Notes from my Knapsack 6-8-23

Notes from my Knapsack 6-8-23
Jeff Gill

Flag etiquette from my point of view
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Coming up is a modest holiday which no one gets off that I know of: Flag Day.

It was on June 14, 1777 that the Continental Congress included in its business a motion reading "Resolved, That the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation." In other words, the original Betsy Ross version of Old Glory.

Often Flag Day falls during Cub Scout Day Camp, and it has always been both a pleasure and an honor to teach young Scouts how to properly fold the flag into the unique triangle that sets it apart from other banners and bunting stacked upon a shelf.

We also work on the protocols of raising and lowering the flag. Certainly that it should not touch the ground, and our nation's standard goes up briskly in the morning, and down at a slower, stately pace at the end of the day.

Just covering the basics takes all the time I usually have, so that's what we practice. Flag folding, and how to present, raise, and lower the flag (then folding it for stowage overnight). There's some history about how we got the star spangled banner we have I often start with.

Where I don't go is the borderline between opinion, preference, and symbolism where I actually have some pretty firm sentiments. After all, these are nine and ten year olds. But you, dear reader, deserve to learn a bit more.

For instance, I really dislike big clumps of flags. You know, the kind that have broken out like a rash in political rallies? The pledge, which we also discuss with the Cub Scouts, notes we are honoring "the republic, for which it stands." The flag stands for the United States of America, in the way the King stands for Great Britain, and they swear allegiance to the Crown. We have the flag.

So I think — this is just one guy's opinion — there's never a good reason to have two, or twelve, or dozens of U.S. flags up on a stage. It confuses the symbolism and meaning. Doesn't bother you? Swell.

But I also deeply regret the sea change we've gone through with 24 hour flag displays. The U.S. flag should go up in the morning, dawn or not too long after, and down at or before sunset, and if it rains, somebody runs out to respectfully take it down.

There used to be just a couple of places (Mackinac Island had one) where guides noted by act of Congress they were allowed to have the flag up with a light 24 hours a day. Yeah. So now, with modern fiber technology and a token spotlight we have all sorts of flags whipping themselves into shreds as they fly all day, all night, all the time. I don't like it.

Flags with gold fringe? Don't like 'em. Backwards patches indicating "we're always moving forward?" A general's whim during the first Gulf War now enshrined on car logos. A flat display flag points right, to its own left.

And unless you're armed, take off your hat, please, when it passes by. My opinion!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if you read these columns, you knew he had opinions. He's happy to read yours at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-2-23

Faith Works 6-2-23
Jeff Gill

A semi-annual exhortation for summer
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School is out, Memorial Day behind us, and the summer sprawls on ahead.

Granted, like so many things, summer ain't what it used to be. With so much going back into action not after Labor Day but on or just after August 1, it does seem as if summer is shorter. If you have school age kids, that's definitely true.

However you mark the warmer months, whatever you do to get away, I want to suggest something I know I've said many times before, but bears repeating. Try going to worship on vacation.

There are fine folk who are religious, if you will, about their church attendance through the year, but see summer break time as an opportunity to take a break from all kinds of routine, including attending services.

I get it. I really do. My own religious tradition is not rooted in any beliefs that you must be in church for God to pay any attention to you, or your prayers, we just say along with many Protestant Christians that the Hebrews 10:25 instruction means we really oughta.

Preachers can put a bit too much weight on that one verse; again, I don't mean to say that missing a Sunday (or Saturday, or Friday depending on your practice) is the same as leaving God out of your life. I would say, along with every gym director and coach on the practice field, that missing a regular routine can quickly turn into no routine at all.

What I do want to suggest is that attending a worship service, especially for those who are deeply engaged in their own faith community, somewhere that's unfamiliar to you can be a revelatory and instructive experience.

Just like sitting in a distant hotel room watching the evening news, and noting what's the same, and what's different, it makes coming home a new experience. The same thing about any vacation getaway: you see your own life in a different light when you return from it.

Worship in a different place, where no one knows you, can trigger all sorts of useful reflections on your own habits and assumptions back home. I've seen people come back and talk about their having visited a service and been told "you're in my seat" and now they want to tell everyone why that's a terrible horrible awful thing to say to our visitors here at home. And trust me, preachers smile because we can say that from the pulpit at length and convince no one, but that lived experience re-told first hand can turn a congregation around.

The songs that are sung, the instruments that are used, the style of preaching you hear, and even odd details in the architecture or decor: you gain something by seeing a place fresh, and finding your way into worship in that new setting.

And depending on where you are vacationing, sometimes after the service as you deal with the fascinating experience of being the visitor in a church, you learn from the locals who tell you about things or suggest options you never would have heard about as just a tourist sticking to the tourist stuff and touristy places. That's not why I recommend the practice, but it's a nice fringe benefit.

I'd love to hear about anyone's experiences this summer visiting worship in a place they're traveling!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher around central Ohio; he's taking an extended vacation of sorts this summer going nowhere. Tell him where you're going to church on the road at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-26-23

Faith Works 5-26-23
Jeff Gill

Appreciation all the year round, especially summers
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We are four months from October, which long ago was established as Clergy Appreciation Month, with the very best of intentions: but after the end of that month is a steady rain of can't miss events on most ministerial calendars, from Thanksgiving & Advent through Lent & Easter to Pentecost.

So please allow this involuntarily inactivated parson to proclaim out of season: if you want to appreciate your ministerial leadership? Encourage them to take their time off, both some rest & personal time each week, and their leave time every year.

Here's the hard part. It's nice to say to your preacher "make sure to take your vacation time!" But what's more important is how you affirm & defend that time to others in your church. Speak up when the nit pickers say "didn't they just take off a Sunday?" Support that time away when a friend or fellow parishioner says "how many days have they been gone, anyhow?" Don't just nod or chuckle when someone says "they only work one day a week, what do they need time off for?"

I could add something about helping make sure they don't get contacted a dozen times when they're away for six days; I'd also remind anyone still listening that if your minister leaves after preaching on Sunday, and preaches the morning after they get back, any PRC or elders or trustees who say "that's six days away off your total for the year's vacation time" is not doing accurate or compassionate math.

Rev. Willard Guy, who in 1990 was retired but working part-time where I was in my first full-time position, made quite an impression on me as I believe he did everyone who had the honor of knowing him. I had started the year before with two weeks' vacation in my letter of call. I hadn't taken all of it, having done three weeks of camp, but in my first review was recommended for a third week in my contract "which I should try and take all of this time!"

This proposal went to the board for approval, and at that meeting someone said "when I started working I got no vacation, and had to work for years just to get two weeks." Much rumbling, and it looked as if the third week was going to be removed from the motion. Rev. Guy spoke up: he'd been a chaplain in Europe with the Blackhawk Division, earned a Silver Star, feared God alone having faced armed Nazis and helped liberate a concentration camp or two on their way to Berlin. "In that job, how many holidays did you get?" Grudging reply, "Ten." Willard went on: "And how many weekends did you get off?" Long angry stare, which bounced off of Rev. Guy, then "All of them."

Calmly he replied: "So that's 104 plus 10 days you got off when you didn't have vacation, a hundred and fourteen days. Your ministers work literally on most holidays, every Sunday unless we give them time off, and with regional and district events, almost half the Saturdays. I think four weeks should be a minimum, but that's just my opinion since I don't have a vote." Silence, for a bit, then the chair moved the motion as stated through. Thank you, Willard. I got my three weeks.

That's my contribution to any church member thinking ahead to Clergy Appreciation Month. October's too late, but May is when the rubber really should be hitting the road on this subject. Be blessed and renewed and God grant you lack of cell coverage as you get away!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher around central Ohio; he's on a sabbatical of sorts these days. Tell him about how your support your preachers & leaders at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-19-23

Faith Works 5-19-23
Jeff Gill

Renewing your vows on an ongoing basis
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An opportunity I had when just starting out in parish ministry was to do a renewal of vows ceremony before I did my first wedding.

It was a couple celebrating their fortieth anniversary, and wisely as it turns out they chose to do a renewal of vows then, and not wait for a 45 or 50 (he was ill then and died a few years later). At the time my wife and I had been married just over a year and I couldn't imagine forty.

They invited friends and family, we held it in the church after worship, inviting people to stay if they wished, and a fairly full sanctuary watched as they repeated to each other the vows they'd shared just after World War II ended, as they began their married life together.

I've heard of people doing a renewal of vows at Disney or on a golf course; one year I floated the idea of a group renewal of marriage vows on a Sunday in June and we tried it as part of the service, since there were a number of fiftieths coming up anyhow.

And there are people who choose to renew their vows every year on their anniversary, wherever they happen to be when it rolls around (there's an amusing misuse of this idea in the 1945 "Christmas in Connecticut"). It has no legal standing, nor is there any canon law guidance in liturgical traditions around what it means or whether you should. It's a nod to memory, like many of the baptisms done these days in the Jordan River by life-long Christians, who know they are baptized in God's sight, but want to have the full immersion experience there.

Joyce and I spend enough time facilitating ceremonies and programs for other people and institutions that we've never discussed the idea of doing a renewal of vows. To simply repeat the words from that day in 1985 would seem a bit odd.

What I would say about being married not quite forty years (but I can see it just ahead) is that you both are going to be renewing your vows quite often if you're going to make the long haul a committed couple. Maybe long, long ago when George was a farmer from childhood to old age, and Martha was a mother and homemaker beginning to end, the shape of your vows, official and unofficial, printed in the bulletin and unspoken in your mind, would never need to flex. If the times and conditions within which the marriage operates are mostly the same, I guess you just count on the initial vows made and let it go at that.

Today, as people change careers multiple times in their lives, and movement is usual, not strange, the relationship of the marriage to the lived experience will change even if the basic relationship between the two people will not. Couples deal with distance as a common occurrence, not a strange turn of events; we were working in two different states, two homes, when our son was born, and there have been other geographic complications for various stretches. As I say that, I recall funerals I did years ago for elderly church members where family would ask me to say "they never spent a day apart their whole marriage." All I can reply with is "wow."

Renewing is not quite rewriting, but there is a revisioning to be done in most modern marriages, literally: to re-vision, to see anew how the way you thought it would go has gone, and how we proceed, together (even if sometimes apart).

And I'm glad we had the wisdom and vision to put atop our wedding program Browning's line "Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been married a while, but not as long as some. Tell him about your enduring relationships at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-12-23

Faith Works 5-12-23
Jeff Gill

Pastoral care intersects with political debate
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Just about any minister will tell you that the hardest pastoral care situations are around the death of a child. Far and away, those events are painful for everyone involved, and the simple answers are often those that create new pain as much as easing loss.

Sometimes, you simply sit with the parents and family, and grieve with them. The time for words will come, but you can't and shouldn't force it. The questions will come, and they will be hard, and call on your faith as much as the grieving mother or father's trust in love at work, even in the midst of death.

When the time comes to talk, you need to be able to say something. You will pray, and think, and even rehearse a bit in your mind what to say, but the dialogue when it comes is going to follow it's own pattern, and the direction of the conversation is going to be guided by their needs. I can't sum it up better than that.

A close second, in my own experience, is a sort of situation where current events have me reliving, and rethinking those confessions and responses I've been through with people torn up in grief.

It has been when someone comes to me after a suicide by firearm, and they provided the weapon in question, usually sold or given to a friend or family member, not long before the act.

This isn't about law. In the cases I've been involved with going back across forty years, I'm fairly certain no legal line was crossed. The pastoral problem is when the survivor, the person who provided unwittingly the tool by which the deed was done, is asking themselves how they could have known, or even how they could not have known. "He seemed fine, we were talking about plans for this summer, I had no idea."

You may well have heard that in the first four months of 2023, one-third of the year thus far, over 13,900 gun deaths have occurred in the United States. That includes thirteen shooting events which took lives in K-12 schools, out of 184 "mass shooting" events which the Gun Violence Archive defines as four or more people shot not including the shooter. There are a fair number of criminal events mixed in with those 184, crooks shooting each other, which is sometimes used as a way to dismiss that figure, but in sum those too have an impact on the wider community.

What I fear is too often overlooked is that 60%, around 7,920 deaths in that grim total, are suicides. Those are the massive iceberg undergirding the tragic and horrible pinnacle which is that so many of the public mass shootings, such as in Texas recently, Tennessee before that, and on and on, are seemingly in the end a means to a particular kind of suicide, but an intention to die by one's own hand or to force another to do the shooting.

I have no simple policy prescription or political response. I do know the Founders with muzzle-loading black powder rifles longer than your arm would be utterly baffled by the idea of 8,000 citizens shooting themselves. It's a further problem in the larger question.

And I pray I do not have to find a way to comfort more people whose anguish is over having provided the weapon not just for a friend to self-harm, but to take many with him on the way. That's grief I have no easy answer for.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he has many and complicated feelings about firearms. Tell him how we can reduce the number of suicides at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 5-18-23

Notes from my Knapsack 5-18-23
Jeff Gill

Thinking about Aunt Esmerelda
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Over the last few months, I've been thinking about Aunt Esmerelda quite a bit.

Demographically, I mean.

The name is uncommon, picked for that reason. If there's an Esmerelda who reads this, my apologies, but I had to name her something with an echo of days gone by.

Aunt Esmerelda, in my formulation here, is that "maiden aunt" who becomes, largely by default, the family caregiver. She was the youngest daughter of the twelve children or something like that, and when Grandma got sick, she tended her. By the time Grandma passed, Esmerelda was too old for marriage, and anyhow, she was needed at Aunt Endorra's house, where she moved into the spare room.

Once that situation resolved, usually at the Grover's Corners cemetery, she went home to tend her mother or her father.

Seriously, if you do much genealogy, you recognize "Esmerelda Syndrome" pretty quickly. There were lots of kids, people died at home - heck, they had the calling and the funeral at home usually - and while the menfolk shoed horses and shot bears, and the women churned laundry and scrubbed butter, end-of-life care was taken care of "all in the family."

Plus, this is back when un-ironically people called pneumonia "the old person's friend" because it was the usual end of suffering, before morphine drips and other medications took over. And since some of those medications actually cured pneumonia, we all had to find something else to die of, and that list has been shrunk considerably.

So we live longer, and that's good, but by the time we get to the last few years of debility (if we're fortunate), our children and our prospective Aunt Esmereldas are older, too. This gets called "the sandwich generation," about the large numbers of us adults who have ailing parents and children needing care all at the same time, but if you're thinking about calling Aunt Esmerelda… well, we didn't have her. There aren't many youngest of twelves around.

Smaller families, shorter spans of childhood within a household, and you cut down on the sandwichian overlap, but you come up short when the elderly are no longer 60 or 70, but 90 and pushing up into the centenarian cohort.

Obviously, this is where assisted living facilities and home care aides come in for many families, and when well run and fully staffed they can be a blessing and a good solution to some of these questions.

But they aren't all that. They aren't all well run, and guess which have openings when you need one in a hurry? And fully staffed? Yeah, right. COVID cut a hole through that whole model we're still sorting out, as the elderly are still the most vulnerable to the virus continuing to make ripples of mortality through vulnerable populations. Plus they cost money, which makes for a grim calculus in many families. And I'm no good at calculus.

The situation of an Aunt Esmerelda was not good, and the fact that women aren't shoehorned into such roles as often as they once were, as even Jane Austen feared might happen to her as a "dependent woman," is an improvment. What hasn't improved is how we deal with such situations, as a society or in most families. It's a subject we're all likely to deal with at some point, all the more reason to consider how to handle it now.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his middle name is not Esmerelda but it might as well be. Tell him how you've seen caregiving challenges dealt with helpfully at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 5-5-23

Faith Works 5-5-23
Jeff Gill

Allegiance is a word I have to look up
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While I am pretty sure I know what it means, allegiance is a word I have to think through before I type it. I don't use it often in print.

The "Pledge of Allegiance" I know quite well, even if I don't write it out much. I'm in school buildings of a morning fairly often, and it is still said by standing students every morning in pretty much every district of this county that I know of.

Even if you're there for a meeting that started early and you're in a conference room, when the voice on a PA starts the Pledge, everyone stands up, puts a hand over their heart, and looks around for a flag that isn't always in evidence, but we all say it, then sit down as the announcer goes on to tell us what today's lunch menu is.

This has been true since my earliest days in school, which to be fair only goes back to the middle 1960s, but I think it's been the case for quite a while. Which is why I was as surprised by Joyce Carol Oates tweeting her shock at learning this was true as quite a few other Twitter followers of hers.

I mean no disrespect to her; she's a fine novelist, short story author, reviewer and essayist, and has been a hoot on social media. But she's just enough older than me (I won't say how much, but enough) and clearly has not been around public or parochial schools below the post-graduate level much to not know the "Pledge of Allegiance" is a common feature of the educational morning.

With deep respect to Jehovah's Witnesses and other freethinkers who sadly have suffered to achieve this freedom, I acknowledge that there's a Supreme Court precedent that clearly states no student has to participate, and I've seen a fair number choose to do so, or rather not do so. It's a tricky thing, that: if almost every other student and the teacher is putting a hand over their heart and saying the Pledge, it's very hard to not do so. And again, I acknowledge that there are people who have a principled reason to not say that public affirmation, and support them in not saying it even as I do so. There's a school of thought that says a better solution is to not have everyone say it, to which I reply, and where does that end? I'm more interested in helping everyone allow exceptions rather than ensuring no one ever has to be one.

This has become an issue for the coronation, which you are welcome to not care about, but is in the news more than a bit. May 6, 2023, Westminster Abbey, King Charles III is anointed and crowned and formally installed, and the monarch in Great Britain is for them what the flag of the United States is for us. This means a pledge of allegiance to the new king, which has traditionally been delivered by the peers (dukes and lords and such) but is being opened up this time to, well, anyone.

Since I agree with George Washington that we don't need a king, this is not technically my event, but as an English speaking Protestant, and as a Christian in general, I'm interested. Trust me, I don't plan to "swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty" but the debate over who can or should is of interest.

Psalms, prophets, so much of Biblical religion uses imagery of kings and monarchs to communicate something of who God is, and how God reigns (such as, "reigns"). This symbolic language needs interpreting, which means work for preachers. This preacher will be watching, and reflecting, and making notes.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's taught the Pledge and flag folding to Cub Scouts for years. Tell him how you understand allegiance at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-28-23

Faith Works 4-28-23
Jeff Gill

Rising to the occasion, including resurrection
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Yes, I affirm bodily resurrection as the heart of what I celebrate in the wake of Easter.

I don't just say that because fellow Christians expect it. In fact, there are Christians who have a variety of views on the nature of resurrection. This bothers me less than I'm told it should.

There have been people who've dismissed belief in a bodily resurrection as . . . well, I'm not quite clear what the inference is, and some have said this minister's views have been mangled or misrepresented. The line "My faith is not tied to some divine promise about the afterlife" seems sum it up well enough.

What's kept this going in social media is the question of whether or not one can be a Christian and not believe in the actual resurrection of a dead Jesus. Now, as a congregational pastor, I've had this conversation many, many times. And will again. People tell me that, while they honor Christ, they just can't quite accept the idea of Jesus's resurrection from the dead. And I'll tell you what I've told them all: I believe that faith in God's ability and willingness to raise up Jesus from death should be our goal as Christians. You may not be there yet, but if you are following Jesus, you're likely to end up there, so just keep on going. But I also come from a tradition that has historically been very unwilling, and I believe wisely so, to spend time telling other people they are not Christians.

I've been tangled up in these sorts of debates around all sorts of variants of Christian belief and practice. Christians do have internally substantial disagreements with other traditions, and that includes my own. Two of our movement's key founders, Barton Stone & Alexander Campbell, debated back and forth from 1821 to 1827 their view of trinitarian and unitarian understandings of Jesus Christ, and while many called on Campbell to reject Stone's "Socinian" views, his response was to go out of his way to say to Stone "I will call you brother."

So if someone affirms that they would follow Christ, intend to fellowship with others as a Christian, and will grant me the same, I'm not going to say they aren't Christian just because their beliefs don't track exactly with mine. Of course, I'm right, and they're wrong (#irony), but if I only claimed fellowship with people who agree with me on everything, I'd have a quiet time of it on Sunday morning praying by myself.

I think a casual statement that "you don't have to believe in the resurrection to be a Christian" is problematic, but it doesn't make me mad; a parallel line I've seen is that since this is the majority view, it's important to affirm for those on the outside looking in that there's room for those who believe differently. Perhaps belief in the bodily resurrection is still a majority belief within most fairly orthodox Christian bodies, but my push-back is more because I think such a faith is, in fact, NOT the majority view in the world at large. I think most people in general don't believe that resurrection is possible, has happened, or could happen in any meaningful way for the rest of us at some future point.

Hence my belief that it's important to speak up in defense of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. I do think it's at the heart of my faith; saying that isn't my way of saying someone without it has no faith at all, nor do I believe such a person isn't a Christian. What I'd like to do is keep teaching and preaching and discipling such a person into why this counter-intuitive, improbable, unlikely event is, in truth, a way to understand this world, let alone the next . . . and our place in it.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has a number of non-majority beliefs, but you probably knew that already. Tell him your odd affirmations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-21-23

Faith Works 4-21-23
Jeff Gill

A theology of holistic education
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If you follow much of the discussion and debate out of the Statehouse, and in a number of school districts with levies up on the ballot next month, you are hearing a vocal constituency is concerned public education is getting too much money, and that parents need more choices with less interference in how they educate their children.

Some of this discussion is around how homeschooling is managed in Ohio. As a parish minister, I've preached at least once in every church I've ever served this: I firmly believe every parent should homeschool their children.

Watching the shocked expressions on more than a few faces, I let the tension hang a bit in the air, and then add: many, probably most of us, will supplement that with our public schools.

I mean that, not just as a rhetorical device. Most of the problems we think we have, or are told exist, in the public school system, are because not enough parents are homeschooling. Another point that always gets some pushback when I make it is that between birth and age 18 the typical child will spend 9% of their time in school.

After some puzzlement, folks put the pieces together and then say "wait, you're counting the time they spend asleep." You bet I am. Sleep is perhaps the number one issue educators are struggling with, in public, parochial, or higher education. They aren't getting enough of it, the students or their parents, and the educational process is seriously harmed by that lack.

You might also object to including their first five years of life, but how a child enters and experiences kindergarten and first grade is shaped profoundly by whether or not the student is prepared with basics like letters, numbers, and colors before Day One in the little red schoolhouse.

Summers? Yeah, I'm counting that. If June, July, and nowadays the first half of August, anyhow, are filled with stress, conflict, anger, uncertainty, the teachers and bus drivers and administrators know it in the first weeks of school.

I am quite serious. Every family is, or should be, homeschooling. The education and development of a child, a student, a young citizen, is not just the responsibility of the school staff. And here's the thing: homeschoolers, legit doing the real deal homeschoolers, of which there are many in Licking County and God bless them for taking that on, know that their children need rest and solid nutrition and encouragement and a supportive structure all around them for learning to happen. I love actual homeschoolers; they are brave and devoted and their children learn and succeed in their lives.

If someone deals with their child's problems in school by saying "I'm going to homeschool" but puts no time into looking at what they intend or getting that approved, which in Ohio and Licking County is indeed quite simple: that's the kind of "homeschooling" which gives homeschoolers an unfair bad name.

For the vast majority of us with kids in public school, or even the rest of us who don't have school-age family anymore, but interact with and encourage and coach or counsel or in any way work with children: everyone should be homeschooling. Otherwise, we are wasting the money that goes into our school districts and public education. Because they can't with their 9% of a child's life, no matter how committed they are, change the 100% of a student's experience.

As for public education, I'm in and out of all ten districts in Licking County, and there's not one where I see they are wasting time, money, or your student's capacity. Parochial schools I see less often up close, but their outcomes are consistently amazing. Bless them all, but just keep praying for the rising generation of youth, who are facing challenges none of us could imagine when we were young.

They need us all to teach them well.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher; he's also become a full-time caregiver so he's interested in all ages. Tell him how you've learned to teach our children well at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-20-23

Notes from my Knapsack 4-20-23
Jeff Gill

Reconsidering the past in a complex present
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Of all the characters in Licking County history who are important to me, though we've never met, Warren K. Moorehead is near the top of the list.

I've had the honor and pleasure of actually impersonating Chaplain David Jones and William Gavit in marking bicentennial events for the state of Ohio and Centenary United Methodist Church in Granville, but Moorehead is someone whose life I've gotten to inhabit in a variety of less dramatic ways. Born in 1866, died in 1939, he's a living presence for me in this area. His mother died when he was very young; her father Joseph Warren King was a benefactor of Shepardson College, building King Hall in 1891 which was recently renovated for its continued service to now Denison University.

Warren King Moorehead started at Denison in 1886 but never completed a degree; he spent too much time exploring the countryside and engaging in "antiquarian activities" — the term archaeology had barely come into usage at this time. The dropout later received an honorary doctorate from Denison in 1930, by which time he was called "the dean of American archaeology."

My primary point of access to the more everyday fellow has been his voluminous collection of papers resident in the Ohio History Connection (OHC) archives, including diaries. Moorehead, especially the younger Warren, was writing very much for a future audience. It can be bracing to turn a yellowed sheet of paper and continue a sentence as he writes in 1901 about "some future reader of these pages" and how he hopes they will understand his circumstances. That plea has stuck with me.

One challenge for anyone involved in contemporary archaeology looking back at him is that he was a pioneer, but as a pathbreaker, he broke quite a bit along the way. His methods, especially in his early years, were atrocious; his ethics about collecting and selling artifacts were not at all what would be tolerated today. I've defended him in other settings with the point, easily established in the archives, that his boards and supervisors as he served as the first curator for the then Ohio Archaeological & Historical Society (OAHS), and first professor of archaeology for The Ohio State University, told him to sell the duplicate artifacts he found to fund his budgets. The 1890s were a "wild west" in many ways, in Ohio as well as beyond the Mississippi.

What I find compelling about Moorehead's story, though, is how he learned and grew. He was a plunderer and pillager in his digging, by any standards then or now, but he was also a preservationist. His work is a primary reason Fort Ancient became our first state park in 1891, and he was a key figure in the beginning of the work of the OAHS, now OHC, as it opened its first museum in what's now Orton Hall on the OSU campus. His methods improved over the years.

His approach to Native American antiquities and human remains was, frankly, horrible in his youth; he also was present at Wounded Knee in 1890, just 26 years old, and in the years after witnessing that slaughter he became such an advocate of Native American rights & justice he was forced off a federal panel defending tribal sovereignty in 1933, a 67 year old threat to entrenched interests.

Warren K. Moorehead learned & grew; a hundred years later, so can we.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's also a long-time volunteer for the OHC around Licking County. Tell him how you've learned and grown in understanding the past at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-14-23

Faith Works 4-14-23
Jeff Gill

When I Died, and After
___

Thirty years ago, I died. Not quite, but near enough.

I was heading back to the church I was serving from the campus, and crossing 21st St. was hit by someone running a red light, screened from my sight by a stopped car in the nearer lane.

The driver got out of their equally wrecked car holding onto the dashboard cigarette lighter, which told me all I needed to know about how it had happened.

It was what they call a t-bone, with the other car hitting me square on the front right tire. The officers and ambulance crew responding told me that mitigated the effects of the accident: a half-second earlier, hitting the corners, both might well have flipped up and over, while a half-second later might have bent my car in half to the breaking point around the other's engine block, which could have driven on through and into my lap.

Neither happened: the other car hit my tire and axle square, and the vehicles bounced a bit, mine rolling into the grass on through, the other slewing sideways into the now completely blocked intersection.

I had, on impact, surged forward behind my seat belt into the roof where it met the windshield, cutting my forehead but my skull didn't quite impact anything, something it took a while for the paramedics to feel certain of as they swabbed my blood out of my face. But it was just a small cut; the seat belt, indeed, saved my life, no question of it.

The other driver had to have had their seat belt on, but as I mentioned, got out with the round dashboard lighter in hand, also relatively unscathed. They also walked over to where I had literally crawled out of my car and shouted at me standing overhead "you hit my car! you hit my car!"

Then that other driver walked up to the officer who had shown up in mere moments and asked "can I get into my car (which was in the middle of the intersection) and get my cigarettes?" He said "no" and walked over to me.

Still shouting "he hit my car, it was his fault" the officer knelt next to me, and asked if I was alright. I said, tentatively, "no, not really, but I don't think anything is broken." He leaned over, and said "there's no way you hit them, sheet metal doesn't lie." Then he went back and started directing traffic as the ambulance pulled up.

I've remembered that ever since. "Sheet metal doesn't lie." People do, but there are facts and evidence and stories more reliable than the ones we tell ourselves. I did not die, not in the impact, and not after. My whole body ached for a few days, but that was it.

Back at home, I watched the tragedy in Waco play out in a semi-daze, both the unreality of the scene and story in Texas, and also my own situation. What had just happened to me? I nearly died, and in seconds someone was standing over me screaming patent falsehoods for the world to hear. I was upset about the latter immediately; it had taken a few hours for me to internalize the former, more significant event.

Archbishop Cranmer's words in the Book of Common Prayer for a burial service are quite relevant to many occasions: "In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord."

We do not live to die, but death is part of life, and remembering that can give our living a sense of proportion and purpose. I think about that every time I drive through that intersection…very cautiously.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he always wears his seat belt, and you should, too. Tell him how you've learned lessons at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-6-23

Notes from my Knapsack 4-6-23
Jeff Gill

A time to walk around the world
___


Do you see the world around you as a circle, or a square?

Anthropologists surmise that people long ago would have naturally seen their world as a circle, the horizon all around any one of us, before and behind our immediate vision. That imaginative circle would echo the outlines in the sky of the sun and the moon, and you could project from there the circle one would imagine from the orbit around us (as it appears), half in view overhead and half beneath.

When agriculture became a mark of civilization, it's likely the world starts to develop a different imaginative outline, a rectangle or square, after planting rows of crops. A field becomes the near horizon, and with the addition of a compass let alone a map you get north and south, east and west.

Navigate much with those tools, and you quickly pick up four more, northwest and southeast, southwest and northeast. Eight points, a rotated square, even an octagon of sorts for the principal directions.

Since Apollo spacecraft took astronauts around the moon, and back towards an earth rise, we've had a new appreciation of the circles we live in. But our smartphone maps pull us back down into grids and checkerboards, squares and rectangles. The push-pull, tugs back-and-forth, continues in how we imagine the world we see, and the world just beyond the horizon we don't see.

For the Octagon of the Newark Earthworks, the four open house days for 2023 have been announced, and while there's another coming in the summer and one in the fall, two arrive quickly, Sunday and Monday April 16 and 17. At the public area just off of 33rd St. and Parkview Road, there will be interpreters and guided tours from at least Noon to 4 pm, along with the museum at the Great Circle being opened there off of Rt. 79.

The Saturday before those two open house days at the Octagon, I will be leading again a three mile hike around the streets of Newark, on April 15 from 9 am to Noon, beginning and ending at the Great Circle Museum. We won't quite make it to the Octagon, but we will cover about half of the once four-and-a-half square mile complex of interconnected earthworks that the Octagon and Great Circle are 'corners' of, so to speak.

You are welcome to come join my stroll (bring water and a hat) on that Saturday, but I want to encourage anyone who can to take advantage of one of those open house days to simply go and walk the perimeter of the geometry there. 55 acres worth of octagonal enclosure, another 20 acres of the connected Observatory Circle. Take a tour if you wish, say hello at the interpretive tents, but make sure to simply go and walk around the world.

It may not be your world, it might not have been a cosmos in miniature, vast though the earthworks are, it couldn't just have been an observatory alone, but it was built to define a space and connect us to what is seen, and unseen.

Walking the outline of the earthworks makes me more aware of my horizons, even when I'm driving around now. And more conscious of how much is beyond my immediate horizon, but still part of my world. Spring is an excellent time to take such a trip, right here nearby.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he prefers the view on foot when he can take the time. Tell him how you slow down to see more at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-31-23 & 4-7-23

Thought I'd get ahead a week as has been the usual wish in the past for Easter and other holiday weeks, so you have two columns here, in sequence:


Faith Works 3-31-23 (see below for 4-7-23)
Jeff Gill

Ride on, ride on, King Jesus
___


Palm Sunday opens Holy Week for most Christian congregations, a series of commemorations of events through the culminating week of Jesus at work in Jerusalem.

Maundy Thursday marks the institution of communion in the breaking of bread and the pouring out of the cup, shared together "in remembrance of" Jesus; Good Friday follows closely with the crucifixion narrative through that fateful morning and his death from noon to three in the afternoon.

And then, of course, Easter's coming.

In some churches, the "Passion story" or the events of the week to come are marked all in this Sunday, especially where it's unlikely people will be able to come together for additional services. But my preference is to mark the entry of Jesus, hailed as king and savior by the crowds, to set off the opening of the sequence. It's been said, and rightly so, that you do yourself a disservice to leap from triumph to triumph, from Palm Sunday's regal procession, to the celebration of the resurrection on Easter; that life isn't a journey from victory to victory without a trip down into the valley of the shadow in between from time to time. You'll have to make your own choices about Thursday and Friday.

But Palm Sunday, the ancient cry of "Hosanna!" and the rejoicing of an expectant crowd, it all has a place, both in the story of Jesus, and in our own understanding of how we are called to follow him.

Because there are so many moments like this we are asked to accept, triumphs which we know in the moment will be brief. Every tournament victory gives way to the next season just around the corner; any new opportunity can feel like a grand entrance, though you know there's some heavy slogging ahead. Retirement is an occasion for cake if no longer many gold watches, but so many smile nervously as they already calculate how soon they'll outlive their savings; each reprieve at the doctor's office is also step on down the road of aging and a need to prepare for the next turn in that road to come.

Even finishing the dishes and taking out the trash are quiet celebrations which last only as long as the next plate and fork in the sink, and don't even get me started about the laundry. This is all a universal aspect of life, of living, of staying the course, for buckling down to the long haul.

All of this, I would suggest, is in Jesus's thoughts as he climbs onto his donkey, and starts into Jerusalem. The crowd is ready to celebrate a big victory for God's purposes, and has the very highest of hopes: for Jesus, against Rome, and towards as much a divine plan as their own desires. What Jesus also knows is that the joy of the moment is not going to be enough to fuel their endurance for the days and week and years to come. There's a quiet hope, a lasting intention which is all that can endure against the obstacles of this world. You can't eat birthday cake every morning, and tomorrow the dishes will need to be done all over again.

Traditional art of Jesus on Palm Sunday tends to get this right, I believe. Jesus is not weary, but he is a bit wary, aware as only he could be of what was yet to come. Celebrate, rejoice, shout hosanna . . . and be ready for the next thing. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, and keeps on going.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's cultivating endurance at this stage of his journey. Tell him how you keep going at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.


=+=+=+=


Faith Works 4-7-23
Jeff Gill

Innkeepers on the road, in the story
___


If you are an innkeeper, a tavern owner, a manager of an establishment for rest and refreshment, you have to worry.

Is there room for all those who come seeking shelter? And will they pay?

You could think having too many customers would be a good problem, but the thing about turning people away is that they might be back your way again in the future, and you want them to think of you and your establishment. This is where you want them to turn aside, to rest their animals, to feed their bellies, to lay down their heads. At your place.

At Christmas time we hear about a couple turned away "because there was no room at the inn." We can debate Koine Greek some other time on the details, but the point was somewhere they might have stayed, they couldn't, and where they did go, this wasn't how it normally would have gone. Mangers, maybe a stable, certainly animals nearby, and we'll trust Isaiah's anticipation that an ox and donkey were in the neighborhood.

This feels like a sweet symmetry to me that from Luke's nativity narrative to the stories of Christ's resurrection we go from inn to inn, from temporary resting place to a table along the road. From Bethlehem's birth to Emmaus and new birth, for Jesus and Clopas and someone else who could be anyone and whom Luke may well have intended to be us, sitting right there, unseeing until the breaking of the bread.

And in between, there's another inn, unambiguously so stated in Luke 10, perhaps just a place in a parable by Jesus, but there had to be a resting place halfway from Jericho up to Jerusalem, a caravansary along the way too far for a single day's journey by foot or even by camel. I've been there, thirty years ago, and I remember clearly the shock and delight of seeing an inn right where the story of the Good Samaritan would place it, and the sign on the door, indicating that Diner's Club was indeed accepted. Perhaps that's changed, but little else in two thousand years.

What happens at that inn? Someone who is hurting is helped; a traveler who may well have been a scamp or a rascal themselves is aided by a stranger, and not just a stranger, but an other, an alien, a Samaritan. Did the fellow fall among robbers by his own fault? We aren't told. Did he deserve help? We most certainly are not told that. The point of the story, and that inn, is that someone in pain was cared for, and that the glory of God was shown in that care, given without regard for persons.

Is there a connection, then, between these three inns? In Bethlehem, where Mary and Joseph are not welcome; on the Jericho Road, where a stranger is cared for as a neighbor; at Emmaus, where in a place of public refreshment, God's love is made known in a simple gesture of hospitality?

May your table be a place where those you love, and those whom God loves, will know Jesus, and his love which is alive and active this very day.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's met Jesus in the strangest places. Even in church! Tell him where you've seen Christ at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-24-23

Faith Works 3-24-23
Jeff Gill

Faith in the journey, faith of the journey
___


"But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?""

If you've been following the Gospel readings through Lent, you know there are people who said Jesus either didn't heal a man born blind, or if he did it was inappropriate. Then after that fellow is clearly seeing clearly who Jesus is, and what the cynics are up to, they pivot from him to accusing Jesus of not having healed a fellow in advance.

It's like Jesus can't win, you know?

If you don't know what happens next with Lazarus, check out John chapter 11. If you don't know what happened next to Jesus, just stay tuned: we will be hearing a great deal more about that.

Could not churches be doing more? I get asked that in a wide variety of settings. Helping the poor, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, caring (as indeed the Bible instructs us to do) for the widow and the orphan. Wherever there is a gap, a social failing, an economic need, it's a place where people of faith can and should be found. Yet the needs continue, and our civic shortcomings seem to expand.

Could not a faith that claims to open the eyes of the spiritually blind also keep people from perishing on our streets and in our communities?

Here's what I think first, as a pastor, about needs. The problem with crafting your ministry around needs alone is that they are, in a very practical sense, never ending. If you decide to pursue faithfulness by going where the needs are greatest, you may find yourself going in circles, round and round.

This is where discernment comes in. A spiritually grounded process of the community to understand where God is at work, and what it means to follow faithfully.

Sometimes God calls people to feed the hungry, but that doesn't mean every church has to open a food pantry. Sometimes God calls people to build houses, but that doesn't make every congregation a chapter of Habitat.

I know a place where the members have an assortment of skills in construction, but they focus the time and energy they have to build access ramps for people in wheelchairs. Is that God's will for them? I believe so, for that congregation; that's not the same as saying now every church group should be building ramps.

All of which is to suggest that, practical though it may not seem, prayer is the first and foremost ministry of any church. To seek the paths of spiritual awareness and rootedness and roundedness that help people of faith figure out where they should be extending and expanding their ministries. We all should be constantly looking for where we can serve as God wants us to, but needs alone won't give us that guidance.

Should Jesus have kept Lazarus from dying in the first place? Could he have? As a Christian believer, I have no doubt he could have. Should he? Well, he didn't. Death is part of our story, too. We each have a role to play in God's plan before we reach that turning; we all would like God to smooth the path along the way, but we know that isn't promised to any of us, either.

We are promised comfort and company along the rocky, narrow way, and a secure destination. Until then, the work we have to do is not how we earn our entry to that final door, it's a witness to those around us of our faith in the way we have chosen to walk.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been wrestling recently with God's call to do less, not more. Tell him how you hear God's guidance at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-23-23

Notes from my Knapsack 3-23-23
Jeff Gill

Spring break plans without complications
___


From Newark City Schools to the more rural districts in Licking County, the next few weeks mark "Spring Break" for students and households.

With college students, spring break has a meaning all its own; Denison and Ohio States have already taken their time off. I'm thinking more in terms of school age kids and their families.

The State Department is issuing warnings about "south of the border," so Cancun and other more tropical beaches seem to be risky; even heading down onto the Gulf of Mexico in the US feels a little off right now.

If you've got time and money to burn, maybe the South Pole or at least Antarctica are on your list; Florida tends to attract the biggest crowds, with Texas right behind around South Padre and Mobile, Alabama fairly popular.

Or, what about Licking County?

I know, spring break is supposed to mean travel. Get me to the Aegean, or maybe the Hawaiian Islands. Nice "work" if you can get it.

It was my senior year of college, and I had a few of them (long story), before I realized that maybe 20-25 percent of my classmates were making it to Florida and Fort Lauderdale for spring break, or so where Purdue students ideally went since "Where the Boys Are" came out in 1960. My impression was people like me were a freakish minority going home for spring break, but in fact we were an overwhelming majority.

Most of us then, and most students now, go home. Like, to here. Ditto school age kids. Some families may visit exotic ports of call, but most of us are right here. To do what?

Let me make a few suggestions for how to spend a spring break, most of which will work fine in this county, but might just be useful in tropic locales.

Take a walk. Not a stroll, but a longer venture, one where you get a small day pack, or even a knapsack, and put a couple of water bottles and energy bars in it. Walk a long, long way, then turn around and walk home. Five miles, ten, maybe more, but just do a long walk. We have rails-to-trails options, but if you walk facing traffic on roads with good shoulders, there are many options.

Find a good place on a mostly sunny day to lie down. Take a blanket or quilt or whatever to buffer your experience of the soil and grass, and lay yourself in a comfortable pose, where you can see the sky from horizon to horizon. Then, watch a cloud from its first appearance, likely in the west, across the sky overhead, and all the way to (usually) the eastern horizon. Repeat a time or two. You will never, I guarantee you, look at clouds the same way again.

Pick a spot. Take a foot or two of red yard, and make of it a nature trail. On a tree branch to a trunk, from the roots to a nearby anthill. Think through ten or twelve stations. Find someone also on spring break, talk them through the hike. Switch, and let them design the yarn's path and tell you the tour.

Enjoy your spring break, wherever it is!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's used to spring breaks close to home. Tell him about your travels at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-17-23

Faith Works 3-17-23
Jeff Gill

Where we are from, which is elsewhere
___


Halfway through Lent, with St. Patrick's Day and St. Joseph's Day marking the turn.

I've checked out some fish frys on Fridays, even as the Protestant in me prefers baked steak dinners.

A preacher in a Catholic church is no strange scene today, but there are still those alive who recall when it was much more unusual, unlikely, improbable.

Not so terribly long ago, Protestants casually walking into a parish hall and handing their money to a member of the Knights of Columbus: not a thing. Seriously.

My point being: times have changed. Hurrah! We include more people in the circle of "us." This is a good thing, and in general we all agree on this.

The question is who, now, is "them." This where we get into tricky territory. By tricky territory, I mean politics. And this is meant to be a column about religion and faith and churches, broadly defined. By broadly, I mean both Protestant and Catholic, even Orthodox or heterodox.

I've been writing this column weekly for not quite twenty years (since Jan. 2005, anyhow). When I was given this opportunity, a preceding regular faith columnist in these pages frequently made comments about Catholicism as if it was alien to Christianity. One request, not a requirement, that I heard when being considered for this page as a regular contributor, was asking if I could not refer to a major sector of local Christianity as heretical.

This was the beginning of my exploration of our local history back into a time when Catholics were targeted by the Klan, when southern Germans and northern Italians and Austrians in general were a "minority group." When even after fifty to seventy years in Licking County, such people were called aliens and immigrants, because of their church affiliation and not their citizenship. And their annihilation, literal or metaphorical, was called for in publications for sale on the streets of Newark.

As I said last week, we have come a long, long way, and that's a big part of what I want to say by retelling these stories of hate and hostility from a century ago. It is encouraging and hopeful that we have stopped saying awful things about long-time neighbors, and encouraging discrimination against groups whose identity is tied to their church attendance more than anything else about them.

How did we do that? What can it teach us today as we work on expanding that circle of "us"? And yes, we can even discuss questions about where the edge of the circle really needs to be clearly defined.

But that's where I feel the most uncomfortable today. When we talk about homelessness, the argument keeps getting made: they aren't from here. We're attracting the wrong sort of people here by the services and supports we offer. "Those" people come to be homeless from "other" places. And when those of us who work with people who are homeless say most of our conversations and interactions are with people with obvious and concrete connections to this county, those statements get dismissed in favor of "no, homeless people are other than us, different than we are, from somewhere else."

Again and again and again I find as I read and review the history of Licking County, from 1802 on into the present day: we are all from somewhere else. We all came here, bringing certain gifts, even some challenges, from other places. And the outside, external, other-ed interests in trapping or farming or sheep herding or glass making or whatever . . . become part of our present picture of who "we" are.

The Wehrles were once other. The Heiseys, ditto. The Moraths, the Dilles, even the Joneses . . . and my did we have a bunch of them! . . . were once not just neighbors to keep up with, but others, who came here.

And are now us.


Jeff Gill is writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he came here from Indiana, and I hope that's okay. Tell him about where you come from at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-10-23

Faith Works 3-10-23
Jeff Gill

Three years and a hundred and always
___

It was three years ago this Sunday that my father died, quite suddenly. He was 85, so you can't call it a complete surprise, but it was at the time. Coming after three hard funerals in a row at the church I served, of men I knew well and respected greatly, it was a season of hard losses, even if they were all in their eighties and nineties.

As many of you who have lost parents know, you never entirely lose that impulse of thinking "I need to tell Dad about that" or "I wonder what Mom would say." It's a frequent reaction for me even still.

In our last few conversations, we talked about history and genealogy as we often did. And I was thinking even in 2020 about 2023, and the Klan stories I was already researching and seeking to understand back then, set in Valparaiso, Indiana where he raised me, and in Licking County, Ohio, which has become my home.

But there were questions I never got around to asking, or perhaps more to the point there were follow ups that came to me later which now can't be asked in person. How did he and the committee he reported to decide on what went into the congregational history they wrote in the 1980s, and what was left out? What kind of discussion did they have about those days, which some of the other committee members would have remembered where he, born in 1934, would not?

Yet there are elements of the story that emerge even as some avenues are blocked. Just my initial retellings of some of the Klan story in the Midwest spurred my younger sister to tell me about encounters she'd had with a family down the street that we had never talked about to each other, being eight years apart. A man who had accosted me about his childhood Klan memories, wishing they were still around, had a daughter my sister worked with, and she had also talked about her dad's stories, and how they had Klan robes of her grandfather and great-grandfather still in a closet in the basement.

An older minister reached out to me once about the almost confusing focus of the Klan in those days, at least in the North, on anti-Catholic rhetoric. You look at the pictures, and even as you read the stories, for someone living after the third resurgence of the Klan during the Civil Rights era, you think about racial prejudice and hostility towards African Americans. That horrible contradiction of faith and racism translates into Klan imagery and language all too easily.

But my correspondent confirmed what a more careful reading of local articles says clearly - and my apologies for the language I'm about to quote from the public press of those days - where Klan speakers are always ranting in the 1920s about "Catholics and Jews." And the Jews they bemoan are always somewhere else, usually New York, but the vitriol about Catholics in general and priests and nuns in particular is immediate and local and specific. "That's who they wanted us to fear."

And Catholics today assure me there's still hints of that bias afoot today, but here's where the exploration of history has a hint of hope for me. Again, you have to read at length to catch just how angry and hostile the anti-Catholicism of the Klan was then. So how did we get past it?

A pessimist might say we just displaced it, turning anti-this into anti-that. It's one theory. I'd like to think, cautiously, that maybe we have learned something over the years. That's what I'm looking for, how we've learned to expand the circle, to increase our understanding of who we mean when we say "us."


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hopeful, even if it doesn't always sound like it. Tell him where you see improvement at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-9-23

Notes from my Knapsack 3-9-23
Jeff Gill

Disappearing in plain sight
___


We have an annual confusion over starting points and signs of the seasons. March 12 is time change, which is neither astronomical nor meteorological, but the impact on us in terms of daylight and evening time is immense.

Weather folk mark Spring from March 1, and most of us whether meteorologists or not think of "Spring" as March, April, May, then "Summer" as June, July, and August. It may be hot as Hades in September, but that's "Fall" to almost anyone, as are October and November.

Yet astronomical Spring begins with the vernal equinox, March 20 this year, regardless of the temperatures or foliage. June 21 is the summer solstice, ushering in astronomical Summer, but folk calendars tend to call it "Midsummer" as in old Bill's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with the longest day pushing back the shortest night.

May 24 is the last day of school in Granville, and for kids, that's the first day of summer; August 23 is the first day of the next school year, and there's an implicit sense of autumn in going back.

What's really interesting is the phenology calendar. Phenology, our friends at Ohio State tell us, is "the study of recurring biological phenomena and their relationship to weather. Bird migration, hunting and gathering seasons, blooming of wildflowers and trees, and the seasonal appearance of insects are examples of phenological events that have been recorded for centuries." Even if you're not a big outdoors person, you notice when the stuff starts happening: in your yard, on the horizon you watch out the bedroom window in the morning, along the roads you travel daily.

You can go deep in this matter at the OSU Phenology Center website, https://phenology.osu.edu/ or you can just look around. The silver maples are already starting to expand in outline, buds filling out their formerly skeletal profiles against the clouds, softening and detailing their limbs and branches.

Soon, the trees will disappear. No, seriously. You see the trunks and bark and each species' unique way of reaching up into the sky; oaks round out their branching extents where maples fan out. Once you start to notice those patterns, you can see which type of tree you're looking at from quite a distance. And for over half the year, that's who trees are to us.

But once the leaves open up and the canopy settles down as a shroud across the forest, you can't see the trees for the forest. You see leaves and greens, but you have to get much closer to see the tree itself for what it is. It's all just "the woods" and we lump the trees together, and likewise take them for granted.

In this margin between buds and foliage, take a few moments to appreciate trees for what they are, unique and valuable each in their own way. The birds do for sure, as do many other creatures, finding a different sort of refuge or foodstuff in every one.

It might help us see people around us differently as well.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's fascinated by trees and forests each in their own way. Tell him about what you see blossoming at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-3-23

Faith Works 3-3-23
Jeff Gill

To preach the word, in season and out
___

In 1923, as February ended and March begins, the minister of Valparaiso's First Christian Church in northwest Indiana is under fire from a major national organization that has suddenly exploded in numbers around the Midwest; our best information is from the March 9 edition of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana's weekly publication, with a March 5 dateline.

Rev. C.E. Burns opposed allowing the Klan to hold a program on Wednesday in the church's auditorium. On Feb. 27, the board met, and supported the minister over the Klan, but by a vote of 12 to 9. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. On March 4 he preached a message of opposition to the Klan's methods and agenda, while asking for cooperation on the areas where they did not disagree.

Again, we only have the Klan's side of the story here. But their indignation at being opposed, and their barely veiled thuggishness at the future of Rev. Burns's ministry, is clear. They aren't used to opposition of any sort.

For wider context, the Klan will hold a rally hosting tens of thousands in May and another with hundreds of thousands in attendance a few weeks later in nearby Kokomo. Klan candidates will sweep statewide elections in November.

Those impending events give us some sense of the pressures building, and what it meant to take any kind of public stand against a relatively new organization locally, but one not only growing, but making moves to purchase major institutions like Valparaiso University. Publicity about a collection to complete that sale would be a major feature of the May & July Klan rallies in Indiana; while all reports indicate much money was donated, somehow the closing payment never arrived, and VU would not be sold to the Klan but to the Lutheran University Association in 1925.

On my list of today's impacts of the Klan's particular mark from 100 years ago: both Lutherans & Catholics felt even more pressure from the Midwest Klan than did the racial groups we think of as the Klan's primary focus of hostility. That's because the earlier post-Civil War Klan, and the post-World War II Klan, made hostility to civil rights for African Americans their primary reason for being. But this "second era" Klan, while in the South still a racist terror group in most of its activities, was in the North and West more concerned with European immigrants in general, and Catholicism in particular. Lutheranism was swept up in that enmity, both out of their resistance to Prohibition which was a major talking point for northern Klan recruiters, and because it was seen as "less American" especially because of the common usage of German in their worship services.

So the existence of Valparaiso University as a Lutheran affiliated school derives largely from a desire to create a safe haven for Lutheran students to pursue higher education. Just down the road, the Klan attempted to march across the Notre Dame campus in South Bend. After the Klan was run off, they became known as: The Fighting Irish.

For churches caught in the middle, the battle lines often ran right through the congregation. And that's what I wonder about as I read the scraps we have available today about how it was, to preach and lead in 1923. Rev. Burns, who prevailed in keeping the Klan from holding their meeting at the church whose pulpit he served, was run out of town after three different occasions when crosses were burned on the parsonage lawn. And his "denouncing" of the Klan seems painfully mixed with pleading that the Klan allow him to do his work. I can only image how difficult that sermon was to write, and deliver.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's read enough old newspapers to know there is nothing new under the sun (actually that's in the Bible). Tell him what's new again at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.



Page 2:
http://bl-libg-doghill.ads.iu.edu/gpd-web/fierycross/192339.pdf

Picture #1, Buckeye Lake Ohio Klan Konklave, July 12, 1923:
https://ohiopix.org/contentdm-search-results/?cdm-keywords=Ku%20Klux%20Klan%20(1915-%20)--Ohio--History--20th%20century&cdm-mode=all&cdm-field=subjec

Faith Works 2-24-23

Faith Works 2-24-23
Jeff Gill

Foundations and new buildings and restoration
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One hundred years ago is a long time. Five generations almost, at least more than a human lifetime.

A century ago is a different era, a completely different time and place. Yet we enjoy the little connections and associations; there are Facebook groups which treasure the buildings we still have from back then and earlier, and mourn the ones long gone.

From a historian's point of view, a century is not as long as you think. It's certainly tied to a period with documentation, print and written records, even photographs.

An anthropologist would say much the same about a hundred year span; yes, change, but not as much as you might think, and some of it on the surface, not the real differences of social transformation that take centuries and more. And an archaeologist would call a century a margin of error, plus or minus at best.

Church history, especially for a Christian scholar, is focused on a framework of about two thousand years; Protestants get excited about five hundred years ago while the Eastern Orthodox lean more towards millennia. And you get back in written records to Sumeria and Ur of the Chaldees and some six thousand years ago, meandering forward with Abraham and Sarah, Ruth then David, on to Mary and Joseph and that boy of theirs.

So is one hundred years too long to matter, or too short a time to tell? I have learned this, writing a string of essays about events in early 1923 around Newark, Ohio and Valparaiso, Indiana: it is both, and neither.

The emails and messages and posts saying the work of remembering and recovering this period in Midwestern and American history is important have been encouraging, and I appreciate them all. Between some personal travel issues and the sudden increase in volume, I may have missed a few but not intentionally.

That includes the folk who ask "why?" Why bother, why bring this up now, why do we, here today, need to care? Is this some woke exercise in guilt, some scheme to burden the present with the dry bones of the past, am I trying to deal with my own issues — all questions I've been asked? And some who worry that by raising the tensions and faults of then, one hundred years back, I can inadvertently cause stresses and anxieties today, linking past sins to present problems. Well, it hasn't been inadvertent. It's been quite intentional.

Along with a number of individuals telling me stories about personal property inherited from family, and landowners asking about stories they've heard in the last few decades about what went on where they now live in past times, I've heard from a few who think I should just drop it. This is not subject matter that really relates to today. The Klan is dead, and in many ways, they're right. The hoods (or helmets, as they called them), the robes, the horseback parades, the dues and newsletters of the "Fiery Cross" are all part of history themselves.

But just as a building can be 150 years old, and have been a grocery, a dry goods store, an office, and now a remodeled loft apartment, there are foundation stones with a history that still subtly shape today's landscape, in language and institutions and historical outlines as well.

How do we come to terms with the past in the present, or is it something we never can accomplish? Can we learn a lesson now we chose not to learn generations before? I think we can. Lent is a pretty good time to do just that.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates all the family stories shared with him at knapsack77@gmail.com about the Klan era.