Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-24
Jeff Gill
Chronophobia isn't a new diagnosis
___
My impression is chronophobia is not precisely a clinically accepted diagnosis, but it's been around a while.
It would be, from the root words, fear of time's passage. Not too far removed from Lucy's diagnosis of pantophobia, which she suggested to Charlie Brown, to her own discomfiture. (You can look up the clip.)
Pantophobia, the fear of everything; chronophobia, the fear of the most inevitable issue any of us have. Time will pass, things will change.
As they always have. I hear people worry about our village's unique qualities, growth coming to the school district, changes on highways and byways, and my head goes back into history.
Introducing stoves for warmth into our church buildings was a BIG deal in our second decade as a village. Heat the church, and soften the moral fiber. Our parents had cold churches, and . . . ah, we put them in anyhow.
There were worries in the 1820s and 1830s as the Granville Academy, the Granville Literary and Theological Institution, and the Granville Female Seminary were all founded in short order. Will our rural retreat be overrun with students? Yet we adapted, and endured, and survived. The GLTI became Denison University in the mid-1850s.
Around this same period the Cumberland Pike was being extended across the continent just to the south, later to become The National Road (US 40 today), and then the Ohio & Erie Canal to our east, with Lucius Mower spearheading the Granville Feeder over to the foot of the village, and all the economic disruption faster transport might offer. What remains of that project is the former aqueduct, now roadway bridge over Raccoon Creek which will soon be pre-empted and re-routed from onto the Thornwood Crossing.
Railroads began to undercut canals and turnpikes almost as soon as they were completed, and Granville sought a rail connection avidly for many years; we didn't get a station in town closer than Union Station until 1880 (now a place to get fresh and tasty muffins). Rail traffic didn't do much for Granville, to the chagrin of some; the real impact on the community was when the interurban electric railway came down Broadway in 1890, a pioneering effort connecting us to Newark where you could catch trains to anywhere, and buy almost anything. We only just got a regular bus route back between the two this year, after decades of absence.
Oft-told but not too frequently said is the poetic tragedy of Charles Webster Bryant, our village pharmacist who campaigned for an historical society successfully in 1885, and for a clean public water supply — making it all too ironic that he died of typhoid in 1886. Change did not quite come fast enough in that case.
Residential electricity and telephones, radio broadcasts, television, liquor sales in the village . . . each innovation had its advocates, and also a chorus to proclaim the coming doom each would bring. The internet, smartphones, teleconferencing . . . these are the new horse-people of the apocalypse.
Or will we adapt, and adjust, and find a way to be Granville while incorporating changes, even big ones, into the fabric of our everyday lives? History says we're likely to do just fine.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not sure if adding thermostats to churches was a good idea, but that's a different story. Tell him your fear of what's to come at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, April 22, 2024
Faith Works 4-26-14
Faith Works 4-26-14
Jeff Gill
Polity is a funny word for important work
___
It would be easier to say I teach church history.
Not accurate, but easier.
I did have the honor of teaching American history for five years at Fairmont State University; since then, I've been an adjunct lecturer or instructor for Bethany College, Ashland Theological Seminary, Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and now Phillips Theological Seminary online.
All of the latter four, I've taught Disciples of Christ history and polity.
Now, sometimes people know about the Disciples of Christ, but occasionally I have to explain this particular Christian tradition, with roots nearby in western Pennsylvania and northern Kentucky. That's the easy part.
What's always more complicated is that odd little word after history. Most people have some idea of what "church history" means. But history and . . . polity?
Polity is basically a term for governance. Our polity in secular terms for the United States is as a democratic republic; Great Britain's polity is a constitutional monarchy. And so on.
Church polity has to do with visible elements like bishops or synods; it also relates to less obvious aspects of church life like the rules around ordination, who can become a minister and under what guidelines. Polity and theology intersect with issues such as who can preside over communion, or even who can preach during a service. As a regular supply preacher in multiple traditions, there are denominations where I can preach on invitation any time, but can't preside over communion that Sunday; I have been asked by local lay leaders to preach for congregations where I've been in the odd position of having to explain to them I'd love to preach for them, but I am not allowed by their church polity.
Even that term "laity" or lay person, versus clergy: that's an indication of polity at work, which is different for various church groups. In some Christian bodies, laity can preside at communion any time, in others only under certain circumstances, and for others the distinction doesn't even exist.
Polity may be like Robert's Rules of Order to many of you: something that may have a purpose, but not much understood. Anyhow, that's why I tend to grit my teeth and explain, because it's worth explaining what it means to say I teach "history and polity" for my tradition.
Whether that word is used or not, it's in the air right now. The United Methodist Church (UMC) is in their General Conference at the end of April into May, where hugely significant issues of their polity are slated to go under review. A number of Licking County Methodist local churches have left for the Global Methodist Church, in large part to work and serve under a polity they believe serves their purposes better; their local annual conference will come later in May.
In early June, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meets just down the road in Indianapolis; they meet annually, while the UMC historically meets only every fourth year, but they're still sorting out rescheduling from COVID. When the SBC gathers, they are scheduled to make a theological vote with major polity consequences, as to whether or not women can serve as pastor of a local church, or even as a staff pastor where a male is senior pastor. Last June on the floor of their convention, polity actions removed a number of churches from full fellowship, including Saddleback in California, founded by Rick Warren but now led by a clergy couple.
In fact, most polity is theology working out in a practical fashion. Technically, I don't teach theology; practically speaking, history and polity always turn on a theological hinge. All three are worth understanding!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hoping the word polity didn't drive off too many readers. Tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Polity is a funny word for important work
___
It would be easier to say I teach church history.
Not accurate, but easier.
I did have the honor of teaching American history for five years at Fairmont State University; since then, I've been an adjunct lecturer or instructor for Bethany College, Ashland Theological Seminary, Methodist Theological School in Ohio, and now Phillips Theological Seminary online.
All of the latter four, I've taught Disciples of Christ history and polity.
Now, sometimes people know about the Disciples of Christ, but occasionally I have to explain this particular Christian tradition, with roots nearby in western Pennsylvania and northern Kentucky. That's the easy part.
What's always more complicated is that odd little word after history. Most people have some idea of what "church history" means. But history and . . . polity?
Polity is basically a term for governance. Our polity in secular terms for the United States is as a democratic republic; Great Britain's polity is a constitutional monarchy. And so on.
Church polity has to do with visible elements like bishops or synods; it also relates to less obvious aspects of church life like the rules around ordination, who can become a minister and under what guidelines. Polity and theology intersect with issues such as who can preside over communion, or even who can preach during a service. As a regular supply preacher in multiple traditions, there are denominations where I can preach on invitation any time, but can't preside over communion that Sunday; I have been asked by local lay leaders to preach for congregations where I've been in the odd position of having to explain to them I'd love to preach for them, but I am not allowed by their church polity.
Even that term "laity" or lay person, versus clergy: that's an indication of polity at work, which is different for various church groups. In some Christian bodies, laity can preside at communion any time, in others only under certain circumstances, and for others the distinction doesn't even exist.
Polity may be like Robert's Rules of Order to many of you: something that may have a purpose, but not much understood. Anyhow, that's why I tend to grit my teeth and explain, because it's worth explaining what it means to say I teach "history and polity" for my tradition.
Whether that word is used or not, it's in the air right now. The United Methodist Church (UMC) is in their General Conference at the end of April into May, where hugely significant issues of their polity are slated to go under review. A number of Licking County Methodist local churches have left for the Global Methodist Church, in large part to work and serve under a polity they believe serves their purposes better; their local annual conference will come later in May.
In early June, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meets just down the road in Indianapolis; they meet annually, while the UMC historically meets only every fourth year, but they're still sorting out rescheduling from COVID. When the SBC gathers, they are scheduled to make a theological vote with major polity consequences, as to whether or not women can serve as pastor of a local church, or even as a staff pastor where a male is senior pastor. Last June on the floor of their convention, polity actions removed a number of churches from full fellowship, including Saddleback in California, founded by Rick Warren but now led by a clergy couple.
In fact, most polity is theology working out in a practical fashion. Technically, I don't teach theology; practically speaking, history and polity always turn on a theological hinge. All three are worth understanding!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hoping the word polity didn't drive off too many readers. Tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, April 15, 2024
Faith Works 4-19-24
Faith Works 4-19-24
Jeff Gill
Considering the birds of the air
___
If you have an eye for birds at all, you're noticing something this time of year.
They're flying about often with something in their mouths.
To be fair to birds, they don't have hands. They have two feet to perch with, two wings to fly with, and a beak that has to do double duty for lifting and carrying. They're doing the best that they can.
From their creation in the first chapter of the Bible, birds are all through scripture. They can remind us of certain passages and images, and if you're a Bible reader it's interesting how often nature turns our attention to passages we can gloss over. Eagles soaring in flight, ravens feeding their young, even swallows making a home near your doorway can make you think of their comfort in the 84th psalm in the architecture of the Jerusalem Temple.
During nesting season, there's a commonality between the simple, humble activities of momma and papa birds and our family lives which can make us think of our relative place in the larger context, or as Jesus says in Matthew's tenth chapter, not a sparrow falls without God's awareness and even a fatherly care, affirming our value at least as worthy of God's love as those small creatures, if not even more so.
So I watch nesting birds with wonder, and sympathy, and fellow feeling. They build their homes, not with two-by-fours and ten penny nails, but with twigs and stems and bits of vine, fluff and litter padding and filling out the developing shape.
Naturalists tell us that setting out dryer lint isn't as helpful as we'd like to think, something I used to do. There are synthetic threads and strands of fabric which tangle differently around chicks than the normal natural materials an adult bird would gather, cutting off circulation and handicapping or even killing the young. Where I can help is to not tidy up my lawns too aggressively, leaving a bit of unkempt brush and patches of leaf debris where they can gather up the materials for nest building.
That makes me think of a parallel in Leviticus, chapter 23, where farmers in that culture are taught not to harvest all the way into the corners of the fields, so that the poorest can glean sustenance from the unharvested edges. Gleaners need a place where they can find what they need, which is more important than my getting maximum value for myself of every bit of my property. Likewise the birds of the field (and the bees, a separate but related realm of nature) need me to leave them room for us to coexist in this world. There's a wider lesson there for today's culture, I think, but it can start with the birds.
I see robins with mouthfuls of sticks and straw flying by; last week I saw a bald eagle on its larger, brushier, higher nest. Great blue herons are back in our area from the south, and are re-occupying their rookeries, clusters of stick nests high in trees: they may not look like it, but they're much more sociable than eagles are, whose similar nests tend to exist in regal isolation. To each their own for sociability, but herons look out for each other, a practice eagles might benefit from.
Yet we each have our nature, as do the birds. We nest our own ways, and there are limits to how we can expect an eagle or a heron nature to bend to even the most practical needs of how their nest, their home, is maintained. I find myself often asking "why do people live that way?" Interestingly, I rarely ask myself that about birds. I take their peculiarities in stride even when they don't make sense to me.
Consider the birds of the air: They do not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns. And yet.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's watching the birds, even if he's not much of a birdwatcher. Tell him what they teach you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Considering the birds of the air
___
If you have an eye for birds at all, you're noticing something this time of year.
They're flying about often with something in their mouths.
To be fair to birds, they don't have hands. They have two feet to perch with, two wings to fly with, and a beak that has to do double duty for lifting and carrying. They're doing the best that they can.
From their creation in the first chapter of the Bible, birds are all through scripture. They can remind us of certain passages and images, and if you're a Bible reader it's interesting how often nature turns our attention to passages we can gloss over. Eagles soaring in flight, ravens feeding their young, even swallows making a home near your doorway can make you think of their comfort in the 84th psalm in the architecture of the Jerusalem Temple.
During nesting season, there's a commonality between the simple, humble activities of momma and papa birds and our family lives which can make us think of our relative place in the larger context, or as Jesus says in Matthew's tenth chapter, not a sparrow falls without God's awareness and even a fatherly care, affirming our value at least as worthy of God's love as those small creatures, if not even more so.
So I watch nesting birds with wonder, and sympathy, and fellow feeling. They build their homes, not with two-by-fours and ten penny nails, but with twigs and stems and bits of vine, fluff and litter padding and filling out the developing shape.
Naturalists tell us that setting out dryer lint isn't as helpful as we'd like to think, something I used to do. There are synthetic threads and strands of fabric which tangle differently around chicks than the normal natural materials an adult bird would gather, cutting off circulation and handicapping or even killing the young. Where I can help is to not tidy up my lawns too aggressively, leaving a bit of unkempt brush and patches of leaf debris where they can gather up the materials for nest building.
That makes me think of a parallel in Leviticus, chapter 23, where farmers in that culture are taught not to harvest all the way into the corners of the fields, so that the poorest can glean sustenance from the unharvested edges. Gleaners need a place where they can find what they need, which is more important than my getting maximum value for myself of every bit of my property. Likewise the birds of the field (and the bees, a separate but related realm of nature) need me to leave them room for us to coexist in this world. There's a wider lesson there for today's culture, I think, but it can start with the birds.
I see robins with mouthfuls of sticks and straw flying by; last week I saw a bald eagle on its larger, brushier, higher nest. Great blue herons are back in our area from the south, and are re-occupying their rookeries, clusters of stick nests high in trees: they may not look like it, but they're much more sociable than eagles are, whose similar nests tend to exist in regal isolation. To each their own for sociability, but herons look out for each other, a practice eagles might benefit from.
Yet we each have our nature, as do the birds. We nest our own ways, and there are limits to how we can expect an eagle or a heron nature to bend to even the most practical needs of how their nest, their home, is maintained. I find myself often asking "why do people live that way?" Interestingly, I rarely ask myself that about birds. I take their peculiarities in stride even when they don't make sense to me.
Consider the birds of the air: They do not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns. And yet.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's watching the birds, even if he's not much of a birdwatcher. Tell him what they teach you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, April 08, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-24
Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-24
Jeff Gill
Looking back at a shared experience
___
Mark Twain famously said "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."
I'd say the same about the distinction between a 99% eclipse, and totality. Licking County missed out on totality, just barely. Some estimates were literally less than one percent.
By now you've likely heard from others if you didn't go in search of it yourself: 99% coverage is not the same experience as a total eclipse. And it is not. When the disc of the Moon covers the Sun, there's a truly cosmic sense of scale that both rushes upon the viewer on the ground, and draws you up into the near infinite contrast between Earth and the intervening heavenly bodies. Add in the coruscating lights around the circumference, solar prominences momentarily visible in bright glowing reds and shimmering greens, and you are in the presence of something simply not of this Earth.
There's a comparison of sorts when you happen to see a moonrise on a clear evening, full and seemingly vast against the distant horizon, usually an unusual orange or even blood red when the thickest part of the atmosphere filters the usual silvery moonshine. The rising Moon can capture your attention in ways a full one directly overhead does not. A solar eclipse totality is similar, and yet…
My wife and I were in central Indiana for the event, at a house slowly being emptied after a death last December, part of a neighborhood we've come to know but are still strangers in. We sat on camp chairs on the back patio as totality came into view, no longer needing eclipse glasses, the traffic on a busy road behind having stopped almost entirely some minutes before. There was no one at all within sight where we sat.
Yet as the totality wrinkled its way from the last sliver of Sun to the "beads" of sunlight through lunar mountains and valleys, with darkness suddenly gripping the sky, chilling the air, and opening up stars and planets to view overhead, there was from all around us, unseen, a cheer.
We heard shouts and laughter and applause, dozens of voices from points across the road and to either side. The experience overhead we were sharing with many people invisible to us, but within earshot, a less than cosmic distance around our location.
In an earlier era, we might have gathered at the well or spring, buckets in hand, marveling at what we'd seen; maybe we'd come to the market square, the church towering across us from one side, and share our impressions and understandings. Instead, we had inside the sliding door of the patio a television on to keep us appraised of events at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and later about traffic reports crowding the interstates leaving the area.
In other words, our moment of common experience was brief, and dissipated into the more usual linkages of media analysis. We get told, no matter how politely, what we just saw or felt or understood. Maybe that's more efficient, I don't know.
What I heard in those cheers over fences and across right-of-ways, though, was a moment of communion, of connection. It felt good, it felt right. Something we needed, and need more of. Even if it's just more sunsets shared in common.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in shared experiences. Tell him what you've shared with a large number of fellow humans at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Looking back at a shared experience
___
Mark Twain famously said "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."
I'd say the same about the distinction between a 99% eclipse, and totality. Licking County missed out on totality, just barely. Some estimates were literally less than one percent.
By now you've likely heard from others if you didn't go in search of it yourself: 99% coverage is not the same experience as a total eclipse. And it is not. When the disc of the Moon covers the Sun, there's a truly cosmic sense of scale that both rushes upon the viewer on the ground, and draws you up into the near infinite contrast between Earth and the intervening heavenly bodies. Add in the coruscating lights around the circumference, solar prominences momentarily visible in bright glowing reds and shimmering greens, and you are in the presence of something simply not of this Earth.
There's a comparison of sorts when you happen to see a moonrise on a clear evening, full and seemingly vast against the distant horizon, usually an unusual orange or even blood red when the thickest part of the atmosphere filters the usual silvery moonshine. The rising Moon can capture your attention in ways a full one directly overhead does not. A solar eclipse totality is similar, and yet…
My wife and I were in central Indiana for the event, at a house slowly being emptied after a death last December, part of a neighborhood we've come to know but are still strangers in. We sat on camp chairs on the back patio as totality came into view, no longer needing eclipse glasses, the traffic on a busy road behind having stopped almost entirely some minutes before. There was no one at all within sight where we sat.
Yet as the totality wrinkled its way from the last sliver of Sun to the "beads" of sunlight through lunar mountains and valleys, with darkness suddenly gripping the sky, chilling the air, and opening up stars and planets to view overhead, there was from all around us, unseen, a cheer.
We heard shouts and laughter and applause, dozens of voices from points across the road and to either side. The experience overhead we were sharing with many people invisible to us, but within earshot, a less than cosmic distance around our location.
In an earlier era, we might have gathered at the well or spring, buckets in hand, marveling at what we'd seen; maybe we'd come to the market square, the church towering across us from one side, and share our impressions and understandings. Instead, we had inside the sliding door of the patio a television on to keep us appraised of events at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and later about traffic reports crowding the interstates leaving the area.
In other words, our moment of common experience was brief, and dissipated into the more usual linkages of media analysis. We get told, no matter how politely, what we just saw or felt or understood. Maybe that's more efficient, I don't know.
What I heard in those cheers over fences and across right-of-ways, though, was a moment of communion, of connection. It felt good, it felt right. Something we needed, and need more of. Even if it's just more sunsets shared in common.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in shared experiences. Tell him what you've shared with a large number of fellow humans at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, April 07, 2024
Faith Works 4-12-24
Faith Works 4-12-24
Jeff Gill
Advice can be answering questions, can't it?
___
Not that my goal was to turn this into an advice column, but the reaction from last week's question and answer installment got me a different set of responses than perhaps I'd hoped.
What I heard were mostly questions I get fairly often. If you speak up about faith related matters on social media, you will hear pretty quickly from a cohort of fairly anti-religious voices, some of whom I'm getting used to bantering with.
You can overestimate the numbers versus the volume, or as Pew Research found almost five years ago, there were fewer than 50 million US adults on X (or Twitter), but only 6% of them put up 73% of the political content. Which meant fewer than 1% of us were frequent fliers on platforms like that, and I don't think that's increased.
However, there are questions I bat around often on social media, as a voice for faith perspectives, which I think are worth putting up here, for what I think is a somewhat broader audience. Such as:
Question: Why don't more churches open up in cold weather for helping the homeless?
Response: It's a fair question, but there's a non-trivial issue here called insurance, and yes, religious people in general believe in insurance alongside of faith. And churches are finding it harder in general to get and keep property insurance. I could do a whole column on this and may someday, but it is a real concern for some faith communities who'd like to host but are told they can't by their policy carrier.
Q: Well, why have buildings at all? Shouldn't you Christians sell all you have and give it to the poor?
R: That's a point resting on a scriptural passage also worth a column on its own, and one many sermons have been preached on. I'll dodge it somewhat to go to a practical point. If you've been part of a new church start, which I have, and gone through years of setting up and tearing down on Sunday mornings in rented space, you know why congregations buy and own property. Renting a place to bring a hundred or hundreds together every week gets expensive, as well as a pain (literally, in the back and legs), which makes ownership simply good stewardship.
Q: Okay, but you church folk should pay taxes on your property like we all do. Why don't you?
R: In brief, the reason governments tend to not collect taxes from non-profits is that they're made up of people who choose to associate for purposes that are intended for the common good. So whether it's a church or private school or public museum, if you tax them, you're basically asking their supporters who are already paying taxes personally to then pay a second time to cover the tax burden on said non-profit. Your non-profit supporting citizens tend to be the most publicly engaged folk, as well, so it's been seen historically as a counterproductive course of action. We can change it, but if you tax all non-profits, beware of unintended consequences.
Q: Why are there so many hypocrites in churches?
R: I support having hypocrites in churches, because if you barred them from membership I'd have to leave. Seriously, I think (speaking as a Christian) we could do a better job of loving one another. Fair enough. I also think on average churches do better than the norm in society, but we should not be content with that. Tertullian said in the 2nd century he heard Romans exclaim about Christians, "See how they love one another!"
That should be our goal in the 21st century as well.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still wondering if there are some advice column questions to be answered. Send 'em to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Advice can be answering questions, can't it?
___
Not that my goal was to turn this into an advice column, but the reaction from last week's question and answer installment got me a different set of responses than perhaps I'd hoped.
What I heard were mostly questions I get fairly often. If you speak up about faith related matters on social media, you will hear pretty quickly from a cohort of fairly anti-religious voices, some of whom I'm getting used to bantering with.
You can overestimate the numbers versus the volume, or as Pew Research found almost five years ago, there were fewer than 50 million US adults on X (or Twitter), but only 6% of them put up 73% of the political content. Which meant fewer than 1% of us were frequent fliers on platforms like that, and I don't think that's increased.
However, there are questions I bat around often on social media, as a voice for faith perspectives, which I think are worth putting up here, for what I think is a somewhat broader audience. Such as:
Question: Why don't more churches open up in cold weather for helping the homeless?
Response: It's a fair question, but there's a non-trivial issue here called insurance, and yes, religious people in general believe in insurance alongside of faith. And churches are finding it harder in general to get and keep property insurance. I could do a whole column on this and may someday, but it is a real concern for some faith communities who'd like to host but are told they can't by their policy carrier.
Q: Well, why have buildings at all? Shouldn't you Christians sell all you have and give it to the poor?
R: That's a point resting on a scriptural passage also worth a column on its own, and one many sermons have been preached on. I'll dodge it somewhat to go to a practical point. If you've been part of a new church start, which I have, and gone through years of setting up and tearing down on Sunday mornings in rented space, you know why congregations buy and own property. Renting a place to bring a hundred or hundreds together every week gets expensive, as well as a pain (literally, in the back and legs), which makes ownership simply good stewardship.
Q: Okay, but you church folk should pay taxes on your property like we all do. Why don't you?
R: In brief, the reason governments tend to not collect taxes from non-profits is that they're made up of people who choose to associate for purposes that are intended for the common good. So whether it's a church or private school or public museum, if you tax them, you're basically asking their supporters who are already paying taxes personally to then pay a second time to cover the tax burden on said non-profit. Your non-profit supporting citizens tend to be the most publicly engaged folk, as well, so it's been seen historically as a counterproductive course of action. We can change it, but if you tax all non-profits, beware of unintended consequences.
Q: Why are there so many hypocrites in churches?
R: I support having hypocrites in churches, because if you barred them from membership I'd have to leave. Seriously, I think (speaking as a Christian) we could do a better job of loving one another. Fair enough. I also think on average churches do better than the norm in society, but we should not be content with that. Tertullian said in the 2nd century he heard Romans exclaim about Christians, "See how they love one another!"
That should be our goal in the 21st century as well.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still wondering if there are some advice column questions to be answered. Send 'em to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Friday, March 29, 2024
Faith Works 4-5-24
Faith Works 4-5-24
Jeff Gill
After Easter, a few words of advice
___
With all the activity and complications of Holy Week and Easter, many preachers and parsons are needing a good long nap.
Or a series of naps.
This is not a great week to reach out to a minister or church musician with your latest great idea. In order to help give them a bit of a break, I'm opening up "Faith Works" as an advice column this week.
Are these actual questions sent in to me, or am I crafting queries to suit the answers I want to give? Yeah, I've always wondered about that, too. Moving on…
Dear Faith Works: I think my preacher is using the wrong translation of the Bible. In fact, I think most people in my church are using the wrong version. Can you help me tell them to use the right one?
My reply: Absolutely! Happy to do it. First, you should study Hebrew and Greek. Make sure not to get tangled up with modern versions of either; Biblical Hebrew is not what they're using in the cafes of Tel Aviv today, and Koine Greek isn't what the front desk is speaking in Athens or Santorini. But you can get some good modules or videos online to help you get started. Once you've gotten a basic working knowledge of those languages for the Old Testament and New, you're ready to look at editions in the original languages. For the New Testament, I have come to like "The Reader's Greek New Testament" from Zondervan; they also have "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" which I find helpful.
Faith Works column guy: Why does the praise band at my church always play the same few sets of contemporary Christian music? I hear stuff online that's newer and more interesting to me.
My reply: If you give more to your congregation's general budget, and they improve musician compensation, they will find it much easier to spend more time learning and practicing new music than working an extra shift at the cash register to cover their rent and groceries. I'm a firm believer that music teaches, and therefore that 1 Timothy 5:17-18 covers music ministry leaders as well.
Yo, religion dude in the paper: Why don't you talk more about politics? I've asked my pastor this, too, and they don't really answer my question . . . okay, they won't talk about politics is what I mean. Anyhow, what's your story?
My reply: Friend, politics is a funny thing. And like most humor, you don't want too much of it in your sermon. That's what stand up is for. Do I want the hungry fed, the naked clothed, the homeless given a place to live in peace? Yep, that's what the Boss (no, not Springsteen) tell me. I start with children, since as a friend recently said to me: "every morning I have to feed the hungry and clothe the naked." As a mother, it's a hard calling to miss. Beyond our own kids and relatives and church family? That's where it gets tricky. Start with making sure all your church family is well housed and securely fed, then work out into your neighborhood. I suspect you'll all be talking politics soon enough just doing that.
Faith Works writer: love your enemies? I can barely love my neighbor. How does this Christianity thing work, anyhow?
My reply: Do you know your neighbor? For all you know, they might be an enemy, so it's good to start there. Say hello. Talk about the pollen this spring. Work on it from there. As for loving enemies, I'm still working on it myself, which is where I appreciate the whole grace thing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows all the authors of these questions. In fact: ask him more questions if you want at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
After Easter, a few words of advice
___
With all the activity and complications of Holy Week and Easter, many preachers and parsons are needing a good long nap.
Or a series of naps.
This is not a great week to reach out to a minister or church musician with your latest great idea. In order to help give them a bit of a break, I'm opening up "Faith Works" as an advice column this week.
Are these actual questions sent in to me, or am I crafting queries to suit the answers I want to give? Yeah, I've always wondered about that, too. Moving on…
Dear Faith Works: I think my preacher is using the wrong translation of the Bible. In fact, I think most people in my church are using the wrong version. Can you help me tell them to use the right one?
My reply: Absolutely! Happy to do it. First, you should study Hebrew and Greek. Make sure not to get tangled up with modern versions of either; Biblical Hebrew is not what they're using in the cafes of Tel Aviv today, and Koine Greek isn't what the front desk is speaking in Athens or Santorini. But you can get some good modules or videos online to help you get started. Once you've gotten a basic working knowledge of those languages for the Old Testament and New, you're ready to look at editions in the original languages. For the New Testament, I have come to like "The Reader's Greek New Testament" from Zondervan; they also have "A Reader's Hebrew Bible" which I find helpful.
Faith Works column guy: Why does the praise band at my church always play the same few sets of contemporary Christian music? I hear stuff online that's newer and more interesting to me.
My reply: If you give more to your congregation's general budget, and they improve musician compensation, they will find it much easier to spend more time learning and practicing new music than working an extra shift at the cash register to cover their rent and groceries. I'm a firm believer that music teaches, and therefore that 1 Timothy 5:17-18 covers music ministry leaders as well.
Yo, religion dude in the paper: Why don't you talk more about politics? I've asked my pastor this, too, and they don't really answer my question . . . okay, they won't talk about politics is what I mean. Anyhow, what's your story?
My reply: Friend, politics is a funny thing. And like most humor, you don't want too much of it in your sermon. That's what stand up is for. Do I want the hungry fed, the naked clothed, the homeless given a place to live in peace? Yep, that's what the Boss (no, not Springsteen) tell me. I start with children, since as a friend recently said to me: "every morning I have to feed the hungry and clothe the naked." As a mother, it's a hard calling to miss. Beyond our own kids and relatives and church family? That's where it gets tricky. Start with making sure all your church family is well housed and securely fed, then work out into your neighborhood. I suspect you'll all be talking politics soon enough just doing that.
Faith Works writer: love your enemies? I can barely love my neighbor. How does this Christianity thing work, anyhow?
My reply: Do you know your neighbor? For all you know, they might be an enemy, so it's good to start there. Say hello. Talk about the pollen this spring. Work on it from there. As for loving enemies, I'm still working on it myself, which is where I appreciate the whole grace thing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows all the authors of these questions. In fact: ask him more questions if you want at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, March 25, 2024
Faith Works 3-29-24
Faith Works 3-29-24
Jeff Gill
Holy Saturday defines our time and circumstances
___
When it comes to the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, you'd be forgiven if you thought of it as "Egg Hunt Day."
Holy Saturday isn't a part of many church traditions, even when Easter, or the celebration of Christ's resurrection, is observed. Liturgical churches have a whole series of events from Palm Sunday through what's often called "Holy Week" to mark that last period of the earthly ministry of Jesus, but Holy Saturday can get left out.
As the sun sets on Holy Saturday, Easter vigils begin in many traditions, and some Christian preachers just make sure to get to bed early (if they can) to wake up in time for sunrise services, a more Protestant tradition in place of Easter vigils.
But over the last decade or so I've found myself increasingly drawn to consideration of Holy Saturday itself. The time unambiguously between the death of Christ Jesus on the cross, and the first dawning awareness of his rising, or what English speaking churches call Easter.
One apocryphal line of the tradition teaches that this is the time when, according to a certain reading of I Peter 3:19, Christ "went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison," or in the medieval iconography, performed "the harrowing of Hell." My favorite Bosch work shows Jesus basically kicking down the doors of Hades, which would have gotten everyone's attention down there. Some even suggest he left behind a "Closed for Business" sign which is a topic for another day.
It's the quiet sad clarity of what Holy Saturday points back to that has my attention: the time after Jesus was declared dead and publicly buried in his borrowed garden tomb, and before the promise of new life was fulfilled. We think of Mary and John and those who left with them; of Peter wandering distraught through the streets of Jerusalem. It's all too easy to imagine the disciples left to their own devices the night before, and facing a new day, a chill sunrise, with their confusion bumping up against their faith. Food had to be found in the marketplace, cooking in the kitchen, cleaning to be done as the guests for Passover left for the countryside. It seemed to most of them to be "life after Jesus." What now?
We can jump ahead too quickly. Into Easter, into resurrection, into proof and witness and belief. Thomas will remind us soon enough of the depth of that despair which had to be settling in for many of Jesus's followers on Holy Saturday. They could remember Jesus, but what value was memory in the presence of hideous loss?
Where we can jump ahead is to our day, and the parallels and echoes and holographic comparisons between that Holy Week and our own journey with Jesus. On Holy Saturday, in our lives lived out in faith, we are between promise and fulfillment; death is a continued reality, with resurrection still a prophetic reality we struggle to make sense of in the day to day. "Practice resurrection" as Wendell Berry suggests, but we still ask ourselves "how?"
We know what's coming Easter morning. Lilies and anthems and maybe even some trumpets, certainly songs celebrating "Christ arose!" The disciples in their rented rooms and borrowed campsites around Jerusalem after the crucifixion knew what Jesus kept telling them, "and on the third day rise." But they struggled to make sense of it, too. Some probably better than others.
We're given reason to think Mary Magdalene may have had a better idea than most of what was coming, but even she set herself to practical arrangements for life as usual. Spices and aloe, burial preparations for a body already entombed. Somehow, what Jesus said will make sense. So she carried on.
As shall we, this Holy Saturday.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows it's too soon to say "Christ is risen" but it's good practice. Tell him what you endure in faith at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Holy Saturday defines our time and circumstances
___
When it comes to the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, you'd be forgiven if you thought of it as "Egg Hunt Day."
Holy Saturday isn't a part of many church traditions, even when Easter, or the celebration of Christ's resurrection, is observed. Liturgical churches have a whole series of events from Palm Sunday through what's often called "Holy Week" to mark that last period of the earthly ministry of Jesus, but Holy Saturday can get left out.
As the sun sets on Holy Saturday, Easter vigils begin in many traditions, and some Christian preachers just make sure to get to bed early (if they can) to wake up in time for sunrise services, a more Protestant tradition in place of Easter vigils.
But over the last decade or so I've found myself increasingly drawn to consideration of Holy Saturday itself. The time unambiguously between the death of Christ Jesus on the cross, and the first dawning awareness of his rising, or what English speaking churches call Easter.
One apocryphal line of the tradition teaches that this is the time when, according to a certain reading of I Peter 3:19, Christ "went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison," or in the medieval iconography, performed "the harrowing of Hell." My favorite Bosch work shows Jesus basically kicking down the doors of Hades, which would have gotten everyone's attention down there. Some even suggest he left behind a "Closed for Business" sign which is a topic for another day.
It's the quiet sad clarity of what Holy Saturday points back to that has my attention: the time after Jesus was declared dead and publicly buried in his borrowed garden tomb, and before the promise of new life was fulfilled. We think of Mary and John and those who left with them; of Peter wandering distraught through the streets of Jerusalem. It's all too easy to imagine the disciples left to their own devices the night before, and facing a new day, a chill sunrise, with their confusion bumping up against their faith. Food had to be found in the marketplace, cooking in the kitchen, cleaning to be done as the guests for Passover left for the countryside. It seemed to most of them to be "life after Jesus." What now?
We can jump ahead too quickly. Into Easter, into resurrection, into proof and witness and belief. Thomas will remind us soon enough of the depth of that despair which had to be settling in for many of Jesus's followers on Holy Saturday. They could remember Jesus, but what value was memory in the presence of hideous loss?
Where we can jump ahead is to our day, and the parallels and echoes and holographic comparisons between that Holy Week and our own journey with Jesus. On Holy Saturday, in our lives lived out in faith, we are between promise and fulfillment; death is a continued reality, with resurrection still a prophetic reality we struggle to make sense of in the day to day. "Practice resurrection" as Wendell Berry suggests, but we still ask ourselves "how?"
We know what's coming Easter morning. Lilies and anthems and maybe even some trumpets, certainly songs celebrating "Christ arose!" The disciples in their rented rooms and borrowed campsites around Jerusalem after the crucifixion knew what Jesus kept telling them, "and on the third day rise." But they struggled to make sense of it, too. Some probably better than others.
We're given reason to think Mary Magdalene may have had a better idea than most of what was coming, but even she set herself to practical arrangements for life as usual. Spices and aloe, burial preparations for a body already entombed. Somehow, what Jesus said will make sense. So she carried on.
As shall we, this Holy Saturday.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows it's too soon to say "Christ is risen" but it's good practice. Tell him what you endure in faith at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Notes from my Knapsack 4-4-24
Notes from my Knapsack 4-4-24
Jeff Gill
History and cosmic events with local impact
___
Around 3:00 pm on April 8, Licking County will become strangely dim.
Unless, of course, there's a thunderstorm overhead.
Actually, when a solar eclipse passes, and is as close to totality as we will see in Licking County, you would notice the intensification of darkness even on a cloudy day. Eclipses are powerful astronomical phenomena, and a total solar eclipse is like nothing else you might experience out in nature.
Past solar eclipses passing across Kentucky and Tennessee have taught police and fire officials a lesson, since you can easily add thousands to an area over a few days, with no problem: it's all of them wanting to go home, or find a bathroom, within the same fifteen minutes after an eclipse ends that creates the immediate havoc. We won't see a total eclipse in Granville on April 8th, but we will see traffic jams heading past about 4 pm.
Natural phenomena do leave a mark on the collective memory of a community, or state, or region. Granville's history includes two strange events of the early 1800s with a lasting legacy in our public recollection.
Bushnell's "History of Granville" written in 1880 recalls the "Earthquake of 1811," the New Madrid Fault which still threatens the Midwest today. In 1811, the initial jolt on Dec. 16th was felt all across the Great Lakes region.
Early on Dec. 16, 1811, the new doctor for the village, Dr. William Richards was "sleeping one night in the same room with David Messenger, Jr., when the house was shaken by one of the great earthquake waves that changed the channel of the Mississippi. Messenger was frightened by the rolling of the house, and waking the Doctor, asked what he thought was the cause of the house shaking so. The Doctor roused up enough to mutter that it must be a hog rubbing against the house, and went to sleep again."
Along with that memorable story, Rev. Bushnell interviewed an elderly man of 1880 who had childhood memories of 1811: "The day before this occurrence Daniel Baker had been with his family to Newark to make some purchases, among other things some blue-edged dishes. That night the family slept in pioneer style in their new cabin. The dishes stood on the table and the bed of Daniel, Jr., then a small boy, was on the floor and near the table. He was awakened in the night by the rattling of the dishes over his head, but was too young to be alarmed."
Bushnell also recounts the great "Meteor Shower" of 1833, a major occurrence of the annual Leonid meteor shower that was visible all across the early United States, with variable impacts depending on the local weather. Alabama had clear skies, and "Stars Fell on Alabama" became a popular book and orchestral jazz standard out of those vivid memories.
Early in the morning of Nov. 13th in Granville, Ohio: "It was but the quiet, gentle, beautiful, prolonged rain of glowing sparks that died as they neared or touched the ground. Here, there, everywhere, they fell like lighted snow-flakes at the gentle beginning of a snow storm, each leaving a fine luminous track behind it. The morning bell was rung rather boisterously in the hope of waking people up to see the sublime spectacle. Some were panic stricken and expected the end of the world. One old lady rose, went into the street and shouted in terror. But most of the people appreciated it at once as an unusual natural phenomenon. It was a season of rapt enjoyment until the display was lost in the rising day."
Our eclipse this April will likely be a similar sort of experience.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's planning to be out with his eclipse glasses on Apr. 8! Tell him your cosmic experience at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
===
Maria: if you need 500 words not 600, delete the paragraph starting "Along with that memorable story…" but it was too good not to include, in case you have the space!
Jeff Gill
History and cosmic events with local impact
___
Around 3:00 pm on April 8, Licking County will become strangely dim.
Unless, of course, there's a thunderstorm overhead.
Actually, when a solar eclipse passes, and is as close to totality as we will see in Licking County, you would notice the intensification of darkness even on a cloudy day. Eclipses are powerful astronomical phenomena, and a total solar eclipse is like nothing else you might experience out in nature.
Past solar eclipses passing across Kentucky and Tennessee have taught police and fire officials a lesson, since you can easily add thousands to an area over a few days, with no problem: it's all of them wanting to go home, or find a bathroom, within the same fifteen minutes after an eclipse ends that creates the immediate havoc. We won't see a total eclipse in Granville on April 8th, but we will see traffic jams heading past about 4 pm.
Natural phenomena do leave a mark on the collective memory of a community, or state, or region. Granville's history includes two strange events of the early 1800s with a lasting legacy in our public recollection.
Bushnell's "History of Granville" written in 1880 recalls the "Earthquake of 1811," the New Madrid Fault which still threatens the Midwest today. In 1811, the initial jolt on Dec. 16th was felt all across the Great Lakes region.
Early on Dec. 16, 1811, the new doctor for the village, Dr. William Richards was "sleeping one night in the same room with David Messenger, Jr., when the house was shaken by one of the great earthquake waves that changed the channel of the Mississippi. Messenger was frightened by the rolling of the house, and waking the Doctor, asked what he thought was the cause of the house shaking so. The Doctor roused up enough to mutter that it must be a hog rubbing against the house, and went to sleep again."
Along with that memorable story, Rev. Bushnell interviewed an elderly man of 1880 who had childhood memories of 1811: "The day before this occurrence Daniel Baker had been with his family to Newark to make some purchases, among other things some blue-edged dishes. That night the family slept in pioneer style in their new cabin. The dishes stood on the table and the bed of Daniel, Jr., then a small boy, was on the floor and near the table. He was awakened in the night by the rattling of the dishes over his head, but was too young to be alarmed."
Bushnell also recounts the great "Meteor Shower" of 1833, a major occurrence of the annual Leonid meteor shower that was visible all across the early United States, with variable impacts depending on the local weather. Alabama had clear skies, and "Stars Fell on Alabama" became a popular book and orchestral jazz standard out of those vivid memories.
Early in the morning of Nov. 13th in Granville, Ohio: "It was but the quiet, gentle, beautiful, prolonged rain of glowing sparks that died as they neared or touched the ground. Here, there, everywhere, they fell like lighted snow-flakes at the gentle beginning of a snow storm, each leaving a fine luminous track behind it. The morning bell was rung rather boisterously in the hope of waking people up to see the sublime spectacle. Some were panic stricken and expected the end of the world. One old lady rose, went into the street and shouted in terror. But most of the people appreciated it at once as an unusual natural phenomenon. It was a season of rapt enjoyment until the display was lost in the rising day."
Our eclipse this April will likely be a similar sort of experience.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's planning to be out with his eclipse glasses on Apr. 8! Tell him your cosmic experience at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
===
Maria: if you need 500 words not 600, delete the paragraph starting "Along with that memorable story…" but it was too good not to include, in case you have the space!
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Faith Works 3-22-24
Faith Works 3-22-24
Jeff Gill
Eating in haste, but with memory
___
In one of the Lenten readings I heard this reminder, from the establishment of the Passover meal at Exodus 12:11 —
"In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD's Passover."
It occurred to me that in today's world, we eat quite a few Passovers, almost every day. But of course, not really.
We do eat in haste, too often. We eat with our belts fastened and running shoes on, the car idling outside in the drive. Translate all that as you will. We eat ready to go, if not on the road. We eat in haste.
In the ancient world, so much was different, but we can draw some connections, infer some lessons. Often, eating was more like twice a day. You'd break your overnight fast of a morning, get to work, pause for water, perhaps a snack or bite to eat at noon, but then dine later.
As some scholars have it, it wasn't three squares a day as we have an expectation of, but more like many small meals, only one main meal. Breakfast, the immortal second breakfast, midday collations and tea time late in the afternoon all define an English model, of a time gone by, with various pauses for nourishment before a true supper. In the days of Jesus, we're less sure, but the idea of one major time for eating the most substantial meal seems most common.
So if you aren't pulling some pieces of pita bread out of your pouch, walking from one vineyard to another, or between hauls on the net in the Sea of Galilee, if we're not talking about those more solitary and hurried repasts, we're looking at something more formal, more measured.
To be part of a real supper time, you removed your sandals, with a servant or even your host's family washing your feet. Your leather belt, from which various pouches or tools might hang, is removed. Staffs are left by the door. You're going to be here for a while, and once the stew or pottage or baked dish was in the coals, everyone would stay put, tell stories, sing songs, relax.
One argument about the so-called Mediterranean diet is that the healthful effects claimed for it are less to do with the vegetables and vitamins and nutrition in it, as is the cultural context of sitting down at a table, pouring wine you savor slowly, and enjoying company as much as the food. (Think "Mamma Mi" on a Greek island, right?)
Jesus and the disciples for their Passover would be looking forward to the main meal of the day, the main source of strength on the table, but also to the fellowship surrounding them.
They knew, as we read now in Exodus, that their heritage was the "bread of haste" and a lamb to be slain and expeditiously consumed, but then and now in today's Passover gatherings, the hurried context is a memory, while the remembering takes some time.
When we eat in haste today, often in the car, let alone with the car keys or staff in our hand, we are in a blur of forgetting. We forget where our food comes from, what a blessing it is, and too often we eat it alone.
Passover, and Maundy Thursday, and all the remembrance of the upper room which haunts our culture even at its most secular, where bread and cup represent life, and bodies, and blood: they all should remind us to take a moment, say grace, and be thankful.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's eaten too often out of drive-up windows himself. Tell him how you slow down to remember at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Eating in haste, but with memory
___
In one of the Lenten readings I heard this reminder, from the establishment of the Passover meal at Exodus 12:11 —
"In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD's Passover."
It occurred to me that in today's world, we eat quite a few Passovers, almost every day. But of course, not really.
We do eat in haste, too often. We eat with our belts fastened and running shoes on, the car idling outside in the drive. Translate all that as you will. We eat ready to go, if not on the road. We eat in haste.
In the ancient world, so much was different, but we can draw some connections, infer some lessons. Often, eating was more like twice a day. You'd break your overnight fast of a morning, get to work, pause for water, perhaps a snack or bite to eat at noon, but then dine later.
As some scholars have it, it wasn't three squares a day as we have an expectation of, but more like many small meals, only one main meal. Breakfast, the immortal second breakfast, midday collations and tea time late in the afternoon all define an English model, of a time gone by, with various pauses for nourishment before a true supper. In the days of Jesus, we're less sure, but the idea of one major time for eating the most substantial meal seems most common.
So if you aren't pulling some pieces of pita bread out of your pouch, walking from one vineyard to another, or between hauls on the net in the Sea of Galilee, if we're not talking about those more solitary and hurried repasts, we're looking at something more formal, more measured.
To be part of a real supper time, you removed your sandals, with a servant or even your host's family washing your feet. Your leather belt, from which various pouches or tools might hang, is removed. Staffs are left by the door. You're going to be here for a while, and once the stew or pottage or baked dish was in the coals, everyone would stay put, tell stories, sing songs, relax.
One argument about the so-called Mediterranean diet is that the healthful effects claimed for it are less to do with the vegetables and vitamins and nutrition in it, as is the cultural context of sitting down at a table, pouring wine you savor slowly, and enjoying company as much as the food. (Think "Mamma Mi" on a Greek island, right?)
Jesus and the disciples for their Passover would be looking forward to the main meal of the day, the main source of strength on the table, but also to the fellowship surrounding them.
They knew, as we read now in Exodus, that their heritage was the "bread of haste" and a lamb to be slain and expeditiously consumed, but then and now in today's Passover gatherings, the hurried context is a memory, while the remembering takes some time.
When we eat in haste today, often in the car, let alone with the car keys or staff in our hand, we are in a blur of forgetting. We forget where our food comes from, what a blessing it is, and too often we eat it alone.
Passover, and Maundy Thursday, and all the remembrance of the upper room which haunts our culture even at its most secular, where bread and cup represent life, and bodies, and blood: they all should remind us to take a moment, say grace, and be thankful.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's eaten too often out of drive-up windows himself. Tell him how you slow down to remember at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 3-21-24
Notes from my Knapsack 3-21-24
Jeff Gill
Who will watch the guardians?
___
There's an old Latin tag that traces back to Juvenal: "quis custodiet ipsos custodes."
You can translate it "who will guard the guardians" or in more contemporary terms, who will watch the watchers? "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" however you put it today is an enduring question.
With the Oscars behind us, I've had some thoughts about the vast and somewhat unwieldy film "Oppenheimer." It tells a story from our history, which a passing few can still remember, and there's new information revealed out of the archives, but the personalities at the center of the creation of the atomic bomb are certainly compelling and that's what the cinematic version of J. Robert Oppenheimer's life was trying to capture.
There was attention to the ethical issues around whether we should have developed nuclear physics to create the weapons we did, and when humanity should use them. "Never" is one answer, but it's been negated by the fact that it has been done, twice directly on human targets, more often if you count the human cost of nuclear testing which killed downwinders, movie actors (ironically, John Wayne may have been one of them, caught in swirling irradiated dust filming a movie and dying later of lung cancer), and even some of the technicians at work in places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.
Alfred Nobel was so struck by the destructive power of dynamite he'd helped bring into the world he created a prize to develop peace. Oppenheimer had his own hopes for what the world would do with the inventions he helped bring into being, and that to me is where the movie recently honored both revealed and obscured at the same time.
Robert Downey, Jr. justly earned a great deal of praise for his portrayal of a governmental official, Lewis Strauss, who had come into conflict with Oppenheimer in the post-war era, and ultimately helped see to it that the views of scientists were not, in fact, the ones that made the final decisions about weapons development, let alone deployment.
There's a further story beyond the simple rise and fall of one brilliant physicist which perhaps another filmmaker will take on. That's the tension, left unresolved at the end of "Oppenheimer," around "who will watch the guardians?" The genius of Los Alamos seems to have thought that scientific elites would have a key voice at the table, if not the deciding presence. Downey offered up a Strauss whose bitter and somewhat ominous presence shadowed the realization that politicians would be making the decisions from then on, about new bombs and future command and control protocols for nuclear weapon deployment.
Yet, perhaps unintentionally, the story in the film makes it clear that there is no such thing as a purely rational scientist, either. They are driven by urges and impulses they're not always entirely aware of, and need some balance brought into their lives and work. Gen. Leslie Groves is almost a moral center, and certainly the calming presence, in the story on screen and perhaps in actuality. So did Nolan mean to imply military control is our best course?
I kind of doubt that. But the question, left unresolved, is one we still have: in science, in weapons, in vaccines, in space. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We're still working on finding an answer we're comfortable with.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he does not have a final answer on this one, either. Tell him how you'd manage such matters at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Who will watch the guardians?
___
There's an old Latin tag that traces back to Juvenal: "quis custodiet ipsos custodes."
You can translate it "who will guard the guardians" or in more contemporary terms, who will watch the watchers? "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" however you put it today is an enduring question.
With the Oscars behind us, I've had some thoughts about the vast and somewhat unwieldy film "Oppenheimer." It tells a story from our history, which a passing few can still remember, and there's new information revealed out of the archives, but the personalities at the center of the creation of the atomic bomb are certainly compelling and that's what the cinematic version of J. Robert Oppenheimer's life was trying to capture.
There was attention to the ethical issues around whether we should have developed nuclear physics to create the weapons we did, and when humanity should use them. "Never" is one answer, but it's been negated by the fact that it has been done, twice directly on human targets, more often if you count the human cost of nuclear testing which killed downwinders, movie actors (ironically, John Wayne may have been one of them, caught in swirling irradiated dust filming a movie and dying later of lung cancer), and even some of the technicians at work in places like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge.
Alfred Nobel was so struck by the destructive power of dynamite he'd helped bring into the world he created a prize to develop peace. Oppenheimer had his own hopes for what the world would do with the inventions he helped bring into being, and that to me is where the movie recently honored both revealed and obscured at the same time.
Robert Downey, Jr. justly earned a great deal of praise for his portrayal of a governmental official, Lewis Strauss, who had come into conflict with Oppenheimer in the post-war era, and ultimately helped see to it that the views of scientists were not, in fact, the ones that made the final decisions about weapons development, let alone deployment.
There's a further story beyond the simple rise and fall of one brilliant physicist which perhaps another filmmaker will take on. That's the tension, left unresolved at the end of "Oppenheimer," around "who will watch the guardians?" The genius of Los Alamos seems to have thought that scientific elites would have a key voice at the table, if not the deciding presence. Downey offered up a Strauss whose bitter and somewhat ominous presence shadowed the realization that politicians would be making the decisions from then on, about new bombs and future command and control protocols for nuclear weapon deployment.
Yet, perhaps unintentionally, the story in the film makes it clear that there is no such thing as a purely rational scientist, either. They are driven by urges and impulses they're not always entirely aware of, and need some balance brought into their lives and work. Gen. Leslie Groves is almost a moral center, and certainly the calming presence, in the story on screen and perhaps in actuality. So did Nolan mean to imply military control is our best course?
I kind of doubt that. But the question, left unresolved, is one we still have: in science, in weapons, in vaccines, in space. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We're still working on finding an answer we're comfortable with.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he does not have a final answer on this one, either. Tell him how you'd manage such matters at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Twitter.
Faith Works 3-15-24
Faith Works 3-15-24
Jeff Gill
Trying to remember, and not always succeeding
___
Jersey City is a mystery I will likely never solve.
I've driven through it a few times, as many do and never notice it. If you're going from the Newark (NJ) airport into Manhattan, you'll almost zoom over it on elevated roadways. It's a city of some 300,000, just a bit smaller than Newark which is New Jersey's largest city, both in the shadow of New York City.
My father, who died four years ago this week, graduated from Iowa State in 1956 and got a job in Manhattan. He lived in Jersey City for that year, taking public transit and sometimes walking to his job on the other side of the Hudson, the Statue of Liberty on his right hand heading into work.
He talked about it once in my presence, actually to a group of children I was part of, explaining the meaning of the Statue of Liberty and of freedom to us. I never found out the company he worked for, where their offices were, or what he did.
Ron Gill grew up in a small town in western Iowa, attended a state school, and a day trip to Council Bluffs let alone over to Omaha was a big deal. He got a forestry degree, went west into national forests for his summer training, and had been through Los Angeles where an older sister lived, on his way to Portland, Seattle, then up into the Cascades. What I'm saying is he had seen big cities, but he'd never lived in one.
It may have been too big a leap, from Ames, Iowa to Manhattan and Jersey City. My impression, admittedly vague, is that it didn't go well. It had something to do with importing lumber and building products, and he ran back and forth a bit from the office to the docks, keeping accounts, checking invoices, "struggling to understand" how the business worked he said, but "glad to get back to the Midwest."
After his year in New York, he got a line on a sales job back in Chicago through a college friend, with the Edward Hines Lumber Company, and was happy to return west. He would work in the lumber business in the Chicago area the rest of his career. Not long after getting semi-settled in a YMCA residential hotel in LaGrange, he met another resident on the women's side, went to a football game at Wrigley Field with her (look it up!), met her parents at Thanksgiving and married her the next July. They were together 62 years.
During his last year, when I was back home I asked Dad about Jersey City. He was vague, and dismissive, and in retrospect, I think he was finding it hard to remember what I was talking about. "I wasn't there long."
Yes, but that first year after college is a big deal. He looked at me, puzzled; "I married your mother within a year of getting back to the Midwest." He went on to tell me familiar stories I knew well of that next year. But of the fall of 1956 to the fall of 1957 I was fated never to hear more of from him again.
It's a familiar reminder: talk to your parents, your grandparents if you still have them, older family members in general, while you can. It's good advice. No matter how well you inquire, you'll still have questions when they're gone, but it does feel good to know you did talk, there were new stories, that there were some puzzles made clear when you still could.
My point here is to press the urgency back even further. Don't wait too long. Memory is a funny, tragic, fleeting thing. Ask now. Take notes. Don't wait.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not always sure how far to trust his memory, either. Tell him what you've forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Trying to remember, and not always succeeding
___
Jersey City is a mystery I will likely never solve.
I've driven through it a few times, as many do and never notice it. If you're going from the Newark (NJ) airport into Manhattan, you'll almost zoom over it on elevated roadways. It's a city of some 300,000, just a bit smaller than Newark which is New Jersey's largest city, both in the shadow of New York City.
My father, who died four years ago this week, graduated from Iowa State in 1956 and got a job in Manhattan. He lived in Jersey City for that year, taking public transit and sometimes walking to his job on the other side of the Hudson, the Statue of Liberty on his right hand heading into work.
He talked about it once in my presence, actually to a group of children I was part of, explaining the meaning of the Statue of Liberty and of freedom to us. I never found out the company he worked for, where their offices were, or what he did.
Ron Gill grew up in a small town in western Iowa, attended a state school, and a day trip to Council Bluffs let alone over to Omaha was a big deal. He got a forestry degree, went west into national forests for his summer training, and had been through Los Angeles where an older sister lived, on his way to Portland, Seattle, then up into the Cascades. What I'm saying is he had seen big cities, but he'd never lived in one.
It may have been too big a leap, from Ames, Iowa to Manhattan and Jersey City. My impression, admittedly vague, is that it didn't go well. It had something to do with importing lumber and building products, and he ran back and forth a bit from the office to the docks, keeping accounts, checking invoices, "struggling to understand" how the business worked he said, but "glad to get back to the Midwest."
After his year in New York, he got a line on a sales job back in Chicago through a college friend, with the Edward Hines Lumber Company, and was happy to return west. He would work in the lumber business in the Chicago area the rest of his career. Not long after getting semi-settled in a YMCA residential hotel in LaGrange, he met another resident on the women's side, went to a football game at Wrigley Field with her (look it up!), met her parents at Thanksgiving and married her the next July. They were together 62 years.
During his last year, when I was back home I asked Dad about Jersey City. He was vague, and dismissive, and in retrospect, I think he was finding it hard to remember what I was talking about. "I wasn't there long."
Yes, but that first year after college is a big deal. He looked at me, puzzled; "I married your mother within a year of getting back to the Midwest." He went on to tell me familiar stories I knew well of that next year. But of the fall of 1956 to the fall of 1957 I was fated never to hear more of from him again.
It's a familiar reminder: talk to your parents, your grandparents if you still have them, older family members in general, while you can. It's good advice. No matter how well you inquire, you'll still have questions when they're gone, but it does feel good to know you did talk, there were new stories, that there were some puzzles made clear when you still could.
My point here is to press the urgency back even further. Don't wait too long. Memory is a funny, tragic, fleeting thing. Ask now. Take notes. Don't wait.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not always sure how far to trust his memory, either. Tell him what you've forgotten at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, March 04, 2024
Faith Works 3-8-24
Faith Works 3-8-24
Jeff Gill
Global relief and local awareness
___
Sunday, March 10, is UMCOR Sunday, which if you don't spend much time around Methodists sounds a little odd.
For Methodists, UMCOR is short for "The United Methodist Committee on Relief," and is their global program for responding to immediate needs in the face of both natural and human-caused disasters.
It began with World War II, and has continued to be the annual offering which is at work all year long, bringing resources and tools and assistance into the middle of sudden unexpected need.
UMCOR is how Methodists roll; my own Disciples of Christ have the "Week of Compassion," and Presbyterians and UCC folk call their "One Great Hour of Sharing" or OGHS which keeps the acronym vibe going. They're all much more than a Sunday or a week or an hour, but are a representative effort for a much larger attempt to minister in Christ's name to people who didn't ask for either the trouble or the help. Like most of these initiatives, Catholic Relief Services grew out of World War II's global needs, and there are many more.
Church-based relief programs are common to all sorts of faith traditions or religious bodies. I've had the pleasure of working shoulder to shoulder with Emergency Relief teams from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and disaster response groups from the Mennonite Central Committee. Many of us have seen or even been blessed by the presence of relief workers from The Salvation Army.
Today there are also many parachurch organizations at work in both national and overseas emergency response; Samaritan's Purse is well known, and their big push is with Operation Christmas Child in the fall towards December. They and World Vision trace their origins to a minister named Bob Pierce who didn't want denominational boundaries to hold up aid, whose best known line may be "Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God."
Obviously the seasons leading up to either Christmas or Easter are times when people in general and Christians in particular are more open to thinking about making a gift to things a little beyond their immediate surroundings. Many church-based campaigns use the disciplines of Lent and our preparations for Easter to make for an opportunity to focus and increase our giving.
This column came to mind because I do realize that like many preachers, I have tended to talk about giving and stewardship in the fall, which is when many congregations are planning the next year, and asking members and friends of the church to make commitments to the work ahead. We always say in those fall offering invitations that giving is something we need to think about all year, but it doesn't hurt to talk about it all year, too.
The hesitation is that some say they leave churches "because they talk about money all the time." I don't know how much is all the time, or how much is too much. I'm always reminded when I hear this that Jesus talked more about money and our stewardship of the possessions and material blessings God has given us than almost any other three subjects put together. If Jesus thinks we should talk about how we use our gifts for others, it's probably not a bad idea for preachers to do it, too.
So whether its an UMCOR Sunday where you are, if you still have a One Great Hour of Sharing or Week of Compassion envelope in your Bible, or there's an opportunity you've been mulling to go and serve on a mission trip where The Salvation Army or Samaritan's Purse is taking their rolling tool shed and shower truck to help you get through the week: it might just be time to give.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; your giving has helped him serve in many ways and places. Tell him where you like to give at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Global relief and local awareness
___
Sunday, March 10, is UMCOR Sunday, which if you don't spend much time around Methodists sounds a little odd.
For Methodists, UMCOR is short for "The United Methodist Committee on Relief," and is their global program for responding to immediate needs in the face of both natural and human-caused disasters.
It began with World War II, and has continued to be the annual offering which is at work all year long, bringing resources and tools and assistance into the middle of sudden unexpected need.
UMCOR is how Methodists roll; my own Disciples of Christ have the "Week of Compassion," and Presbyterians and UCC folk call their "One Great Hour of Sharing" or OGHS which keeps the acronym vibe going. They're all much more than a Sunday or a week or an hour, but are a representative effort for a much larger attempt to minister in Christ's name to people who didn't ask for either the trouble or the help. Like most of these initiatives, Catholic Relief Services grew out of World War II's global needs, and there are many more.
Church-based relief programs are common to all sorts of faith traditions or religious bodies. I've had the pleasure of working shoulder to shoulder with Emergency Relief teams from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and disaster response groups from the Mennonite Central Committee. Many of us have seen or even been blessed by the presence of relief workers from The Salvation Army.
Today there are also many parachurch organizations at work in both national and overseas emergency response; Samaritan's Purse is well known, and their big push is with Operation Christmas Child in the fall towards December. They and World Vision trace their origins to a minister named Bob Pierce who didn't want denominational boundaries to hold up aid, whose best known line may be "Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God."
Obviously the seasons leading up to either Christmas or Easter are times when people in general and Christians in particular are more open to thinking about making a gift to things a little beyond their immediate surroundings. Many church-based campaigns use the disciplines of Lent and our preparations for Easter to make for an opportunity to focus and increase our giving.
This column came to mind because I do realize that like many preachers, I have tended to talk about giving and stewardship in the fall, which is when many congregations are planning the next year, and asking members and friends of the church to make commitments to the work ahead. We always say in those fall offering invitations that giving is something we need to think about all year, but it doesn't hurt to talk about it all year, too.
The hesitation is that some say they leave churches "because they talk about money all the time." I don't know how much is all the time, or how much is too much. I'm always reminded when I hear this that Jesus talked more about money and our stewardship of the possessions and material blessings God has given us than almost any other three subjects put together. If Jesus thinks we should talk about how we use our gifts for others, it's probably not a bad idea for preachers to do it, too.
So whether its an UMCOR Sunday where you are, if you still have a One Great Hour of Sharing or Week of Compassion envelope in your Bible, or there's an opportunity you've been mulling to go and serve on a mission trip where The Salvation Army or Samaritan's Purse is taking their rolling tool shed and shower truck to help you get through the week: it might just be time to give.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; your giving has helped him serve in many ways and places. Tell him where you like to give at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, February 26, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 4-7-24
Notes from my Knapsack 4-7-24
Jeff Gill
The politics of public health and cognitive decline
___
We're eight months away from the presidential election, and I have something to say.
It's from the heart, and it's not really meant to be political at all, but in a time when everything seems to be politicized, sometimes you just have to "grasp the nettle" and grab an issue as firmly as you can, discomfort aside.
In the discussions around the two leading candidates currently, the word "dementia" is getting tossed around rather casually.
This is where I can easily envision partisans rising up in a cold fury, or even something hotter, to retort angrily to my obtuseness.
One candidate, the older one to be sure, has the tag "dementia" attached to him quite often. I doubt this very much. My concern in looking at him is that I read his appearance as "frail," which is not unusual for someone into their 80s. Frailty is an issue, and I can discuss that as a reason for one's support or opposition.
The other candidate is chronologically not far behind, though, and his affect is often one of manic self-regard, if not showing a bit of cognitive decline himself. Those who are firmly opposed to him will often throw the word "dementia" around in his direction, too.
If you're still with me, I'd like to make a totally non-partisan distinction between cognitive decline and dementia. Any of us can have cognitive decline, such as me before my morning coffee. Cognitive decline can be something that comes and goes, and in cases where it's the result of an illness or physical condition, it can be reversed. Dementia is something that we can in a very few cases slow but in no way stop it.
Columbia University researchers recently found that around 10% of U.S. adults 65 and older have some form of dementia, while another 22% have mild cognitive impairment. Paralleling those findings, the Alzheimer's Association says 1 in 3 seniors will die of some form of dementia.
It's worth pointing out this means 2 of 3 seniors won't. Not everyone gets dementia, or even shows significant cognitive decline, just by getting older. Some of the sharpest people I've known were in their 80s and 90s.
But dementia is a steadily increasing problem in our country, with 6 million Americans believed to have Alzheimer's right now, and that number expected to reach 13 million by 2050. There's no pill or surgery that cures it. Those with dementia need care, which is personal and challenging, and one way or another expensive. We all need to talk about dementia and how to deal with it when it arises in our families and friend groups.
The current political debate is not helping. Dementia is not a casual insult. It's a diagnosis, and a reality all around us. I hope we can change how we see and share what we know, as we work and pray for better solutions ahead.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working with dementia related issues these days, but you figured that out already. Tell him how you deal with dementia in your circles at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
The politics of public health and cognitive decline
___
We're eight months away from the presidential election, and I have something to say.
It's from the heart, and it's not really meant to be political at all, but in a time when everything seems to be politicized, sometimes you just have to "grasp the nettle" and grab an issue as firmly as you can, discomfort aside.
In the discussions around the two leading candidates currently, the word "dementia" is getting tossed around rather casually.
This is where I can easily envision partisans rising up in a cold fury, or even something hotter, to retort angrily to my obtuseness.
One candidate, the older one to be sure, has the tag "dementia" attached to him quite often. I doubt this very much. My concern in looking at him is that I read his appearance as "frail," which is not unusual for someone into their 80s. Frailty is an issue, and I can discuss that as a reason for one's support or opposition.
The other candidate is chronologically not far behind, though, and his affect is often one of manic self-regard, if not showing a bit of cognitive decline himself. Those who are firmly opposed to him will often throw the word "dementia" around in his direction, too.
If you're still with me, I'd like to make a totally non-partisan distinction between cognitive decline and dementia. Any of us can have cognitive decline, such as me before my morning coffee. Cognitive decline can be something that comes and goes, and in cases where it's the result of an illness or physical condition, it can be reversed. Dementia is something that we can in a very few cases slow but in no way stop it.
Columbia University researchers recently found that around 10% of U.S. adults 65 and older have some form of dementia, while another 22% have mild cognitive impairment. Paralleling those findings, the Alzheimer's Association says 1 in 3 seniors will die of some form of dementia.
It's worth pointing out this means 2 of 3 seniors won't. Not everyone gets dementia, or even shows significant cognitive decline, just by getting older. Some of the sharpest people I've known were in their 80s and 90s.
But dementia is a steadily increasing problem in our country, with 6 million Americans believed to have Alzheimer's right now, and that number expected to reach 13 million by 2050. There's no pill or surgery that cures it. Those with dementia need care, which is personal and challenging, and one way or another expensive. We all need to talk about dementia and how to deal with it when it arises in our families and friend groups.
The current political debate is not helping. Dementia is not a casual insult. It's a diagnosis, and a reality all around us. I hope we can change how we see and share what we know, as we work and pray for better solutions ahead.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working with dementia related issues these days, but you figured that out already. Tell him how you deal with dementia in your circles at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 4-1-24
Faith Works 4-1-24
Jeff Gill
Prayer and evangelism may be the combination you need
___
Easter is a month away and coming in fast. If you observe Lent, we're well into it, but plenty of that season left for prayer and preparation.
Last column I talked about prayer, on a very elementary level, and heard some useful feedback on how that landed for people looking at first steps. But I also had some questions around next steps, and was thinking in the car about what I could helpfully commend.
Then I got home, and saw where Geoff Mitchell, friend and colleague in ministry serving a congregation in Memphis, posted something on Threads (@pastorgeoffrey) that was much better than what I had in mind, and it's not stealing if I give credit, right?
Geoff said "Take a moment this week to empower leadership. Invite them to identify four people in their circle they will pray for between now and Easter. If they get a chance to invite, great, but they will pray for them. Prayer, not programs, helps us reimagine evangelism."
Did you get that? Invitation to worship is fine, but don't force it. In fact, don't worry if a natural opportunity doesn't come up. What if, I think my friend in Tennessee is saying, we live as if what we believe is true, that prayer has power all its own, and God might be able to work through it in ways we can't even imagine?
Consider four people you know you would ask blessings for, and pray that they might be blessed. Not as a program or a first step to your invaluable next contribution, not as a stage in a process where you have the primary responsibility: you simply pray for four people between now and Easter.
What if, and I'm just going off on my own now, what if you pray for four people, and you end up with opportunities arising in your life to invite four completely different people to a sunrise service, your Easter observance, to a work project going on this spring through your church? Does that mean your prayers didn't "work"? Or is it possible we tend to see prayer more like motor oil, an additive that lubricates other actions we undertake, and our spiritual lives as the engine, when that metaphor might have it backwards?
Prayer is powerful. That's a baseline assertion of most spiritual traditions. There are disagreements around technique and practice, but the common thread is that through prayer we are connected to power and initiative that's larger than we are, wider than our own horizons, deeper than even the immensity of now as we know it.
Praying for others isn't something we do for ourselves, but it's an open secret that praying just for ourselves is a fast ticket to nowheresville. That's how you get stuck in a loop of wants and disappointments. To open the loop by praying for others opens up our own hearts to letting go of some wants, and finding new, unexpected fulfillments.
Meanwhile, we pray for others not to reach the outcome we ourselves have figured out is what they need: we pray for blessing. We ask that our time and intention in prayer open up blessings for others, and then are privileged to witness how that can happen, which may well surprise us.
Or as Geoff suggests: "identify four people in [your] circle [you] will pray for between now and Easter. If [you] get a chance to invite, great, but… pray for them. Prayer, not programs, helps us reimagine evangelism."
Because evangelism is, at root, simply sharing good news. Not a program.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes to learn from others as well as praying for them. Tell him how you've seen good news at work in another's life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Prayer and evangelism may be the combination you need
___
Easter is a month away and coming in fast. If you observe Lent, we're well into it, but plenty of that season left for prayer and preparation.
Last column I talked about prayer, on a very elementary level, and heard some useful feedback on how that landed for people looking at first steps. But I also had some questions around next steps, and was thinking in the car about what I could helpfully commend.
Then I got home, and saw where Geoff Mitchell, friend and colleague in ministry serving a congregation in Memphis, posted something on Threads (@pastorgeoffrey) that was much better than what I had in mind, and it's not stealing if I give credit, right?
Geoff said "Take a moment this week to empower leadership. Invite them to identify four people in their circle they will pray for between now and Easter. If they get a chance to invite, great, but they will pray for them. Prayer, not programs, helps us reimagine evangelism."
Did you get that? Invitation to worship is fine, but don't force it. In fact, don't worry if a natural opportunity doesn't come up. What if, I think my friend in Tennessee is saying, we live as if what we believe is true, that prayer has power all its own, and God might be able to work through it in ways we can't even imagine?
Consider four people you know you would ask blessings for, and pray that they might be blessed. Not as a program or a first step to your invaluable next contribution, not as a stage in a process where you have the primary responsibility: you simply pray for four people between now and Easter.
What if, and I'm just going off on my own now, what if you pray for four people, and you end up with opportunities arising in your life to invite four completely different people to a sunrise service, your Easter observance, to a work project going on this spring through your church? Does that mean your prayers didn't "work"? Or is it possible we tend to see prayer more like motor oil, an additive that lubricates other actions we undertake, and our spiritual lives as the engine, when that metaphor might have it backwards?
Prayer is powerful. That's a baseline assertion of most spiritual traditions. There are disagreements around technique and practice, but the common thread is that through prayer we are connected to power and initiative that's larger than we are, wider than our own horizons, deeper than even the immensity of now as we know it.
Praying for others isn't something we do for ourselves, but it's an open secret that praying just for ourselves is a fast ticket to nowheresville. That's how you get stuck in a loop of wants and disappointments. To open the loop by praying for others opens up our own hearts to letting go of some wants, and finding new, unexpected fulfillments.
Meanwhile, we pray for others not to reach the outcome we ourselves have figured out is what they need: we pray for blessing. We ask that our time and intention in prayer open up blessings for others, and then are privileged to witness how that can happen, which may well surprise us.
Or as Geoff suggests: "identify four people in [your] circle [you] will pray for between now and Easter. If [you] get a chance to invite, great, but… pray for them. Prayer, not programs, helps us reimagine evangelism."
Because evangelism is, at root, simply sharing good news. Not a program.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes to learn from others as well as praying for them. Tell him how you've seen good news at work in another's life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Faith Works 2-23-24
Faith Works 2-23-24
Jeff Gill
Lenten spirituality rooted in prayer
___
We're already heading past the second week of Lent, and Easter is not that far away on March 31.
Whether you observed Ash Wednesday on Feb. 14 or chose to focus on your Valentine, and even if you don't practice any kind of Lenten disciplines, it's a time of year when people think about prayer.
It's a question I get asked not infrequently: how do you pray? The quick answer is: I talk to God. Like most conversation, I need to listen as well as speak my own mind, and maybe even not talk at all. For the skeptics who ask "listen to who? To what?" This may not be your column. Come back, we'll get to you, I promise.
For those who are into the idea of communing with the divine, for whom a Presence we call God is a reality worth considering, prayer is a primary form of communication. And none of us listens as well as we ought (if you're married, ask your spouse how you do at that).
Along with the practice of "active listening," I have a couple of other pieces of advice for those wanting to improve their prayer lives in this pre-Easter, even Lenten season. First off the bat: the Psalms. Read them. Pray them. Reflect on them as your own expressions to God.
The Psalms can jar, they jolt you. They say things you may not think you are allowed to say to God, but there they are in the literal middle of the Bible, so there you are. If the Psalmist (David or whomever) can say it to God, so can you. But let the Psalms take the lead. Pray the Psalms. They will teach you.
That's recommendation number one. Recommendation number two may seem too obvious, but I think it gets missed. Go to church. Find a faith community congenial to your spiritual journey as it is right now, and dive in.
How does this help you to pray? Well, because the average service is chock full of them, and you don't have to do anything but listen or read or repeat with them, as a guide and a support. Invocations early in many services, intercessions asked for individuals and for the congregation as a whole, common prayers some printed and some just familiar which you'll pick up over a few return visits; there is the usage of Biblical prayer as prayers like the Lord's Prayer (you don't get much more Biblical than that one), or other doxologies or "songs of praise" which come from scripture. Some have a pastoral prayer and if there's communion, prayers over the elements.
These all can teach and model for us what prayer is, if only for others, and should spark in willing hearts more prayer from our own selves. There are books and manuals and video lessons that all talk about spiritual growth and deepening your prayer life, but anyone can start with those two. The prayers that are the Psalms, and praying in worship which you can welcome into your own prayer life the rest of the week. Those alone are a huge boost, a gracious gift offered to anyone who wants to "talk with God" in the form of prayer.
If I were to add a third suggestion, it would just be this. Practice prayer for others. I pray for you, good readers. Some I hear from, enough to know the breadth and diversity of who is out there reading these. And I do pray for you, for your blessing. I think that's good for me to do. It's a practice I recommend to anyone.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows there's plenty of reasons to pray, and appreciates your prayers for him. Tell him how you pray at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Lenten spirituality rooted in prayer
___
We're already heading past the second week of Lent, and Easter is not that far away on March 31.
Whether you observed Ash Wednesday on Feb. 14 or chose to focus on your Valentine, and even if you don't practice any kind of Lenten disciplines, it's a time of year when people think about prayer.
It's a question I get asked not infrequently: how do you pray? The quick answer is: I talk to God. Like most conversation, I need to listen as well as speak my own mind, and maybe even not talk at all. For the skeptics who ask "listen to who? To what?" This may not be your column. Come back, we'll get to you, I promise.
For those who are into the idea of communing with the divine, for whom a Presence we call God is a reality worth considering, prayer is a primary form of communication. And none of us listens as well as we ought (if you're married, ask your spouse how you do at that).
Along with the practice of "active listening," I have a couple of other pieces of advice for those wanting to improve their prayer lives in this pre-Easter, even Lenten season. First off the bat: the Psalms. Read them. Pray them. Reflect on them as your own expressions to God.
The Psalms can jar, they jolt you. They say things you may not think you are allowed to say to God, but there they are in the literal middle of the Bible, so there you are. If the Psalmist (David or whomever) can say it to God, so can you. But let the Psalms take the lead. Pray the Psalms. They will teach you.
That's recommendation number one. Recommendation number two may seem too obvious, but I think it gets missed. Go to church. Find a faith community congenial to your spiritual journey as it is right now, and dive in.
How does this help you to pray? Well, because the average service is chock full of them, and you don't have to do anything but listen or read or repeat with them, as a guide and a support. Invocations early in many services, intercessions asked for individuals and for the congregation as a whole, common prayers some printed and some just familiar which you'll pick up over a few return visits; there is the usage of Biblical prayer as prayers like the Lord's Prayer (you don't get much more Biblical than that one), or other doxologies or "songs of praise" which come from scripture. Some have a pastoral prayer and if there's communion, prayers over the elements.
These all can teach and model for us what prayer is, if only for others, and should spark in willing hearts more prayer from our own selves. There are books and manuals and video lessons that all talk about spiritual growth and deepening your prayer life, but anyone can start with those two. The prayers that are the Psalms, and praying in worship which you can welcome into your own prayer life the rest of the week. Those alone are a huge boost, a gracious gift offered to anyone who wants to "talk with God" in the form of prayer.
If I were to add a third suggestion, it would just be this. Practice prayer for others. I pray for you, good readers. Some I hear from, enough to know the breadth and diversity of who is out there reading these. And I do pray for you, for your blessing. I think that's good for me to do. It's a practice I recommend to anyone.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows there's plenty of reasons to pray, and appreciates your prayers for him. Tell him how you pray at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, February 12, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 2-22-24
Notes from my Knapsack 2-22-24
Jeff Gill
Public health and politics, an unhealthy mix
___
At the end of January, something I'd been dodging for almost four years hit me square and knocked me down.
Yep, I got COVID; used one of the test kits I still had around (if you think yours are expired, note that the printed expiration date may be extended, which you can find through some simple internet searching). All the symptoms were there, plus the line on the sample under the control line told me for sure. I got it.
Being someone who lives at least a large portion of my life online, I posted that, and promptly heard from a wide range of people asking me if I was now ready to admit the whole vaccine and public health effort around COVID was a scam by Big Pharma and/or the Deep State.
This is a conversation (I hesitate to say dialogue) I've been in since COVID first erupted, in early March of 2020. I had a more "public facing" job then, and even before the national alerts and lockdowns were announced, I learned quickly that just talking about mitigation and precautions in the first days of March provoked a strong pushback.
Yes, the politics got tricky and weird after mask mandates and calls for vaccination went national. But I'm talking in those days before all of that, when we were less sure about what a coronavirus was, or how vectors worked, and even before Tom Hanks was announced as having it or NBA games shut down before the final whistle.
Me, I've gotten a fall flu shot since forever. I did not realize until after we got into the controversies around COVID vaccines that Ohio has a history of running around 40% of all adults getting a flu shot.
And I note wearily that right now in Licking County it's just under 60% have had even one COVID shot, ever, falling to 14% even as current as the bivalent booster.
Meanwhile, there's some very real concern that basic flu shots are less popular than they had been, what with the political controversies around vaccines in general, and even childhood vaccines are falling behind to where measles are on the upswing.
My sincerest sympathies are with public health officials in general, and the Licking County Health Department in particular. I've worked with past and current leadership there for many years, and I would say they are about as political as a "Yield to Oncoming Traffic" sign. They are working on addressing our health on many fronts: we still have 17% of adults in this county smoking regularly, 20% binge or heavy drinking, and STDs on the march. They walk a fine line on COVID issues, I know.
So let me just say for myself: I think being fully vaccinated kept me from getting sicker than I was, and I appreciate my doctor's care which was supported by my vaccine status. Talk to your doctor, and consider taking protective steps for your health.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's gotten the booster, and is glad he did. Tell him how you take care of yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Public health and politics, an unhealthy mix
___
At the end of January, something I'd been dodging for almost four years hit me square and knocked me down.
Yep, I got COVID; used one of the test kits I still had around (if you think yours are expired, note that the printed expiration date may be extended, which you can find through some simple internet searching). All the symptoms were there, plus the line on the sample under the control line told me for sure. I got it.
Being someone who lives at least a large portion of my life online, I posted that, and promptly heard from a wide range of people asking me if I was now ready to admit the whole vaccine and public health effort around COVID was a scam by Big Pharma and/or the Deep State.
This is a conversation (I hesitate to say dialogue) I've been in since COVID first erupted, in early March of 2020. I had a more "public facing" job then, and even before the national alerts and lockdowns were announced, I learned quickly that just talking about mitigation and precautions in the first days of March provoked a strong pushback.
Yes, the politics got tricky and weird after mask mandates and calls for vaccination went national. But I'm talking in those days before all of that, when we were less sure about what a coronavirus was, or how vectors worked, and even before Tom Hanks was announced as having it or NBA games shut down before the final whistle.
Me, I've gotten a fall flu shot since forever. I did not realize until after we got into the controversies around COVID vaccines that Ohio has a history of running around 40% of all adults getting a flu shot.
And I note wearily that right now in Licking County it's just under 60% have had even one COVID shot, ever, falling to 14% even as current as the bivalent booster.
Meanwhile, there's some very real concern that basic flu shots are less popular than they had been, what with the political controversies around vaccines in general, and even childhood vaccines are falling behind to where measles are on the upswing.
My sincerest sympathies are with public health officials in general, and the Licking County Health Department in particular. I've worked with past and current leadership there for many years, and I would say they are about as political as a "Yield to Oncoming Traffic" sign. They are working on addressing our health on many fronts: we still have 17% of adults in this county smoking regularly, 20% binge or heavy drinking, and STDs on the march. They walk a fine line on COVID issues, I know.
So let me just say for myself: I think being fully vaccinated kept me from getting sicker than I was, and I appreciate my doctor's care which was supported by my vaccine status. Talk to your doctor, and consider taking protective steps for your health.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's gotten the booster, and is glad he did. Tell him how you take care of yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 2-16-24
Faith Works 2-16-24
Jeff Gill
Perceptions are challenging, and all we have
___
"Why was all the music new and strange?"
I know I'm not the only minister to have heard this.
If you are a member of a contemporary worship style church, it comes in a slightly different flavor, but the complaint comes even there, I'm told. "Were those all new songs today?" With the inevitable raised eyebrow.
In a more traditional church, it's interesting to hear it when out of three hymns, there was one old standard, a newer hymn the congregation has heard before, plus one admittedly new song, along with familiar tunes and words for a "Gloria Patri," the "Doxology," and a choir anthem sung many times before. But that line-up can still get you "what was the deal with all new music?"
Now that football season is over, it's interesting to look back over the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, whose fortunes became entwined with the Kansas City Chiefs. Her relationship with a player (Travis Kelce already famous in his own narrower right) got her into a skybox with his mom, and being even more famous, she was shown in TV coverage on occasion. Football fans began to erupt on social media over how much Taylor Swift was displacing the old fashioned NFL football coverage. "Too much of the female singer! We're here for football!"
But ESPN personality Colin Cowherd put some interns to work clocking Swift on screen time, and found that on average viewers saw her for . . . 24 seconds out of three and a half hours of coverage. That's 12,600 seconds total, so she was seen 0.2 of 1 percent of the time.
Super Bowl sightings of Taylor Swift: 55 seconds (51 seconds before the score that ended the game) out of a broadcast that was four hours and 18 minutes long. This is counting her sightings from kickoff until the game coverage ended. That's 15,480 total seconds, so she was on screen more, to be fair: 0.35 of 1 percent of the game coverage.
Oh, and something I'm sure the NFL knows: their viewership is already 46% female. I'm not saying all women like Taylor Swift, nor that all men do not, but I think there's a very rational justification for showing a bit of successful, famous women cheering on their teams during game broadcasts. Men who expect things to stay the way they've always been, with crowd shots mostly of former players and the stray (male) politician? Nope. Things aren't changing: they've already changed.
Marva Dawn was a very articulate theologian of worship and Christian practice, and her work took her into the middle of what was called for decades "the worship wars." One of her often told stories was about a person who came up to her after church to complain about one of the hymns they just sang as being strange and unfamiliar. "It's okay," she told them. "It wasn't really about you anyway."
In fact, Dawn suggested it should worry us at least a little if we, long time church goers, love and are delighted by every last piece of music and verbiage we hear in worship. If it works SO well for us, she asked, then how is it working for newer, less familiar people coming to church for the first time, who are still working on their faith and understanding of who God is and what God is doing? Maybe it isn't a good sign if we feel perfectly at home with all the service from beginning to end.
Of course, can you have too much of a good thing? Perhaps. But when we think it's "all" new and different, it may just be our expectations that were unfulfilled, and not God's intention for the service.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's willing to admit he's terrible at picking hymns for worship. Tell him what strange song caught your spiritual attention at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Perceptions are challenging, and all we have
___
"Why was all the music new and strange?"
I know I'm not the only minister to have heard this.
If you are a member of a contemporary worship style church, it comes in a slightly different flavor, but the complaint comes even there, I'm told. "Were those all new songs today?" With the inevitable raised eyebrow.
In a more traditional church, it's interesting to hear it when out of three hymns, there was one old standard, a newer hymn the congregation has heard before, plus one admittedly new song, along with familiar tunes and words for a "Gloria Patri," the "Doxology," and a choir anthem sung many times before. But that line-up can still get you "what was the deal with all new music?"
Now that football season is over, it's interesting to look back over the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, whose fortunes became entwined with the Kansas City Chiefs. Her relationship with a player (Travis Kelce already famous in his own narrower right) got her into a skybox with his mom, and being even more famous, she was shown in TV coverage on occasion. Football fans began to erupt on social media over how much Taylor Swift was displacing the old fashioned NFL football coverage. "Too much of the female singer! We're here for football!"
But ESPN personality Colin Cowherd put some interns to work clocking Swift on screen time, and found that on average viewers saw her for . . . 24 seconds out of three and a half hours of coverage. That's 12,600 seconds total, so she was seen 0.2 of 1 percent of the time.
Super Bowl sightings of Taylor Swift: 55 seconds (51 seconds before the score that ended the game) out of a broadcast that was four hours and 18 minutes long. This is counting her sightings from kickoff until the game coverage ended. That's 15,480 total seconds, so she was on screen more, to be fair: 0.35 of 1 percent of the game coverage.
Oh, and something I'm sure the NFL knows: their viewership is already 46% female. I'm not saying all women like Taylor Swift, nor that all men do not, but I think there's a very rational justification for showing a bit of successful, famous women cheering on their teams during game broadcasts. Men who expect things to stay the way they've always been, with crowd shots mostly of former players and the stray (male) politician? Nope. Things aren't changing: they've already changed.
Marva Dawn was a very articulate theologian of worship and Christian practice, and her work took her into the middle of what was called for decades "the worship wars." One of her often told stories was about a person who came up to her after church to complain about one of the hymns they just sang as being strange and unfamiliar. "It's okay," she told them. "It wasn't really about you anyway."
In fact, Dawn suggested it should worry us at least a little if we, long time church goers, love and are delighted by every last piece of music and verbiage we hear in worship. If it works SO well for us, she asked, then how is it working for newer, less familiar people coming to church for the first time, who are still working on their faith and understanding of who God is and what God is doing? Maybe it isn't a good sign if we feel perfectly at home with all the service from beginning to end.
Of course, can you have too much of a good thing? Perhaps. But when we think it's "all" new and different, it may just be our expectations that were unfulfilled, and not God's intention for the service.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's willing to admit he's terrible at picking hymns for worship. Tell him what strange song caught your spiritual attention at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Sunday, February 04, 2024
Faith Works 2-9-24
Faith Works 2-9-24
Jeff Gill
Sitting with death
___
Most of the last year I spent sitting with death. My father-in-law was declining slowly, but steadily, inexorably. Getting better was not in the cards. He was 94, tired, and ready, something he said often.
When I first came to live with him, as his mobility and memory were on a race to deteriorate the fastest (memory was winning that particular race), I would hear certain stories on constant repeat, but that was something I was used to, working with elderly people over many years.
The challenge was to see if, by gentle nudging, I could also get some new stories out of him. To my satisfaction and his apparent enjoyment this was successful. There were side trips off the beaten track I could get him to take, and by a judicious mix of carefully timed questions and well placed silences, I learned a number of things about Buck's childhood and early maturity.
One key was how he would often respond to a query with "oh, I can't remember that stuff, that's long ago and forgotten." If I could wait the right way, open to listening without giving the impression of expectation, he would after a long pause spark himself into a blaze of recollection. I treasure those moments, as well as those stories.
But there came a time when his replies grew fainter, trailed off faster, and stopped almost altogether. It was only the familiar pattern of meals and household routines that was left us, and even that in single phrases or even just a word, which themselves devolved into pointing and gestures. There were no more stories to tell.
We had a few months like that. The talking was almost entirely over. His hearing or comprehension (we were never sure which) was gone, and in time even the pattern of the day was mostly lost, with breakfast followed by lunch which preceded supper, unless towards the end even that was declined. In between, in a mix of dozing and wakefulness, we were waiting.
Buck often said, matter of factly, he was waiting to die. That was next on his list. It is not on mine, but I'm closer to it than I once was. As a reality forming the last bit of punctuation for life, the full stop, period or exclamation point, it was drawing near to both of us. And what I became more familiar with was how it is just that: an approaching reality like the setting or the rising of the sun. It will come when it comes, and there's not a great deal we can do about that.
As someone who has done many hundreds of funerals, and sat with people through dozens of last vigils, I thought I was used to this, but to simply sit for months with death was something new. It was a moving past being able to do anything, or to learn anything, or to help, even. It was a season of simple acceptance.
It was all more complicated than that in the details, but that was the underlying chord, the ongoing bass note for the rest of our days together. The need to accept that we were both of us sitting with death. And as Paul said to the fellowship in Rome, "whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's."
And in the Lord, whose steadfast love endures forever, they are both of them very near to each other. Life, and death. Near enough that it reminds you, after sitting with it for long enough, that those who are in death are not all that far away from we who are in life. In either direction, we are near to one another, and love finds the distance no trouble at all.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on life a bit more these days. Tell him your thoughts on life or death at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Sitting with death
___
Most of the last year I spent sitting with death. My father-in-law was declining slowly, but steadily, inexorably. Getting better was not in the cards. He was 94, tired, and ready, something he said often.
When I first came to live with him, as his mobility and memory were on a race to deteriorate the fastest (memory was winning that particular race), I would hear certain stories on constant repeat, but that was something I was used to, working with elderly people over many years.
The challenge was to see if, by gentle nudging, I could also get some new stories out of him. To my satisfaction and his apparent enjoyment this was successful. There were side trips off the beaten track I could get him to take, and by a judicious mix of carefully timed questions and well placed silences, I learned a number of things about Buck's childhood and early maturity.
One key was how he would often respond to a query with "oh, I can't remember that stuff, that's long ago and forgotten." If I could wait the right way, open to listening without giving the impression of expectation, he would after a long pause spark himself into a blaze of recollection. I treasure those moments, as well as those stories.
But there came a time when his replies grew fainter, trailed off faster, and stopped almost altogether. It was only the familiar pattern of meals and household routines that was left us, and even that in single phrases or even just a word, which themselves devolved into pointing and gestures. There were no more stories to tell.
We had a few months like that. The talking was almost entirely over. His hearing or comprehension (we were never sure which) was gone, and in time even the pattern of the day was mostly lost, with breakfast followed by lunch which preceded supper, unless towards the end even that was declined. In between, in a mix of dozing and wakefulness, we were waiting.
Buck often said, matter of factly, he was waiting to die. That was next on his list. It is not on mine, but I'm closer to it than I once was. As a reality forming the last bit of punctuation for life, the full stop, period or exclamation point, it was drawing near to both of us. And what I became more familiar with was how it is just that: an approaching reality like the setting or the rising of the sun. It will come when it comes, and there's not a great deal we can do about that.
As someone who has done many hundreds of funerals, and sat with people through dozens of last vigils, I thought I was used to this, but to simply sit for months with death was something new. It was a moving past being able to do anything, or to learn anything, or to help, even. It was a season of simple acceptance.
It was all more complicated than that in the details, but that was the underlying chord, the ongoing bass note for the rest of our days together. The need to accept that we were both of us sitting with death. And as Paul said to the fellowship in Rome, "whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's."
And in the Lord, whose steadfast love endures forever, they are both of them very near to each other. Life, and death. Near enough that it reminds you, after sitting with it for long enough, that those who are in death are not all that far away from we who are in life. In either direction, we are near to one another, and love finds the distance no trouble at all.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on life a bit more these days. Tell him your thoughts on life or death at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Faith Works 2-2-24
Faith Works 2-2-24
Jeff Gill
What brings us together
___
If the map of where you find shredded chicken sandwiches was an arson investigation, you'd say the match was lit in Licking County.
To assess the spread of shredded chicken sandwiches as a pool of warm, filling goodness across Ohio and neighboring states, you would see it pouring out from the Newark area and spreading from there, a few splashes over the state boundaries to leave a puddle here and there in West Virginia and Michigan.
I'm quite certain shredded chicken began somehow here, and followed the connections between glass factories, people who moved between plants making bottles or automotive glass, carrying with them the simple secrets of canned deboned chicken, crushed crackers, and perhaps some added cream soup or even evaporated milk to keep it moist over a long simmering stretch in a roaster.
One way to try to trace both across time and over the landscape how our local delicacy became a regional phenomenon would be to sift stacks of church cookbooks. There is a treasure trove of information in those volumes. Often spiral bound, easy to lay flat, found in all sorts of formats and page layouts, they were once a major fundraiser for ladies' aid and women's mission societies.
You will find in most of them a recipe for Scripture Cake, or references to the Holy Trinity (onion, carrots, celery in some areas; swap bell peppers for carrots in the Deep South). There's usually a charming recipe for a good life or a happy family, using a pinch of wisdom and a heaping helping of love, etc.
The real pleasure of church cookbooks, though, is how they are unique to their area and ethnic heritage. Hotdish in the Upper Midwest, burgoo in Kentucky . . . shredded chicken in central and northwest Ohio.
I suspect we could get closer to the origins of shredded chicken by searching back through church cookbooks. And while I proposed last week the connection to the glass making industry to explain the interesting pattern of where shredded chicken is, and where it isn't, following the locations of Owens-Illinois related plants in particular, I can't shake the sense that this mass feeding speciality has church-related roots.
In northern West Virginia, I learned that whether Catholic or Protestant, ethnically Italian or largely English in origin, church events like fellowship dinners, weddings, and funerals, always would have rigatoni with green beans garnished with slivered almonds. Always. A really classy event would have meatballs mixed in with the rigatoni and tomato sauce, liberally seasoned, but they weren't required. There's a story there, too.
Here, our shredded chicken is sold much more often at youth sporting events, or offered up at a concession stand for a band festival or choral contest. It's our preferred mass feeding option. And while churches may not still maintain a china tea service or punchbowl set for wedding receptions, they hold onto their roasters. Those big old roasters have many applications, but it's shredded chicken that I imagine in them whenever I walk past a row of them in a darkened church basement, waiting patiently to be filled in order to fill waiting stomachs.
We may still not have found a path to shared communion between all Christian traditions, but there's a place where we all welcome one another wherever you come from, and that's when churches feed people. After a graveside service in a church basement, Thanksgiving Sunday dinners, in seasonal celebrations of many sorts where guests are invited and made welcome.
For us, in this area, that place of communion is around the humble shredded chicken sandwich. There we may yet all be one.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's sure we can find unity around shredded chicken. Tell him how you see us living and eating as one at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
What brings us together
___
If the map of where you find shredded chicken sandwiches was an arson investigation, you'd say the match was lit in Licking County.
To assess the spread of shredded chicken sandwiches as a pool of warm, filling goodness across Ohio and neighboring states, you would see it pouring out from the Newark area and spreading from there, a few splashes over the state boundaries to leave a puddle here and there in West Virginia and Michigan.
I'm quite certain shredded chicken began somehow here, and followed the connections between glass factories, people who moved between plants making bottles or automotive glass, carrying with them the simple secrets of canned deboned chicken, crushed crackers, and perhaps some added cream soup or even evaporated milk to keep it moist over a long simmering stretch in a roaster.
One way to try to trace both across time and over the landscape how our local delicacy became a regional phenomenon would be to sift stacks of church cookbooks. There is a treasure trove of information in those volumes. Often spiral bound, easy to lay flat, found in all sorts of formats and page layouts, they were once a major fundraiser for ladies' aid and women's mission societies.
You will find in most of them a recipe for Scripture Cake, or references to the Holy Trinity (onion, carrots, celery in some areas; swap bell peppers for carrots in the Deep South). There's usually a charming recipe for a good life or a happy family, using a pinch of wisdom and a heaping helping of love, etc.
The real pleasure of church cookbooks, though, is how they are unique to their area and ethnic heritage. Hotdish in the Upper Midwest, burgoo in Kentucky . . . shredded chicken in central and northwest Ohio.
I suspect we could get closer to the origins of shredded chicken by searching back through church cookbooks. And while I proposed last week the connection to the glass making industry to explain the interesting pattern of where shredded chicken is, and where it isn't, following the locations of Owens-Illinois related plants in particular, I can't shake the sense that this mass feeding speciality has church-related roots.
In northern West Virginia, I learned that whether Catholic or Protestant, ethnically Italian or largely English in origin, church events like fellowship dinners, weddings, and funerals, always would have rigatoni with green beans garnished with slivered almonds. Always. A really classy event would have meatballs mixed in with the rigatoni and tomato sauce, liberally seasoned, but they weren't required. There's a story there, too.
Here, our shredded chicken is sold much more often at youth sporting events, or offered up at a concession stand for a band festival or choral contest. It's our preferred mass feeding option. And while churches may not still maintain a china tea service or punchbowl set for wedding receptions, they hold onto their roasters. Those big old roasters have many applications, but it's shredded chicken that I imagine in them whenever I walk past a row of them in a darkened church basement, waiting patiently to be filled in order to fill waiting stomachs.
We may still not have found a path to shared communion between all Christian traditions, but there's a place where we all welcome one another wherever you come from, and that's when churches feed people. After a graveside service in a church basement, Thanksgiving Sunday dinners, in seasonal celebrations of many sorts where guests are invited and made welcome.
For us, in this area, that place of communion is around the humble shredded chicken sandwich. There we may yet all be one.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's sure we can find unity around shredded chicken. Tell him how you see us living and eating as one at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Friday, January 26, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 2-8-24
Notes from my Knapsack 2-8-24
Jeff Gill
Taking a breath of fresh air
___
On Feb. 8, 1910, now 114 years ago, the Boy Scouts of America were chartered. Scouting had begun just over two years earlier in Great Britain, the brain child of Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, who wisely tended to go by "B-P."
A war hero in England, he came home invited to do anything, but decided he wanted to find a way to use his unexpected fame to serve youth. His experiences around the world made him wonder about what it meant back home for children to grow up in the steadily developing Industrial Revolution, in housing tracts we'd call suburbia today, with less and less contact with nature or the chance to roam and ramble about in it.
"Scouting for Boys" began World Scouting in 1908; girls asked to join early on and in 1909 he developed Girl Guides in Great Britain. A chance encounter with Juliette Gordon Low led to Girl Scouts in the United States after 1912.
Today, the Scouting Movement spans over 200 countries with some 35 million or more members. Scouting is one of the most formative experiences of my life, and I owe Pack 20 and Troop 7, Camp To-pe-nee-bee and Wood Lake Scout Reservation, all more than I can say in this one column. As a Cub Scout and Boy Scout, a youth member and adult leader since 1979, what I've learned through participation in the Scouting program has helped me in all manner of activities and life pursuits far beyond campfires and dutch ovens.
Many are familiar with the Scout Oath and Law, but you may not know as much about the "Aims and Methods" of Scouting. The four aims are Character, Citizenship, Personal Fitness, and Leadership. Those are the elements we aim to develop in young people who participate in the Scouting program.
To achieve those aims, Scouting utilizes eight methods: Our Scouting ideals (exemplified by the Scout Oath, the Scout Law, the Scout Motto, and the Scout Slogan); use of the patrol method; our advancement system (best known in Scouts BSA through ranks and merit badges); the opportunity for healthy adult association; an ongoing emphasis on personal growth; attention to age appropriate leadership development throughout the program; the wearing of a Scout uniform which unifies all participants through a common set of non-trendy clothes; and there's one more to make eight.
That last method through which Scouting delivers on those four aims is an expectation for everyone to participate in outdoor programs. It's that outdoor element I think is still as needed as B-P believed it was, back in 1907 as he was putting the program together for the first time.
Just to get up, and get out of the house. If you do nothing else today, just make sure to go look at some clouds passing, or if they're gone, go see some stars tonight. Walk if you can, get outside when possible, and take in a breath of fresh air. B-P wanted us to start there.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in Scouting a while and hopes to keep giving back. Tell him about youth serving work you've seen be effective at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Taking a breath of fresh air
___
On Feb. 8, 1910, now 114 years ago, the Boy Scouts of America were chartered. Scouting had begun just over two years earlier in Great Britain, the brain child of Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, who wisely tended to go by "B-P."
A war hero in England, he came home invited to do anything, but decided he wanted to find a way to use his unexpected fame to serve youth. His experiences around the world made him wonder about what it meant back home for children to grow up in the steadily developing Industrial Revolution, in housing tracts we'd call suburbia today, with less and less contact with nature or the chance to roam and ramble about in it.
"Scouting for Boys" began World Scouting in 1908; girls asked to join early on and in 1909 he developed Girl Guides in Great Britain. A chance encounter with Juliette Gordon Low led to Girl Scouts in the United States after 1912.
Today, the Scouting Movement spans over 200 countries with some 35 million or more members. Scouting is one of the most formative experiences of my life, and I owe Pack 20 and Troop 7, Camp To-pe-nee-bee and Wood Lake Scout Reservation, all more than I can say in this one column. As a Cub Scout and Boy Scout, a youth member and adult leader since 1979, what I've learned through participation in the Scouting program has helped me in all manner of activities and life pursuits far beyond campfires and dutch ovens.
Many are familiar with the Scout Oath and Law, but you may not know as much about the "Aims and Methods" of Scouting. The four aims are Character, Citizenship, Personal Fitness, and Leadership. Those are the elements we aim to develop in young people who participate in the Scouting program.
To achieve those aims, Scouting utilizes eight methods: Our Scouting ideals (exemplified by the Scout Oath, the Scout Law, the Scout Motto, and the Scout Slogan); use of the patrol method; our advancement system (best known in Scouts BSA through ranks and merit badges); the opportunity for healthy adult association; an ongoing emphasis on personal growth; attention to age appropriate leadership development throughout the program; the wearing of a Scout uniform which unifies all participants through a common set of non-trendy clothes; and there's one more to make eight.
That last method through which Scouting delivers on those four aims is an expectation for everyone to participate in outdoor programs. It's that outdoor element I think is still as needed as B-P believed it was, back in 1907 as he was putting the program together for the first time.
Just to get up, and get out of the house. If you do nothing else today, just make sure to go look at some clouds passing, or if they're gone, go see some stars tonight. Walk if you can, get outside when possible, and take in a breath of fresh air. B-P wanted us to start there.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in Scouting a while and hopes to keep giving back. Tell him about youth serving work you've seen be effective at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, January 22, 2024
Faith Works 1-26-24
Faith Works 1-26-24
Jeff Gill
Work, food, and family
___
You've been traveling with me in search of shredded chicken sandwiches, those simple assemblies of deboned canned chicken, cracker crumbs, and perhaps a can of cream of something soup (to use the most basic recipe of the many that are out there, it turns out).
And we had a detour into West Virginia last week, to consider the homely delights of the pepperoni roll, a another simple meal very intentionally created to serve something filling in a way that travels and eats well for coal miner, even though they've developed far beyond those roots.
In seeking out the strange story of shredded chicken, it's worth repeating that they turn out to be a very location specific delicacy. People who grew up in Licking County or central Ohio have been shocked to move to Chicago or New Jersey let alone California and find out that as basic as the combo is, it's not everywhere.
Even within Ohio, somewhere around Ashland they stop showing up, and long-time local folk confirm you don't find shredded chicken on menus in Parma and definitely not in Cleveland. Towards Cincinnati, the range is maybe to Washington Court House but that's debatable: they definitely don't compete with chili over spaghetti in the Queen City area.
Yet they do run up through Toledo, and as far northwest as Wauseon. Which is where the story gets interesting, because of the opposite direction. I saw shredded chicken served at a few lunch counters in Fairmont, West Virginia — yes, the birthplace of the pepperoni roll — when I moved there in 1993.
I also was startled to see some familiar names in the obituaries, with ties directly back to Newark. It didn't take long to connect this through Owens-Illinois, glass manufacturing and bottle making. From 1910 to 1982, they had a plant there employing thousands, and clearly employees sometimes moved between sites. Newark Star Glass Works began in 1871, Edward Everett expanded their production taking over in 1880, becoming the Ohio Bottle Company and ultimately a part of Owens-Corning making fiberglas from 1934, as it continues to do so.
There's a whole complex corporate history glossed over in there, but between Shields and Everett here, and Edward Libbey plus Michael Joseph Owens up in the Toledo area, there's a web of connections (pulling Henry Ford in early on as they made automotive glass for him, and the Findlay area where Mr. Owens first figured out how to mass produce glass bulbs for Mr. Edison before branching out into bottle making technology). The common thread for me, though, is shredded chicken.
I can't prove it, and there no "miner's lunchbox" origin story, but the odd outline of shredded chicken territory seems to follow the glass making network, with interesting puddles in outlying places like Fairmont which to me seals the deal. Somehow, maybe with the gas burners always there to use in simmering a pot, I think shredded chicken began in bottle works and glass factories, and traveled with their skilled laborers as they moved about with the development of the mass produced bottle industry. Let's just say the data fits.
Yet within that well defined irregular splotch on the map of the Midwest, mostly within central and northwestern Ohio, there is a richness of variation. You could line up a dozen different shredded chicken sandwiches, and from a distance they'd look the same, but in the eating, they'd each have a unique recipe, process, and taste. They're the same, yet different.
Which takes me from lunch counters and football concession stands to church basements, and those deep roasters, and remembered scents, familiar flavors. All somewhat the same, each so very distinct.
Can you give me one last week on this delicious subject?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's feeling awfully hungry right now. Share your preferred recipe for shredded chicken at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Work, food, and family
___
You've been traveling with me in search of shredded chicken sandwiches, those simple assemblies of deboned canned chicken, cracker crumbs, and perhaps a can of cream of something soup (to use the most basic recipe of the many that are out there, it turns out).
And we had a detour into West Virginia last week, to consider the homely delights of the pepperoni roll, a another simple meal very intentionally created to serve something filling in a way that travels and eats well for coal miner, even though they've developed far beyond those roots.
In seeking out the strange story of shredded chicken, it's worth repeating that they turn out to be a very location specific delicacy. People who grew up in Licking County or central Ohio have been shocked to move to Chicago or New Jersey let alone California and find out that as basic as the combo is, it's not everywhere.
Even within Ohio, somewhere around Ashland they stop showing up, and long-time local folk confirm you don't find shredded chicken on menus in Parma and definitely not in Cleveland. Towards Cincinnati, the range is maybe to Washington Court House but that's debatable: they definitely don't compete with chili over spaghetti in the Queen City area.
Yet they do run up through Toledo, and as far northwest as Wauseon. Which is where the story gets interesting, because of the opposite direction. I saw shredded chicken served at a few lunch counters in Fairmont, West Virginia — yes, the birthplace of the pepperoni roll — when I moved there in 1993.
I also was startled to see some familiar names in the obituaries, with ties directly back to Newark. It didn't take long to connect this through Owens-Illinois, glass manufacturing and bottle making. From 1910 to 1982, they had a plant there employing thousands, and clearly employees sometimes moved between sites. Newark Star Glass Works began in 1871, Edward Everett expanded their production taking over in 1880, becoming the Ohio Bottle Company and ultimately a part of Owens-Corning making fiberglas from 1934, as it continues to do so.
There's a whole complex corporate history glossed over in there, but between Shields and Everett here, and Edward Libbey plus Michael Joseph Owens up in the Toledo area, there's a web of connections (pulling Henry Ford in early on as they made automotive glass for him, and the Findlay area where Mr. Owens first figured out how to mass produce glass bulbs for Mr. Edison before branching out into bottle making technology). The common thread for me, though, is shredded chicken.
I can't prove it, and there no "miner's lunchbox" origin story, but the odd outline of shredded chicken territory seems to follow the glass making network, with interesting puddles in outlying places like Fairmont which to me seals the deal. Somehow, maybe with the gas burners always there to use in simmering a pot, I think shredded chicken began in bottle works and glass factories, and traveled with their skilled laborers as they moved about with the development of the mass produced bottle industry. Let's just say the data fits.
Yet within that well defined irregular splotch on the map of the Midwest, mostly within central and northwestern Ohio, there is a richness of variation. You could line up a dozen different shredded chicken sandwiches, and from a distance they'd look the same, but in the eating, they'd each have a unique recipe, process, and taste. They're the same, yet different.
Which takes me from lunch counters and football concession stands to church basements, and those deep roasters, and remembered scents, familiar flavors. All somewhat the same, each so very distinct.
Can you give me one last week on this delicious subject?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's feeling awfully hungry right now. Share your preferred recipe for shredded chicken at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Monday, January 08, 2024
Faith Works 1-19-24
Faith Works 1-19-24
Jeff Gill
Comfort foods and a culture of community
___
Don't worry, I'll get back to shredded chicken sandwiches here in a bit. Didn't think I was done, did you?
During the bowl games, when the West Virginia Mountaineers were playing in a mayonnaise themed contest, the booth commentators took a break from play to sample pepperoni rolls.
Now, WVU is in Morgantown; Fairmont, West Virginia claims it is the one true home of pepperoni rolls, but you can find them up and down the Monongahela River all the way north to Pittsburgh, and south a ways. There are pepperoni roll outposts down towards Parkersburg and even around Charleston, and the state has adopted it their state food.
The roots are underground: they were made as a simple lunch to take down into the coal mines. Sticks of pepperoni, beloved of the southern Italians who were recruited by the thousands in the early 1900s, baked into small loaves which you could put into your pocket. Some today still maintain a true pepperoni roll has sticks baked longwise into the roll, but you can find them with a sheaf of pepperoni slices or even ground pepperoni in the dough.
During the Mountaineer football victory, the on air crew ate pepperoni rolls . . . with mayo. This provoked the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia to strongly protest, suggesting penance was needed, while adding that the use of Miracle Whip on a pepperoni roll is an abomination. It was all in good fun, sort of. And yet said with a hint of seriousness.
Comfort foods are close to our hearts, and how to make them can be a ritual with religious overtones. They have a history, and we are telling a story to ourselves, and about ourselves, as we make and consume them. This is most obvious every Thanksgiving, and in many Christmas cookie recipes, but it's true all year long in certain ways.
Which brings me back to shredded chicken sandwiches. When I left here and we moved to Fairmont, West Virginia for six years, on the counter as a housewarming gift on our arrival was a bag of pepperoni rolls from Giuseppe Argiro's original bakery. We learned the story, and I came to understand the linkage to history and struggle and sacrifice every time one was eaten, even if I've never worked in a coal mine. And the core pepperoni roll territory tracks with the seams of coal and the mine shafts of West Virginia.
What's going on behind our fascination with shredded chicken sandwiches? One story claims that back a hundred years or so, every family raised chickens, and they laid eggs; you didn't kill a chicken until it stopped laying, by which time they were pretty tough, so you had to cook them down long and slow in a cream sauce. Yeah, I can see that.
But chickens are everywhere. We aren't and never have been the chicken capital of the world, or even Ohio. That doesn't explain the very precise footprint of shredded chicken commonality, exploding out of an apparent Licking County epicenter and sprawling north and west across the state.
We may never know the actual origin of the shredded chicken sandwich as we have it today, the core recipe of a can of boneless chicken, a tube of crackers crushed, and a can of cream soup, mixed together and simmered at length, served up on a hamburger bun. But I suspect I know how it spread as it did.
And my guess has to do with finding an unexpected outpost of shredded chicken . . . in Fairmont, West Virginia. The connection isn't coal mining, but something our two areas have in common besides crock pots and roasters.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's nearing an end (a temporary one) to his shredded digression into 2024. Tell him what foods keep you grounded at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Comfort foods and a culture of community
___
Don't worry, I'll get back to shredded chicken sandwiches here in a bit. Didn't think I was done, did you?
During the bowl games, when the West Virginia Mountaineers were playing in a mayonnaise themed contest, the booth commentators took a break from play to sample pepperoni rolls.
Now, WVU is in Morgantown; Fairmont, West Virginia claims it is the one true home of pepperoni rolls, but you can find them up and down the Monongahela River all the way north to Pittsburgh, and south a ways. There are pepperoni roll outposts down towards Parkersburg and even around Charleston, and the state has adopted it their state food.
The roots are underground: they were made as a simple lunch to take down into the coal mines. Sticks of pepperoni, beloved of the southern Italians who were recruited by the thousands in the early 1900s, baked into small loaves which you could put into your pocket. Some today still maintain a true pepperoni roll has sticks baked longwise into the roll, but you can find them with a sheaf of pepperoni slices or even ground pepperoni in the dough.
During the Mountaineer football victory, the on air crew ate pepperoni rolls . . . with mayo. This provoked the Episcopal Diocese of West Virginia to strongly protest, suggesting penance was needed, while adding that the use of Miracle Whip on a pepperoni roll is an abomination. It was all in good fun, sort of. And yet said with a hint of seriousness.
Comfort foods are close to our hearts, and how to make them can be a ritual with religious overtones. They have a history, and we are telling a story to ourselves, and about ourselves, as we make and consume them. This is most obvious every Thanksgiving, and in many Christmas cookie recipes, but it's true all year long in certain ways.
Which brings me back to shredded chicken sandwiches. When I left here and we moved to Fairmont, West Virginia for six years, on the counter as a housewarming gift on our arrival was a bag of pepperoni rolls from Giuseppe Argiro's original bakery. We learned the story, and I came to understand the linkage to history and struggle and sacrifice every time one was eaten, even if I've never worked in a coal mine. And the core pepperoni roll territory tracks with the seams of coal and the mine shafts of West Virginia.
What's going on behind our fascination with shredded chicken sandwiches? One story claims that back a hundred years or so, every family raised chickens, and they laid eggs; you didn't kill a chicken until it stopped laying, by which time they were pretty tough, so you had to cook them down long and slow in a cream sauce. Yeah, I can see that.
But chickens are everywhere. We aren't and never have been the chicken capital of the world, or even Ohio. That doesn't explain the very precise footprint of shredded chicken commonality, exploding out of an apparent Licking County epicenter and sprawling north and west across the state.
We may never know the actual origin of the shredded chicken sandwich as we have it today, the core recipe of a can of boneless chicken, a tube of crackers crushed, and a can of cream soup, mixed together and simmered at length, served up on a hamburger bun. But I suspect I know how it spread as it did.
And my guess has to do with finding an unexpected outpost of shredded chicken . . . in Fairmont, West Virginia. The connection isn't coal mining, but something our two areas have in common besides crock pots and roasters.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's nearing an end (a temporary one) to his shredded digression into 2024. Tell him what foods keep you grounded at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Notes from my Knapsack 1-25-24
Notes from my Knapsack 1-25-24
Jeff Gill
Chickens and eggs and smartphones
___
Correlation does not equal causality.
It's a common statement around scientific endeavors in general and social science in particular. Just because something happens right before something else occurs doesn't mean the one caused the other. It could, for instance, mean they're both caused by the same as yet unmeasured trigger, but one phenomenon happens a little faster than the other.
Another funny way to make the point about correlation versus causality: there's a website by a guy named Tyler Vigen called "Spurious Correlations." His flexible brain working with modern data tools has been able to plot out graphs "showing" odd correlations such as how deaths by drowning in swimming pools closely follows by year the number of films Nicolas Cage appears in. Somehow, there is a statistical correlation, but surely not causation (I can hear some of you thinking furiously about how there might be, and you go right ahead).
An infamous version of this was a magazine story entitled "Bullying Can Make a Bully Healthier," that somehow picked up on data showing that bullies have a lower risk of chronic disease. Is there a connection? May well be, but causation? At the very least I hope not.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been getting a great deal of media attention, justified I would argue, for taking a wide range of survey data, and a global perspective, to demonstrate that starting in 2012 we've seen in the industrialized West a significant teen mental health crisis. His global view is important, because he is able to compare outcomes and changes within cultures and circumstances, and it's not a global shift caused by cosmic rays.
Or as Haidt said more recently, "(this crisis) was not caused by reality getting worse around 2012. Their material and physical health improved steadily." You can look up his work to see how he carefully demonstrates that aspect of what's going on. And then he says "(t)o paraphrase Epictetus: 'It is not events which disturb teens. It is the device through which they interpret all events.'" It's access on a personal, ongoing basis to smartphones.
Here's where I want to offer a note of caution, even as I've been standing with school administrators who are concerned that the incendiary effect of social media on personal devices are creating more intense, faster spreading tensions between students. They'd like to see smartphones limited in their buildings, more than they're allowed to in many cases.
Yet correlation is not causation. There's a growing assumption that the connection between smartphone enabled social media and increased mental health issues for teens is related to content, to challenges around self-image, invidious comparisons, teasing and taunting and bullying. That could be. We don't know.
But what won't get better, if we empower schools to decisively limit devices on school property, is if the decline in teen mental health and increases in anxiety and depression are all more connected to lack of sleep. The obsessive scrolling and clicking and gaming to 3 am most nights. Is sleep the true culprit here? We don't know.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; nope, he's not yet done with this subject. Tell him what you think, but not at 3 am, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Chickens and eggs and smartphones
___
Correlation does not equal causality.
It's a common statement around scientific endeavors in general and social science in particular. Just because something happens right before something else occurs doesn't mean the one caused the other. It could, for instance, mean they're both caused by the same as yet unmeasured trigger, but one phenomenon happens a little faster than the other.
Another funny way to make the point about correlation versus causality: there's a website by a guy named Tyler Vigen called "Spurious Correlations." His flexible brain working with modern data tools has been able to plot out graphs "showing" odd correlations such as how deaths by drowning in swimming pools closely follows by year the number of films Nicolas Cage appears in. Somehow, there is a statistical correlation, but surely not causation (I can hear some of you thinking furiously about how there might be, and you go right ahead).
An infamous version of this was a magazine story entitled "Bullying Can Make a Bully Healthier," that somehow picked up on data showing that bullies have a lower risk of chronic disease. Is there a connection? May well be, but causation? At the very least I hope not.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been getting a great deal of media attention, justified I would argue, for taking a wide range of survey data, and a global perspective, to demonstrate that starting in 2012 we've seen in the industrialized West a significant teen mental health crisis. His global view is important, because he is able to compare outcomes and changes within cultures and circumstances, and it's not a global shift caused by cosmic rays.
Or as Haidt said more recently, "(this crisis) was not caused by reality getting worse around 2012. Their material and physical health improved steadily." You can look up his work to see how he carefully demonstrates that aspect of what's going on. And then he says "(t)o paraphrase Epictetus: 'It is not events which disturb teens. It is the device through which they interpret all events.'" It's access on a personal, ongoing basis to smartphones.
Here's where I want to offer a note of caution, even as I've been standing with school administrators who are concerned that the incendiary effect of social media on personal devices are creating more intense, faster spreading tensions between students. They'd like to see smartphones limited in their buildings, more than they're allowed to in many cases.
Yet correlation is not causation. There's a growing assumption that the connection between smartphone enabled social media and increased mental health issues for teens is related to content, to challenges around self-image, invidious comparisons, teasing and taunting and bullying. That could be. We don't know.
But what won't get better, if we empower schools to decisively limit devices on school property, is if the decline in teen mental health and increases in anxiety and depression are all more connected to lack of sleep. The obsessive scrolling and clicking and gaming to 3 am most nights. Is sleep the true culprit here? We don't know.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; nope, he's not yet done with this subject. Tell him what you think, but not at 3 am, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 1-12-24
Faith Works 1-12-24
Jeff Gill
Shredding my plans for the new year
___
Let's just say there's a serious level of interest out there in shredded chicken.
Yes, a few let me know that they would rather eat truck stop sushi past its sell-by date than have a shredded chicken sandwich again, but they are emphatically in the minority.
For many, shredded chicken sandwiches are a comfort food up there with grilled cheese and tomato soup, or mashed potatoes with gravy. Warming, filling, comforting.
More than a few of you touched on the Depression era roots of a simple meal which could be made with what was on hand, and there was usually an opened sleeve of crackers and a can of boneless chicken in the pantry. Or as some reminisced, there was a time when canning included chicken along with cherries and tomatoes in the Mason jars on the shelves.
What I did not realize was the rich, complex diversity of this simple entree. I had a sense of its geographic reach, and the reality that the beating heart of shredded chicken territory is Licking County, Ohio. That heart isn't quite a center, because the range stretches east up to but not quite along the Ohio River, south hardly at all, and to the northwest I heard from friends in Wauseon confidently assuring me that if I got up there to visit them, they could find me a menu with shredded chicken on it.
Columbus is within the realm of the sacred sandwich, but Cleveland is not and Cincinnatians are expressing horror at the very concept as I described it to them (but look at what they do to their spaghetti). Toledo is contested ground, but Lima and Clyde and Bowling Green are within the holy lands, so to speak.
There is, of course, a website: chickensandwich.info which has over two decades of data, sporadically updated. It shows an isolated outpost in Athens, but since it was at a Whit's, I'm guessing that's the Licking County influence at work.
The website also provides almost twenty recipes, and links to many more. Because it turns out there are even MORE ways to make the humble shredded chicken than I realized. When I posted last week's column on my social media, I heard from many former concession chefs for middle and high school events, which took my previous lore focused around church basements to a whole new level.
Roasters are the key element in making shredded chicken for the masses, and also why it's tricky to make just a few of them. Big families might be able to pull it off, but if you're just cooking for one or two, you're likely to do something quite different from mixing up large cans of boneless chicken, crushing and stirring in a box of crackers, and adding a significant amount of canned soup.
I suspect there's also something to the time spent simmering away in that roaster, and how experienced concession stand parents maintain their product. Evaporated milk had never crossed my mind as an element of shredded chicken sandwiches, but it has been explained to me that it helps keep your vat of shredded from drying out, but it cooks down nicely in the mix.
The cracker conundrum still hovers over this question: how best to make shredded chicken? A surprising number of folks told me they used half Ritz, half saltines, because just the latter is (no surprise) too salty.
Central to this whole issue is: why here? Why us? What makes Licking County the home and heartland of shredded chicken? I'm on a pilgrimage close to home as we try to understand: why.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made a few roasters full himself. How long will this topic drive the "Faith Works" column? Tell him yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Shredding my plans for the new year
___
Let's just say there's a serious level of interest out there in shredded chicken.
Yes, a few let me know that they would rather eat truck stop sushi past its sell-by date than have a shredded chicken sandwich again, but they are emphatically in the minority.
For many, shredded chicken sandwiches are a comfort food up there with grilled cheese and tomato soup, or mashed potatoes with gravy. Warming, filling, comforting.
More than a few of you touched on the Depression era roots of a simple meal which could be made with what was on hand, and there was usually an opened sleeve of crackers and a can of boneless chicken in the pantry. Or as some reminisced, there was a time when canning included chicken along with cherries and tomatoes in the Mason jars on the shelves.
What I did not realize was the rich, complex diversity of this simple entree. I had a sense of its geographic reach, and the reality that the beating heart of shredded chicken territory is Licking County, Ohio. That heart isn't quite a center, because the range stretches east up to but not quite along the Ohio River, south hardly at all, and to the northwest I heard from friends in Wauseon confidently assuring me that if I got up there to visit them, they could find me a menu with shredded chicken on it.
Columbus is within the realm of the sacred sandwich, but Cleveland is not and Cincinnatians are expressing horror at the very concept as I described it to them (but look at what they do to their spaghetti). Toledo is contested ground, but Lima and Clyde and Bowling Green are within the holy lands, so to speak.
There is, of course, a website: chickensandwich.info which has over two decades of data, sporadically updated. It shows an isolated outpost in Athens, but since it was at a Whit's, I'm guessing that's the Licking County influence at work.
The website also provides almost twenty recipes, and links to many more. Because it turns out there are even MORE ways to make the humble shredded chicken than I realized. When I posted last week's column on my social media, I heard from many former concession chefs for middle and high school events, which took my previous lore focused around church basements to a whole new level.
Roasters are the key element in making shredded chicken for the masses, and also why it's tricky to make just a few of them. Big families might be able to pull it off, but if you're just cooking for one or two, you're likely to do something quite different from mixing up large cans of boneless chicken, crushing and stirring in a box of crackers, and adding a significant amount of canned soup.
I suspect there's also something to the time spent simmering away in that roaster, and how experienced concession stand parents maintain their product. Evaporated milk had never crossed my mind as an element of shredded chicken sandwiches, but it has been explained to me that it helps keep your vat of shredded from drying out, but it cooks down nicely in the mix.
The cracker conundrum still hovers over this question: how best to make shredded chicken? A surprising number of folks told me they used half Ritz, half saltines, because just the latter is (no surprise) too salty.
Central to this whole issue is: why here? Why us? What makes Licking County the home and heartland of shredded chicken? I'm on a pilgrimage close to home as we try to understand: why.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made a few roasters full himself. How long will this topic drive the "Faith Works" column? Tell him yourself at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Tuesday, January 02, 2024
Notes from my Knapsack 1-11-24
Notes from my Knapsack 1-11-24
Jeff Gill
Learning what from who, where, and when
___
Who was it that first said "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?"
Well, I'm typing this on a laptop connected to the internet, plus I have a smartphone next to me with a good cell connection. Hold on a sec.
Huh. It is from an essay in 1841 entitled "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
This is one of the huge advantages of the internet world we now live in. In school or even in seminary, I would have needed to not only have some research skills around how to use various reference tools to find the full source of that quote, I almost certainly would have needed to physically go to a library building, downtown or elsewhere, and possibly be sent from that library to a library at a college or other more distant location.
I remember when the rise of inter-library loan was seen as a massive transformation of the research process, that you could get books sent from another city or state to your local library for access. It was, truly, big stuff. (When? It was a college only thing when I was in high school, but . . . let's look it up. Oh my. So interlibrary loans between colleges began in 1876; the Ohio College Library Center began here in 1967, which grew to become the Online Computer Library Center, now based just down the road in Dublin!)
So when I talked at the end of last year about concerns around being too online for school age youth, I was echoing what an overwhelming plurality to school officials have been telling me these last few years. The constant checking and scanning and scrolling around personal platforms and messaging has, in their eyes, increased both anxiety and depression, as well as threats and conflict between students. None of us think the internet created these issues, but they've been an accelerant, like gasoline to a match, causing brush fires of interpersonal tensions to blaze out of control faster and more widely than they did just a decade ago.
Is a totally un-connected world feasible, in education or for parenting? I don't think so. It's a question of management, of guardrails and boundaries. And the everlasting question of how one family raises their child while a nearby family has different boundaries, if any at all, and what happens when they come together.
In the Scouting movement, it's become a requirement along with knife and axe safety and how to handle fires and flames, to take a sort of cyber-safety course. Many schools have begun to include online etiquette and ethics in their plan of study.
And I will continue in 2024 to note that many of the ills blamed on the online life may have more to do with the sleep that is lost to them than the content you find in it. Lack of sleep is plaguing both youth and adults, and we're seeing that loss in many ways.
Some of you have proposed solutions, and I plan to share some of those ideas as we roll on into 2024.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he spent too much time reading about Emerson & the OCLC while preparing this column. Tell him how the internet distracts you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Learning what from who, where, and when
___
Who was it that first said "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds?"
Well, I'm typing this on a laptop connected to the internet, plus I have a smartphone next to me with a good cell connection. Hold on a sec.
Huh. It is from an essay in 1841 entitled "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
This is one of the huge advantages of the internet world we now live in. In school or even in seminary, I would have needed to not only have some research skills around how to use various reference tools to find the full source of that quote, I almost certainly would have needed to physically go to a library building, downtown or elsewhere, and possibly be sent from that library to a library at a college or other more distant location.
I remember when the rise of inter-library loan was seen as a massive transformation of the research process, that you could get books sent from another city or state to your local library for access. It was, truly, big stuff. (When? It was a college only thing when I was in high school, but . . . let's look it up. Oh my. So interlibrary loans between colleges began in 1876; the Ohio College Library Center began here in 1967, which grew to become the Online Computer Library Center, now based just down the road in Dublin!)
So when I talked at the end of last year about concerns around being too online for school age youth, I was echoing what an overwhelming plurality to school officials have been telling me these last few years. The constant checking and scanning and scrolling around personal platforms and messaging has, in their eyes, increased both anxiety and depression, as well as threats and conflict between students. None of us think the internet created these issues, but they've been an accelerant, like gasoline to a match, causing brush fires of interpersonal tensions to blaze out of control faster and more widely than they did just a decade ago.
Is a totally un-connected world feasible, in education or for parenting? I don't think so. It's a question of management, of guardrails and boundaries. And the everlasting question of how one family raises their child while a nearby family has different boundaries, if any at all, and what happens when they come together.
In the Scouting movement, it's become a requirement along with knife and axe safety and how to handle fires and flames, to take a sort of cyber-safety course. Many schools have begun to include online etiquette and ethics in their plan of study.
And I will continue in 2024 to note that many of the ills blamed on the online life may have more to do with the sleep that is lost to them than the content you find in it. Lack of sleep is plaguing both youth and adults, and we're seeing that loss in many ways.
Some of you have proposed solutions, and I plan to share some of those ideas as we roll on into 2024.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he spent too much time reading about Emerson & the OCLC while preparing this column. Tell him how the internet distracts you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Faith Works 1-5-24
Faith Works 1-5-24
Jeff Gill
Not to create a theological controversy
___
Rarely do I venture into the murky and deep waters of theological debate in this column.
The goal, as always, is to seek unity and shared understandings among those open to a faith based perspective, not to defend certain religious traditions or particular church structures.
Yet I've been intrigued recently by a subject which is on the teetering precipice of sectarian dispute. I've wondered about this for some time, and have never quite had the nerve to write about the subject. Here we are at the outset of a new year, and perhaps this is the time.
I'm talking about shredded chicken sandwiches.
Moving here from central Indiana in the fall of 1989, I'd never had them. Then I went to an early craft show that year, and the cafe to one side of the Christmas decor and other sale tables included "Shredded Chicken." It was a dollar, and fit both my budget and my current cash situation, and I was hungry. But what was it?
"Oh, everyone makes this around here." I was shown a can of Sweet Sue boneless chicken, and told you simply heated it up with crumbled saltine crackers and some pepper. I ate of it, and it was good.
But this was only the beginning. As the years scrolled by, I would sample shredded chicken sandwiches in a variety of homely settings: church basements, after funerals, at football games and basketball tournaments, in snack bars set up for choir and band contests. And I developed a cook's interest in asking when I could "how do you make it?"
This is where you get the second of the two interesting but fraught questions around the dreaded shredded (as some would say). The first is the boundary of the sandwich's domain — it's not everywhere, but it is everyone around here, if you can figure out where here is. Let's say from Urbana in the west to Mansfield in the north, and down to Portsmouth and over to somewhere this side of Steubenville and Martin's Ferry, but shredded chicken has made inroads up to the Ohio in a few points around past Marietta. This field needs further research.
The second and more truly theological question is what makes "true" shredded chicken. I learned early on that some will say "not saltines, but Ritz crackers." You get a buttery taste, 'tis true. Yet the saltine true believers hold Ritz to be an external imposition on the one true shredded chicken.
Adding to the denominational complexity: adding soup. There is a reformation of shredded chicken cooking which breaks out into many traditions, each certain of their own rightness. The mainstream is a can of cream of chicken to a much larger can of boneless chicken into the roasting pan. Others say the chicken on chicken effect is not useful, and prefer cream of celery; there are a few obscure sectarians who assert the ideal of a can of cream of mushroom (this may be a Great Lakes Lutheran influence, I don't know, again worth scholarly study).
Atop the soup/no soup distinction, there are the modifications of soup (but which one) plus crackers (saltine or Ritz, or even Club), plus I have had a perfectly satisfying shredded chicken sandwich which I learned had breadcrumbs added in, not crushed crackers.
Finally, in a liturgical flourish, there's the question of if the vat or roaster of shredded chicken should have pepper added, lightly or not at all, versus leaving the pepper quotient to the one stacking up their sandwich.
In central Ohio, these are existential questions. Where does your faith stand?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's eaten many shredded chicken sandwiches. What's your preferred recipe? Tell him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
Jeff Gill
Not to create a theological controversy
___
Rarely do I venture into the murky and deep waters of theological debate in this column.
The goal, as always, is to seek unity and shared understandings among those open to a faith based perspective, not to defend certain religious traditions or particular church structures.
Yet I've been intrigued recently by a subject which is on the teetering precipice of sectarian dispute. I've wondered about this for some time, and have never quite had the nerve to write about the subject. Here we are at the outset of a new year, and perhaps this is the time.
I'm talking about shredded chicken sandwiches.
Moving here from central Indiana in the fall of 1989, I'd never had them. Then I went to an early craft show that year, and the cafe to one side of the Christmas decor and other sale tables included "Shredded Chicken." It was a dollar, and fit both my budget and my current cash situation, and I was hungry. But what was it?
"Oh, everyone makes this around here." I was shown a can of Sweet Sue boneless chicken, and told you simply heated it up with crumbled saltine crackers and some pepper. I ate of it, and it was good.
But this was only the beginning. As the years scrolled by, I would sample shredded chicken sandwiches in a variety of homely settings: church basements, after funerals, at football games and basketball tournaments, in snack bars set up for choir and band contests. And I developed a cook's interest in asking when I could "how do you make it?"
This is where you get the second of the two interesting but fraught questions around the dreaded shredded (as some would say). The first is the boundary of the sandwich's domain — it's not everywhere, but it is everyone around here, if you can figure out where here is. Let's say from Urbana in the west to Mansfield in the north, and down to Portsmouth and over to somewhere this side of Steubenville and Martin's Ferry, but shredded chicken has made inroads up to the Ohio in a few points around past Marietta. This field needs further research.
The second and more truly theological question is what makes "true" shredded chicken. I learned early on that some will say "not saltines, but Ritz crackers." You get a buttery taste, 'tis true. Yet the saltine true believers hold Ritz to be an external imposition on the one true shredded chicken.
Adding to the denominational complexity: adding soup. There is a reformation of shredded chicken cooking which breaks out into many traditions, each certain of their own rightness. The mainstream is a can of cream of chicken to a much larger can of boneless chicken into the roasting pan. Others say the chicken on chicken effect is not useful, and prefer cream of celery; there are a few obscure sectarians who assert the ideal of a can of cream of mushroom (this may be a Great Lakes Lutheran influence, I don't know, again worth scholarly study).
Atop the soup/no soup distinction, there are the modifications of soup (but which one) plus crackers (saltine or Ritz, or even Club), plus I have had a perfectly satisfying shredded chicken sandwich which I learned had breadcrumbs added in, not crushed crackers.
Finally, in a liturgical flourish, there's the question of if the vat or roaster of shredded chicken should have pepper added, lightly or not at all, versus leaving the pepper quotient to the one stacking up their sandwich.
In central Ohio, these are existential questions. Where does your faith stand?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's eaten many shredded chicken sandwiches. What's your preferred recipe? Tell him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
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