly, most people leave room in their beliefs, whether unspoken and unreflected-upon, or even in careful consideration, for some form of God or the angels of God to be directly interacting with creation. God is not done, God is still creating and creative, God's not finished with me, or you, yet.

 

Which comes around to my third and mostly final question. If you believe there is a God, and that God is still interactive with creation, do you believe that God is caring and even loving in that relationship, or do you think God is capricious, cruel even, playing like a child with toy soldiers and plastic action figures on a landscape of scripted presumption? Do you believe that God is just messing with us most days, or that God loves us?

 

Tomorrow is Easter. It is, beyond question, the holiest day of the year for Christians. Yes, Christmas is a big deal, and the Incarnation – God coming into the world as Jesus – is significant, but we don't schedule our worship each week onto the day of the week Christ was born. That's why the Sabbath was shifted to "the first day of the week" by the early church from the last day: because it was on a Sunday morning that the women came to the tomb and found it empty, when Mary Magdalene learned that Jesus was alive.

 

Saturday is a day of anticipation, of expectation, of holy waiting. In some church traditions, tonight is a vigil when new members join the faith; in others, we get up early to re-enact what was going on in that return to the garden, the tomb, to tend a beloved but dead body.

 

What we really celebrate, on Easter and each Sunday, is that God is, God is at work, and God loves us. Jesus rose so that we might know that those three statements, those answers to three questions, are true, true, true.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes in God. Okay, not surprising. Tell him about what you do and don't believe at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.