Faith Works 1-02

Faith Works 1-2-10
Jeff Gill

Healings May Just Be the Everyday Supernatural
___

I believe in healing, not that this represents a solution to the ongoing health care debate.

Over the last month, I've had some pretty unpleasant surgery. Not the sort that carries deep and momentous consequences for the future (i.e., no cancer involved), but to deal with some health issues that have been impairing my well-being, functioning, and general upkeep for some years now.

The aftermath, part of what the medical team calls "the healing process" had its own particular elements of nasty, but as Dr. Shakespeare says, "all's well that ends well." This particular surgical intervention has worked, the medications were effective, and I'm feeling healthier than I have for literally years and years.

What the doctor and nurses and staff would all agree about is that healing, per se, is made possible in some cases by surgical intervention and by medications both prescription and off-the-shelf; but, it really happens within the person of the patient, which is to say, not even just with that one individual.

Healing requires the active support of family and friends, and of your state of mind, which is dependent on your surroundings as much as your interior life. Healing demands that you be in a community of concern, as opposed to being surrounded by those who just want you to go back to old and often self-destructive ways.

In other words, you can't heal a person with a pill and a scalpel, and no one knows that better than medical professionals.

Which is why, I suspect, you find so many highly trained, totally professional health care folks who value prayer as a key element in healing. They won't impose it, but they do ask if you have "personal or spiritual practices that aid in pain management" and other such oblique queries. Prayer is there, all the time, often right where you least expect it.

Because if a drug alone, or just an incision and poking about would cure people, they'd know it. They'd see it. And they don't.

Prayer and spiritual healing means different things to different people. Oral Roberts, who died a few weeks ago, did a great deal to both renew interest in the intersection of spiritual and physical healing, and also to cloud the issue. God be good to him. His excesses in aid of a TV ministry may have given a peculiar cast to the light in which many people view his work and that of his many successors, who make promises that imply God's favor is tied to checks put in the mail.

What can't be obscured is that the human body is an amazingly complex physical organism, "fearfully and wonderfully made." The very best of medical science does not always know what is going on, whether it has to do with allergic reactions, vertigo, heart rhythms, or brain waves.

The very best of religious thinking, or theology, says (at least in the Christian tradition) that miraculous cures are not given as rewards or in response to our efforts or worth, but that those inexplicable moments of grace are meant as signs. The whole Gospel of John is tied up with this awareness, that healings do not come to the deserving or even to those to whom they might be expected, but that each miracle is meant to point beyond itself to the fullness of God's purposes.

So we pray for cures, but what prayer is most fruitful in is healing. That nearly mysterious and very poorly understood process whereby the strange device called a body continues to express thoughts and ideas and hopes and dreams. To endure and continue and cope, to recover from the wounds of this world and to keep on keepin' on – that takes a little bit of healing every day.

Which is a downright miraculous phenomenon that happens all around us, every day. Do we overlook the power of that kind of healing because it isn't dramatic enough, isn't big enough to impress us with our own significance? Or might appreciating and valuing the sort of everyday miracle of healing, physical and spiritual, that gets most of us along our journey actually do a better of job of giving God the glory on a daily basis?

You could pray about it!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a healing tale at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 12-24-09
Jeff Gill

And Everything Changed



The baby was born, and everything changed.

I talked to a mother this week, here in Licking County. She and her husband began the paperwork for an international adoption, reaching out to a country where poverty and social norms combine to generate a disturbingly large number of babies without homes.

They will need two to three years to complete the whole process, and their plan is to request not a newborn, as so many do, more than are available, in fact, but to pursue a child who is already a few years old. A child who has not been adopted.

Which means, of course, by simple math and painful reality, that this child is born this week, or thereabouts. Already, but unknown, unknowably distant; God willing, as this all works out, a child is born to them in a land far away, but just now come into the world with tears and smiles and hope.

For this family to take in another child, since they have some of their own already, they will have to make adjustments. Some have already been made, others are in the works, a few more are contemplated. As experienced parents, they know the biggest adjustments are yet to come, for each child is unique, even if the experience of diapering is mindlessly the same.

When the baby enters your life, everything changes.

There’s something deep within almost everyone that makes the cry of a baby pull our attention and focus away from the most compelling reality show, off of our favorite activities, out of ourselves, and shift to asking “what does the baby need?” Even childless “civilians” know that tug, at the mind and in the heart. For some it is merely an irritation – “why doesn’t someone do something about that crying baby?” but for most it becomes a question – “what could I do to help?”

In an international adoption such as the one I heard about, there is a response to a cry not yet heard, by the prospective parents or indeed by anyone. It is, you could say, a hypothetical cry, of a child needing love and care and devoted attention. The idea that a child, anywhere, is lacking any or all of those things is hard to ignore; so hard to ignore, we mostly have to block out such awareness altogether, since to dwell on those ongoing forlorn cries is too much for any heart to bear.

Yet when you pick up a child and it stops crying, not necessarily because of anything you did (just as some of us pick up happy babies and they start crying because sometimes, that’s what babies do), that contented armful is the whole world for you in that moment. Peace, and love, and joy: and hope.

When you let a baby enter your life, everything will change.

A baby is the center of both the religious and secular celebration we all share, in certain ways, this week, because a baby means something, even when that child has no genetic or genealogical connection to us. A baby means promise and commitment and the future, even when those who should deliver on all those things walk away. And they do, sometimes.

A baby, not even born yet, can change your life; a baby, born long ago & far away, can change the world, your world, right now. In either case, it happens when you decide that your life is connected to something beyond yourself.

Then, everything changes.

Christmas 2009
Dear Friends and Family,

As 2009 comes to a close, our family has many things to be thankful for. Home, health, work and community are among the many blessings we count. Joyce will soon finish six years as Chief of Staff in the President’s Office at Denison University and Jeff continues his busy schedule of supply preaching and speaking, freelance writing and consulting, and work as a mediator for the county juvenile court system. In these uncertain times we are blessed by work that both meets our needs and fulfills us.

We still stay busy with community involvement, Jeff with scouts, transitional housing and financial literacy issues, and local archaeology and Joyce as an officer of the Environmental Education Council of Ohio (EECO) and as worship leader (music director) of New Life Community United Methodist Church. After starting out as a new church five years ago, New Life chartered as an official United Methodist church this fall and just opened a community center in the show room of an old car dealership. Needless to say, the young ministry is blossoming.


11 year old Chris is in sixth grade and seems to get noticeably taller by the day.
He crossed over into boy scouts last spring and has already been on several campouts with Granville Troop 65. He joined the band this year as a beginning clarinet player and is loving it. He’s also becoming quite the young thespian (can you say chip off the old block?), recently drawing rave reviews as “Boomer” in Christmas from Scratch at Centenary UMC here in Granville. His youth group puts on two mini-musicals each year, so we’ll have another to look forward to this spring.

A highlight of our year was a week spent in Disney World this summer. It was Chris’s first visit, and I think it’s safe to say that it exceeded his expectations. He especially liked getting autographs from his favorite Disney characters. It was great fun, but not exactly relaxing. We learned later that the average family at Disney World walks 7 miles a day. We’re pretty sure we did at least that much.


We hope you are well and happy, and we wish you a
blessed Christmas.

Love,

Joyce, Jeff & Chris

Knapsack 12-31

Notes From My Knapsack 12-31-09

Jeff Gill

 

A Summing Up At Year's End

___

 

 

Jacob Little was the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Granville from 1827 to 1865. For these thirty eight years, he not only preached for his flock, but he tried to lead the entire community through both example and exhortation.

 

The Granville Historical Society has just published an attractive and wonderful volume titled "Jacob Little's History of Granville." It includes not only Rev. Little's early attempt at a summary of the first decades of this community, but an assortment of other writings, not only by the parson but from a number of local historians (your columnist among them).

 

Laura Evans is well known to readers of these pages in the Sentinel, and was the presiding eminence over the effort to not only republish these early essays on Granville, but to help bring some historic context to these documents that are very much of their time.

 

At some future date, slighting asides about Sarah Palin, angry commentary about the DeRolph ruling, or rude jokes about Bill Kraner may be utterly incomprehendible, and it will take a meticulous historian or twelve (or 14!) to make sense of current observations, as it has with Jacob Little's work. Not to take anything away from Parson Little, but the lasting value of this book may well be the assembly of framing essays and inserted articles which helps the reader along in understanding what Little was making much of.

 

Most infamously, Rev. Little would issue a "New-Year's sermon" which would be presented both from the pulpit on that day, and usually found its way into print. These sermons were intended to be an assessment of the town as a whole, not just of "Congregationalist Presbyterians" in his own congregation.

 

As Dick Shiels says in an introductory essay for the volume, "Jacob Little aspired to be the pastor for the entire town." His was probably the last era of American life where that aspiration was even imaginable; there have since been a variety of movements and organizations that claim to speak theologically for a majority, silent, moral, or otherwise, but no one imagines that any pastor could really serve as chaplain to an entire community.

 

Little knew there were those in opposition to his stands on subjects such as temperance (for it) and dancing (agin' it), and not everyone was as passionate as he about education for all and even more for those pursuing clerical status, but he truly believed that through a mix of inspiration and shame he might well draw the entire village into his beliefs, if not into his church building.

 

What does unity in community mean today, when diversity and multi-everythingism is the single standard all are expected to salute? Is there any "unum" to which all us "e pluribi" should aspire to? And what would happen to any person, let alone a pastor, who tried to name in public the people whom they saw as breaking down the moral fiber of the community? Even before the defamation lawsuits were filed, can you imagine it at all, or even what categories would be described?

 

In the 1840s, listing who owned a household Bible, or specifying the drinking habits of elected officials down to the quart, or naming those who (gasp) danced last month – it wasn't necessarily popular for Little to do (ultimately, he was forced out of his position, albeit after 38 years), but it was imaginable. Today we fall back on broad, generic survey numbers that safely wag their percentages at how many spouses cheat in their marriages, or poll how many parents purchase alcohol for their children's parties.

 

It was different over 150 years ago: that may seem incredibly obvious, but sometimes I think we forget how different a place, how foreign a country the past really is, even when that place is right here.

 

If you'd like to take a quick trip to that distant nearby land, you can drop by Reader's Garden in the heart of the village, and plunk down $27 (tax included), or go to the website of the Granville Historical Society at www.granvillehistory.org and follow the instructions there for ordering by mail.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is very proud to be in the distinguished company that was assembled by Lance Clarke and Laura Evans to produce this book. Write him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 12-24 -- Granville Sentinel

Notes From My Knapsack 12-24-09

Jeff Gill

And Everything Changed

___

The baby was born, and everything changed.

I talked to a mother this week, here in Licking County. She and her
husband began the paperwork for an international adoption, reaching
out to a country where poverty and social norms combine to generate a
disturbingly large number of babies without homes.

They will need two to three years to complete the whole process, and
their plan is to request not a newborn, as so many do, more than are
available, in fact, but to pursue a child who is already a few years
old. A child who has not been adopted.

Which means, of course, by simple math and painful reality, that this
child is born this week, or thereabouts. Already, but unknown,
unknowably distant; God willing, as this all works out, a child is
born to them in a land far away, but just now come into the world
with tears and smiles and hope.

For this family to take in another child, since they have some of
their own already, they will have to make adjustments. Some have
already been made, others are in the works, a few more are
contemplated. As experienced parents, they know the biggest
adjustments are yet to come, for each child is unique, even if the
experience of diapering is mindlessly the same.

When the baby enters your life, everything changes.

There's something deep within almost everyone that makes the cry of a
baby pull our attention and focus away from the most compelling
reality show, off of our favorite activities, out of ourselves, and
shift to asking "what does the baby need?" Even childless "civilians"
know that tug, at the mind and in the heart. For some it is merely an
irritation – "why doesn't someone do something about that crying
baby?" but for most it becomes a question – "what could I do to help?"

In an international adoption such as the one I heard about, there is
a response to a cry not yet heard, by the prospective parents or
indeed by anyone. It is, you could say, a hypothetical cry, of a
child needing love and care and devoted attention. The idea that a
child, anywhere, is lacking any or all of those things is hard to
ignore; so hard to ignore, we mostly have to block out such awareness
altogether, since to dwell on those ongoing forlorn cries is too much
for any heart to bear.

Yet when you pick up a child and it stops crying, not necessarily
because of anything you did (just as some of us pick up happy babies
and they start crying because sometimes, that's what babies do), that
contented armful is the whole world for you in that moment. Peace,
and love, and joy: and hope.

When you let a baby enter your life, everything will change.

A baby is the center of both the religious and secular celebration we
all share, in certain ways, this week, because a baby means
something, even when that child has no genetic or genealogical
connection to us. A baby means promise and commitment and the future,
even when those who should deliver on all those things walk away. And
they do, sometimes.

A baby, not even born yet, can change your life; a baby, born long
ago & far away, can change the world, your world, right now. In
either case, it happens when you decide that your life is connected
to something beyond yourself.

Then, everything changes.

Faith Works 12-19

Faith Works 12-19-09

Jeff Gill

 

When a story can't be told too often

___

 

Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" has been filmed over and over again since the very dawn of photography, starting in 1901 (less than 60 years after the tale was first told!), and Disney has taken another crachit at it.

 

Using "motion capture" animation, Jim Carrey does for multiple characters, starting with Scrooge, what Tom Hanks did in "The Polar Express." The computer animation, tied to human acting while wearing "mo-cap" suits, continues to amaze, and makes set builders weep. The virtual camera swoops around St. Paul's Cathedral and through the City of London, perching a moment on the Tower itself, never filming a bit of tangible reality.

 

Dickens' story touches hearts in every form, from Mickey Mouse as Bob Crachit in an earlier Disney cartoon venture, or the classic old black and white Hollywood versions.

 

Or you could read it, out of a book or even on your computer screen.

 

What makes this cast of characters and particular plot so affecting is the change of heart, the transformation of the unseen center of Ebenezer Scrooge from the cold and unmoved façade against the outside world to an equally mysterious, but outwardly apparent celebrator of Christmas, of whom "it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge."

 

The question for Scrooge, and for all of us traveling in company with old Ebenezer on his nightlong journey, is whether in fact he *can* change. To quote the reforming miser himself:

 

[blockquote] "Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me."

The Spirit was immovable as ever. [end blockquote]

 

Dickens was too good a storyteller, and perhaps enough of a theologian, to tell us directly whether "certain ends" are inevitable. There are inevitabilities in this world, and there are things very hard to change indeed, and then there are those moments of transformation where only a Spirit can account for the change that results.

 

As much as Americans enjoy their Scrooge, our complement to "A Christmas Carol" is a story that began and really only exists as a movie, "It's A Wonderful Life." George Bailey, too, is haunted by supernatural beings, the angel Gabriel and a Joseph who may or may not be the fellow with relatives in Bethlehem. And Clarence Oddbody.

 

Mr. Bailey wants to know, and doubts, whether his life has changed anything. The weight of predestination, of inevitability, weighs equally heavily on George as it does on Ebenezer.

 

Can one life make a difference? Can small choices make a change, or are we just pawns to "an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato," as Scrooge tried to account for Marley's apparition by means of his indigestion?

 

[blockquote]"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this …. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?" [end blockquote]

 

Jim Carrey plays not only Scrooge in the new "Carol," but also all three Spirits. It's an interesting approach, hinting at not only the acting prowess of the human beneath the animated pictures, but also at a modern attempt at explanation. The three Spirits of Christmas are simply psychological expressions of Scrooge's own interior desire to change.

 

Perhaps. Many want to change, and cannot, but continue to try. This we see all around us every day, and sometimes in the morning mirror. Could it be that it is inevitability itself that is the Ghost, a persistent haunting imposed from within; and to change, to be transformed, requires a nudge from without, from beyond, from Another?

 

Might something as faint, as distant as a baby born in a backwater, thousands of years and as many miles away, be the external, even the supernatural influence that moves us where all our wishes and desires cannot take us?

 

Could the Christmas child make all the difference?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a reason to change you've experienced this Christmas at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 12-12

Faith Works 12-12-09

Jeff Gill

 

Working On the Daily Grind, With Love

___

 

 

Four floors of rumbling kept a fine sift of flour shimmering through the setting sun.

 

The mill was a century and a half old, and today was working in full flow, the millrace off the creek turning the wheel, whose gears and belts and grindstones were in motion, parallel and perpendicular, all through the open frame structure.

 

With the leaves off the trees, the light of sunset slanted directly through the windows on each of the three levels above the entrance. Late fall and harvest meant that wagons filled with whole grain had been pulling up with great regularity, and everyone working around the mill had taken a turn pulling sacks of corn up to the peak.

 

What wasn't powered by the water wheel or elbow grease was moved, through the mill, by gravity; many of the first steps of the milling process started on the top floor.

 

But the grain, as it ground down to floury powder, would rise up again through the floors, lifted by slats on long leather belts through wooden boxes called elevators, since they elevated the grain to a higher level through their constant turning, powered by an axle which in turn rotated off of the mill wheel itself.

 

The miller worked by ear, and feel, more than by sight, which was a good thing when the dust off of the milling process filled the air and the sun caught each mote so as to blind you more than a creekside fog.

 

Tap, tap, he gently rapped the planking of the elevator, one which his ear and the soles of his feet told him had shifted a bit with the creaking of the building itself, built of black walnut timbers in 1849 – some of those timbers starting as young seedlings in 1609 before cut and seasoned and built into this mill.

 

Now, 160 years later, a voice came up to the second floor from below: "Honey, the router went out again, and I can't get the internet on the cash register."

 

The miller looked thoughtfully at his large wooden mallet, and then laid it on a beam nearby and walked downstairs, brushing dust and flour off his jacket and jeans.

 

Coming through the door into the gift shop, another man walked inside at almost the exact same time. He looked cheerful, if a bit grim.

 

"Hello," offered the miller. "My wife is in the back just now, can I help you?"

 

"You sure can," said the visitor. "I'm looking for something for my wife, and this mill's gift shop, people tell me, has no end of unique stuff. That's what I need, unique," he nodded vigorously.

 

"Alright," said the miller. "So, you want to get her something that she wouldn't already have, or . . ."

 

"Something none of her friends already have, and something that will really 'wow' her," answered the man, placing his hands on the counter next to the register.

 

"What does she most want for Christmas?" asked the miller. "Has she given any hints about anything?"

 

The well dressed visitor laughed. "Hints? You must be married, too; I get nothing but hints, every day. Get home earlier, go to church with her, just sit on the sofa with her. But not a clue on what to get for Christmas for her."

 

"Really? It sounds like she's told you already what she wants," replied the miller. "Is that out of your price range?"

 

"No," and he shook his head, "I'm interested in whatever you've got. Some of that art pottery, maybe? Or a sculpture. Price is no object."

 

The miller laughed, gently but easily. "I can tell that. What I meant was if the cost was a bit too much to give her what she wants. My wife wanted to get this mill running again, and we could afford the property, but I wasn't sure I could cover the cost, if you know what I mean."

 

"I think I do," the visitor replied. "This is hard work, isn't it?"

 

"Not as hard as you might think, but long, and steady. You have to know how you intend to finish to even get started. I didn't know if I could do it, but when I knew she wanted to with all her heart, that set me on the path that led me here."

 

"It looks wonderful," said the man, looking around.

 

"And it is, but you have to believe in what you're doing. We started in church, and that's where we remember why we keep going, like that wheel out there, turning in the stream."

 

The miller's wife came out of the back room, saw the visitor and smiled. "Do we have here what you're looking for?"

 

Looking back at the miller, the man said "Yes, I think you do."

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he thanks Bear's Mill in western Ohio for inspiring a story this Christmas. Tell him about your search for a gift at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 12-5

Faith Works 12-5-09

Jeff Gill

 

Happy Holidays To You, & You, & You!

___

 

My e-mail box and Facebook page all tell me, with the best of intentions, I'm sure, that there are retailers who are "officially" informing their employees to say "Happy Holidays," and not "Merry Christmas."

 

No doubt.

 

Yes, we've been here before, haven't we? The so-called "Christmas wars" are right up there with Black Friday, extended warrantees, and heart-plucking tales of seasonal reunion as the Greatest Hits rotation for December.

 

Speaking purely as a Christian and as a pastor, I'm delighted that places of commerce, businesses with goods to sell and no time to spare, shops and stores and malls and merchandisers are all wanting to help make a very important point.

 

With all due respect to Caspar, Balthazar, and Melchior, buying gifts has not a thing to do with the birth of Christ Jesus. Nothing. Nada.

 

Shopping, gift cards, exchanges, layaway, and most emphatically cashback credit card transactions are all activities which are near to the heart of our culture, but having little or nothing to do with spiritual growth. Catch me in a truly Scrooge-y mood, and I might observe they can erode and undermine the development of healthy spirituality.

 

So the news that stores are NOT saying "Merry Christmas" bothers me not at all. Good for them. And for those who say they won't shop at a store which says "Happy Holidays," good on them, too. If you want to make your retail line up with your religion, good luck with that, and I hope it goes beyond season's greetings (good luck with *that*).

 

Meanwhile, for all the militant secularists who are quite delighted at the faux culture war over "Merry Christmas," and are pleased that a misreading of the Constitution leads schools to ban instrumental versions of "Ave Maria" and want no one outside of a church building to say "Merry Christmas" –

 

What was that alternative you wanted to use? Oh, right, "Happy Holidays." Fine, except . . . nah, I'm sure you already know that.

 

Huh? No, I'm talking about "Holidays." It's a word derived from "holy day." A holiday is a day that is set apart, beyond the secular, everyday, a day marked as sacred, or "holy." A holiday.

 

Not liking "Happy Holidays" so much? Sure, there are other options. Some municipal celebrations have shifted over to "Winter Carnival."

 

Except the whole concept of Carnival comes from a church season still a ways down the road, the season of Lent, preparing for Easter. You fast and pray in Lent, so before the fasting begins, you feast on all the meat and fat and animal flesh you are supposed to avoid in Lent – in Latin, "carne," or "flesh." A carnival season is when the flesh is shared out and enjoyed to then shift focus to the spirit and the spiritual.

 

Carnival seems too churchy, then? How about a "New Year Festival"? That seems as safely, blandly generic as you could hope for.

 

Golly, though, it turns out . . . well, do you want to know? OK. A festival is a feast, a meal shared together by many. You can sort of see the word "feast," right? But the word itself, working back through Middle English to Old French and back to Latin once again is derived from "fanum," or temple precinct. In the fanum, a sacred meal was set apart for divine purposes, opened to all, and this is where the word "feast" comes from, out of the fanum. And then festival.

 

You almost get the idea that avoiding the holy or the sacred or the divine in celebrations is almost impossible, except maybe in Esperanto. By the way, according to the internet, Santa Claus in Esperanto is "Avo Frosto." Ah, Grandfather Frost. That worked out so well for the Soviet Union, didn't it?

 

Anyhow, if someone wants to wish me "Happy Holidays," I'll recall that this is indeed a time in which we should seek the holy. If the school calls it a winter carnival, that puts me in mind of the larger church calendar and that ultimately the flesh, the "carne" must be set aside, that the shopping will end.

 

If a festival is what we must have in whatever setting, my prayer is that we find that sacred space within which all may gather and feast on the goodness of God's gracious gift.

 

Or as a rabbi I once knew liked to say this time of year, to all us Goyim after the Hanukah celebration, "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him how you'd like to label the season at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 11-28

Faith Works 11-28-09

Jeff Gill

 

"Tinsel" Tells Us Our Story, But Will We Recognize Us?

___

 

Imagine reading a story about a train wreck.

 

There is massive damage not only to the train, but to the neighborhoods all around the track. Many people on board are hurt, none severely (at least, in the immediate aftermath, as far as the triage staff can tell), and the story not only communicates to you some of the camaraderie and good will that takes place in the midst of the wreckage, but it makes you laugh. Not at the people in the wreck, but with them.

 

Even though you get the sense that, as you read, the train wreck was caused less by whoever was driving the train up in the cab than by the actions of the passengers themselves, plus a lack of roadbed maintenance by the railroad itself.

 

And yet you still think, reading this story, "I'd go on a train ride with those people."

 

That's how I would be tempted to sum up "Tinsel," except it isn't about a train wreck, it's about . . .Christmas.

 

Hank Stuever, the award-winning Washington Post reporter & essayist, literally moved from the DC area to a north Dallas suburb, Frisco, Texas. He spent the holiday season for three years in Frisco, with a few other visits from time to time, following a number of families and ultimately focusing, in this book, on three.

 

He follows them into a train wreck that happens every year, at about the same time, on the same dangerous curve, with these families and all their friends and neighbors alternately pulling on the emergency stop cord while hollering over the train's intercom to "pick up the pace!"

 

The subtitle of "Tinsel" is "A Search for America's Christmas Present," and the searching part is present for both the featured families and for Hank himself. He grew up a Catholic altar boy, and his mother is now a nun, but he refers to himself as an "unbeliever" today. He takes a sort of wry anthropological view of the placing of the décor on and around and in the vast McMansions of Frisco, the shopping trips that are both daily and endless. He watches, and listens, and clearly succeeded in becoming, as he explains was his intention, part of each family, in an unofficial Uncle Hank sort of way.

 

As a gay man from an East Coast capital in the heart of megachurch country, he asks questions about motivation and intention that might not even have occurred to a full participant in all the festivities, in worship services and special programs and even in observing the rituals around "visiting Santa" at the mall.

 

Given all that, I really think that church Sunday school classes and family home groups would gain some self-understanding in spending some time reading and discussing "Tinsel." Hank Stuever has all too accurately described the hollow center of many of our current Christmas cultural obligations, and the sweet vanilla crème filling inside. The thing about that kind of confection is that it isn't actually hollow – there is something inside, and it may not be nutritious or healthy, but we love it, or at least love the experience of eating it.

 

The hollow feeling comes later, and the hunger for something substantial.

 

"Tinsel" is not a mere rant against consumerism, although conspicuous consumption is laid out in painful detail. It isn't a mockery of faith, though some of the less savory aspects of contemporary praise & worship style Christianity is described fairly, if not to anyone's credit. Stuever doesn't have a specific agenda about "what should be done" about Christmas as it's currently practiced in America, nor does he have a list of recommendations at the end of the book.

 

What may end up being prescriptive is that the economic implosion of the past year closes the book. Frisco is one of the epicenters of the foreclosure meltdown, and a way of life that some of the interviewees actually refer to as "recession proof" is made to wobble, if not actually fall over, like an inflatable Santa sculpture half collapsed into the snow.

 

Why would church groups want to discuss "Tinsel"? Well, because I think Frisco is just far enough away to let us safely discuss whether or not this is actually about us, and ask what we would want to do about that if it's true.

 

And by the way, I'm told that as Stuever was making his final decision on where to go, the north Columbus, Ohio suburban area was in his final three.

 

I'm not sure if we would be able to read that book as honestly, but I don't think it would have been a bit different, other than the names.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your views on seasonal excess at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 11-21

Faith Works 11-21-09

Jeff Gill

 

Or On the Other Hand, Maybe Not

___

 

If I were to hazard a guess that there were some readers of the Advocate today who weren't feeling too terribly thankful, it wouldn't be going out on too shaky a limb.

 

Given the state of the national, regional, and local economy, the odds that there are some people turning pages (actual or virtual) who are looking more for the Help Wanted pages than sprightly opinion & comment are pretty good, almost a certainty.

 

The parson's usual dodge, said the parson, is to suggest that everyone, no matter if they've lost their job, even if they're short cash or feeling the sting of already-burned-through credit coming due, should still feel thankful for something . . . or other.

 

You still have your health, even if no health insurance, says the optimist; you have the breath of life itself, says the faithful believer, which is a gift; the pragmatist points out that you aren't in jail. (Except for all our faithful jail readers – hey there, folks, hang in there!)

 

Thankfulness is technically something you can feel no matter what your circumstances, unless you're a corpse or at least catatonic. Medical science declares that feelings of thankfulness lowers blood pressure, supports your immune system, and promotes general well being.

 

Does that include forced or insincere thankfulness? Or is it one of those categories of thought and action where if you believe something, you'll start to live so much as if it's true that it will effectively become true. You can't think yourself tall, but thinking self-confidently can start to straighten your spine enough to actually add both height and the impression of height.

 

There's anecdotal evidence enough that if you decide to speak and act and claim to be thankful, thankfulness for yet another day, for a few basics, and for the promise of maybe something more at some possible point later, you really do end up feeling thankful right down to your ungrateful appendix.

 

"Give thanks, with a grateful heart" says the well-known praise song, and it's a piece of wise counsel, but what about just giving thanks, and asking for a grateful heart to warm up inside you as a result? Sometimes, you just don't feel thankful for anything, including, not just starting with, the fact of having woken up that morning. You may even be particularly displeased about that. You know you shouldn't, but it's been that kind of week, OK? (You think, grumpily.)

 

Which may be so, but can you concede that there is a reason, any reason at all in your life, to offer thanks: to God, to your higher power, to something or Someone beyond your own abilities and actions?

 

And then could you be open to feel it, to feel the effects of that decision to present a thankful attitude in the general direction of the cosmos? It would be a start.

 

Most areas around the county have a community Thanksgiving service, usually on Sunday night, since so many travel on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. Granville & Hebron churches band together for a 7:00 pm service, while Utica, always a step ahead, has one at 6:30 pm Sunday night, and there are no doubt others.

 

If you're feeling particularly un-thankful this year, my heart and sympathies are with you. There are some real challenges out there, and I wouldn't want to even hint that they are anything other than demoralizing for anyone feeling alone and pushed aside.

 

What I'd also like to offer is to come join one of the community Thanksgiving worship services, since there's probably one very near you, and since they include multiple congregations, it's a great time to drop in and not feel like the only stranger in the building.

 

And for that hour of music and singing and prayer, take a shot at being thankful, even if only for very little. It might just grow.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you're thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 11-19

Notes From My Knapsack 11-19-09

Jeff Gill

 

Give Thanks With Heart and Hands and Voices

___

 

Sunday evening at St. Luke's Episcopal Church the entire community is invited to start a week of Thanksgiving with a Community Thanksgiving Service at 7:00 pm, planned by the Granville Ministerium.

 

The Rev. Thom Lamb of First Presbyterian will preach, and The Rev. Stephen Applegate of the host church has arranged a number of us clergy folk from many different denominations in a worship service that can help raise up and focus our reasons to be thankful, as a village, as families, and as individuals.

 

Our offering at the service will go to the Coalition of Care's ongoing work, and a community chorus will sing for us.

 

That chorus is another expression of an impulse that's visible over on Newark's East Main Street, just past the big blue steel bridge, opposite the Licking County Justice Center. Right now, the "Church Build" Habitat for Humanity house is wrapped in blue material around the first floor framing, but sheathing will go on shortly, and then a crane will help lift the roof trusses into place.

 

Centenary UMC is celebrating a bicentennial year in 2010, and one of the ways they wanted to mark the occasion, along with the usual plates and such, was a gift to the community. A few members took the lead in the idea of pulling together county Christian churches, and got around twenty participants to commit to the idea, but Granville churches are strongly represented in both contributions and construction crew. The last day I was on the site, there were workers from Centenary, St. Luke's, Spring Hills, and St. Edwards.

 

The work will continue on Saturdays and Wednesdays through the holiday season; also coming right up – Thursday, Dec. 3, at 6:00 pm, is the Newark "Sights and Sounds of Christmas" guided tour of downtown churches. $5 per person, all for the Licking County Food Pantry, is a wonderful experience to see and hear some real county history, and great live music. Check out www.sightsandsoundsofchristmas.org for more info.

 

Of course the first Saturday of December is . . . time to leave town? Yes, I know there's a few Scrooges who feel that way, but this is the 20^th anniversary of the Lovely Wife and I first stumbling into downtown Granville as evening settled around the Four Corners, the Scouts lighting the luminaries, music echoing out of the churches, and a light snow fell all around. We were captivated and entranced and whatever else the thesaurus says about that, and if you'd told us that night we'd be living in this village fifteen years later we would have laughed and laughed.

 

If you'd have told us in 1989 we'd have a son in twenty years who would be lighting those luminaries, we might have cried, just a bit, with happy tears. And laughed.

 

Both of which we'll no doubt do on Dec. 5 at the Candlelight Walking Tour. See you there!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story about your favorite anniversaries or events at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 11-14

Faith Works 11-14-09

Jeff Gill

 

Something To Believe In

___

 

 

I believe in Boston.

 

That may sound a little crazy to some, especially when I admit – I've never been to Boston. Got up to Newport and a quick run through Providence, but didn't make it Boston.

 

But I believe it's there.

 

Granted, much of my mental image of Boston is based on pictures taken from history and fiction; the Boston that is most real to me is the one described by Esther Forbes in "Johnny Tremain," a novel written during World War II set in the years before the American Revolution.

 

Add in Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," which is actually a poem, and some historical recreations in my junior high social studies books, and the dominant impression I have when I hear someone mention Boston is that of a long-lost city, with few points of contact with the current reality . . . whatever that is.

 

More recently, I have seen and appreciated the movie "Good Will Hunting," which is set in Boston as it is today, so I have an overlay which may or may not get me closer to the actual city, or at least the South End and parts of neighboring Cambridge.

 

Some of what I've learned over the years about Boston seems downright incredible: Beacon Hill, cut down to a plain, the volume used to fill in the ocean front bays all around the near-island of the city as it began? A vast tunnel where multi-millions of tax dollars went to die, which has been actually seen by few but discussed by everyone (in Boston), or a baseball park with a high, green wall called by all and sundry a "monster" unlike any other playing field? A boxing team on ice skates which fights sliding backwards, until occasionally a hockey game breaks out?

 

Still, I believe in Boston.

 

You might remind me that many have been there, and I could find them, even on my own street, so it is no "leap of faith" to say I believe in Boston. Yet I really can't think of ever having had a conversation with someone face to face about the place. It gets brought up on tv shows and lends its name to a particular brand of candy baked beans that are neither baked, nor beans, and the sum total of inputs has led me to decide: I believe in Boston.

 

If I chose to say "there is no Boston," then I might have to contend with those who say "you are wrong, I've been there, I had a cream pie." But whether anyone chose to confirm or refute my understanding, would that really affect the basic question, whether or not there is a city called Boston?

 

Some of you are saying "what is this lunacy? Everyone knows there is a Boston, and the reality of that place is tied to so many more everyday facts that to deny Boston would be like saying that there is no such thing as gravity." Which may be.

 

The fact remains that I have never been closer than fifty miles to Boston, have never seen it with my own eyes, have no direct contact with anything to do with the city other than knowing a few Harvard grads (which doesn't count, considering the broad Charles River between them), and do not root for either the Red Sox, the Bruins, or the Patriots, which play in Foxborough anyhow.

 

But I have decided that believing in Boston makes sense, fits into the rest of what I know directly of the world, and is no crazier than believing that I will, in twenty years, collect something from Social Security. I may not make it to Bean Town, may never walk the Patriot Trail past Paul Revere's House and Old North Church, or get a retirement check from Uncle Sam, but I believe they are there based on the evidence I have, both solid data and artistic impression, triangulated into a picture with depth and solidity in my mind's eye. Or at least Boston is solid in my assumptions, more so that the prospect of a government benefit.

 

And I believe there is a God, who takes note of my situation on a personal basis, but tends to creation with infinite care. Of Jesus I have heard much, and marvel at some, but his reality long ago and now is something that strikes me as better established than the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, on which thousands of scientists spend millions each year looking for.

 

Some of whom have endowed chairs at universities in the greater Boston area.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has never been to Boston, but did cut through Fall River, MA late one night. Tell him about your trip to an unlikely spot at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Coalition of Care newsletter - Fall 2009

Coalition of Care newsletter – November 2009

Jeff Gill

What Do You See When You Pray?

When it comes to personal prayer, eyes closed is the American norm.
That's what you see if you cheat and look around during most
corporate prayer settings, in church or in other places for that
matter – eyes closed, head bowed.

There's nothing in the Bible that commends shutting out the world
that way, except perhaps the "prayer closet" suggestion Jesus gives
his followers, though that seems to be more aimed at avoiding the
gaze of others than closing off your own. Don't go out where you can
get people to see you and congratulate you as your primary prayer
practice, Jesus reminds us.

But closed eyes is what we're used to, and we like what we're used
to. Except then you have to wrestle with the question, what do I see?

Living in a highly visual culture, the fact is that most of us still
"see" something when we close our eyes. We're all Steven Spielbergs
within our heads, shooting a story and layering in the special
effects from our well fertilized imaginations.

So then the spiritual discipline question is: with images, or
without? Some Eastern Orthodox spiritual practices quite specifically
call on us to "empty" our minds, and clear out all ideas and pictures
while focusing on God; other traditions of the Christian faith
suggest a specific image, and working on keeping that central in our
mind's eye.

During the closing portions of the Gospel Celebration, in a final
prayer together, I asked everyone gathered there to join me in
imagining a desk and a chair, two chairs, and the occupants of those
two chairs in prayer together. To me, that is a central image of what
the "Coalition of Care" is about, the time spent for two people to
hear each others' stories and pray together for discernment and
wisdom and guidance.

What's been in my prayers since then, though, is an image of just one
person, in a chair at home, trying to offer up wordless prayers
through anguish and pain. It's the prayer of a mother, or a father,
or whatever the individual, who is trying to muster the courage, or
maybe the humility, or just to set aside their pride while stumbling
on the awkward, painful embarrassment of having to go somewhere and
sit down and say "I need help."

That's the point where we all can only call on grace, God's grace, to
help move that hurting person. We can't help most folk until they
come in, but that moment of decision to come in – those moments of
choice, to leave the chair, get in the car or walk down the street,
to go through the door, to wait, even a short time, to sit down with
the Coalition counselor . . . at any one of those moments, they could
decide to say "No" and head back into the dark security of despair.

We need to pray for those people, those moments, that grace, so that
those who need to open their eyes and pray their way into a
conference with the Coalition will find that strength, walk in that
hope, and sit in confidence that asking for aid is what God blesses
them to do.

Faith Works 11-7

Faith Works 11-7-09

Jeff Gill

 

The Care and Feeding of Apophenia

___

 

At an archaeology conference held on the OSU-N campus in the Reese Center, one of the presenters talked about "apophenia."

 

If you work with the evaluation of survey data or graphic information of any sort, you know the word, but it's a concept that most of us bump up against without ever needing to put a label on it.

 

Apophenia is just the term for seeing patterns or something familiar where there is actually no intended meaning, whether turning a stump in the twilight into a dog, or calling an arrangement of stars a bear or plow or dipper.

 

Pareidolia is a related concept, more specifically when our senses help us mistake randomness for meaningfulness. The best example of pareidolia that we're all familiar with is hearing the phone ring while we're in the shower. The white noise of water spraying creates so many little audio signatures that our brain kicks into overdrive, trying to hear *something,* and forces from the sound the sense that a distant phone is signaling.

 

Scientists point out that pattern recognition is what makes our brains so useful, and in fact children and adults with autism spectrum disorders can be so sensitized to sorting out inputs (to a fault, perhaps even obsessively) that they notice patterns that actually *are* there, but that most average people don't catch.

 

To a very different extreme is when a mentally ill person hears a message just for them in the arrangement of TV advertizing, or a voice speaking to them just below the dialogue in a movie.

 

Each year in the autumn I think about apophenia, and ancient history, and faith. The talk at the Reese Center poked me because I usually don't write about this subject just before Hallowe'en because it has the potential to push so many odd buttons, and often it's barely a day after Nov. 1 and All Saints' when the big push to the Holiday Season eats all our attention.

 

When the days grow short, and the darkness gathers quickly, and pools of shadow never see light again in our homes and yards until  March or later; when the waving branches of bare tree limbs claw a skeletal hand against a full moon; when the skitter of dry leaves pace an irregular step across the garage floor . . .

 

There's a certain logic, a necessity of ghosts and spirits and haunting that I cannot but find inevitable when I think what life must have been like not so very long ago, and there is in our well-lit, open plan, tidy cornered age an equally unsurprising grasping after the uncanny where it rarely occurs without a little pump priming.

 

Think about green timbers creaking, board floors all askew, small windows with "crazy" glass (the term itself comes from the pattern of ripples and cracks in old panes), and that's just indoors. Think about deep gloom within the forest, actual predators not fearful of humans (and many more human predators, whatever you've heard of "good old days"), and the limits of candle and torch, themselves generating a dancing flicker of shadow as much as of light.

 

Seeing those who had died in the bedroom corner, the shed's fence corner, or along the treeline, especially when the dead grew more numerous in your life by the year, by the week, starting in youth – of course you did. Today not a few of us get into our 30s and even more before we even see a funeral or a casket with contents, and what house is without lights and outlets in every corner, inside and outside?

 

Add in a bit of malnutrition, a general state of ill health combined with rare glasses for no less frequent poor vision, and it doesn't take imagination or even wishful thinking to see what isn't there.

 

Having thought this through, I read old documents with a slightly different eye: then I run across those who skip along from such considerations to the assertion that all religious belief is apophenia, "hindsight effect," that pareidolia is the source of every encounter with the divine.

 

This is where church leadership is tested, especially this time of year. Are the only two choices between agreeing with every out-of-the-corner of the eye apparition, or absolute scientific materialism? I'd say there's a fascinating middle ground for us to explore, and I hope to come back to this subject in the next few weeks.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he hopes you enjoy discovering useful words for odd occasions as much as he does. Share a new term with him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 11-5-09

Jeff Gill

 

Adaptability and Inflexibility Can Work Together

___

 

 

Julia Child and the Wright Brothers have been dancing together in my brain recently.

 

Julia Child, of course, has been back in the national consciousness with the movie "Julie & Julia," and that fun little film has also helped sell not only Julie Powell's book about making all 524 recipes in Julia Child's first cookbook, also titled "Julie & Julia," but it helped get a second book out into the public consciousness, or at least my own.

 

"My Life in France" is a memoir that Child wrote with her nephew, Alex Prud'homme, a project finished by him just after her death, written from a series of lengthy interviews he did with her over the year before she died at the age of 92 in 2004.

 

The book was the "other half" of the movie "Julie & Julia," the half that many of us wished was longer, which followed Paul Child and his new wife, Julia McWilliams, from 1948 to 1954 in Paris, Marseille, and ultimately Oslo, Berlin, New York, and to the home in Cambridge, Massachusetts whose kitchen ends up in the Smithsonian.

 

And it lays out the story of the writing of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," a book which not only created a revolution in American cuisine, but in a roundabout but very distinct way led to the revitalization of WGBH in Boston and PBS in general, created the cooking show as we know it, and is why there is a Food Network that keeps me up late to see who wins on "Iron Chef America."

 

But the book almost wasn't written, repeatedly. It repeatedly should have died, and almost did, with encouragement. The reasons to give up were numerous and convincing, and partnership of "Trois Gourmandes" who officially wrote it was even more complicated and fraught with tensions than the movie indicated, and it indicated a whole bunch of it.

 

Julia Child had to catch her vision, find her own sources of encouragement, deal with pressures to radically revise her hopes into something more conventional, a book that would have gotten to press faster and almost certainly would have sunk more swiftly out of sight . . . unlike "Mastering," which now has a whole new life on the best seller list beyond Julie Powell's and Alex Prud'homme's books.

 

What's this got to do with the Wright Brothers? Well, I had a couple of occasions recently to be in the Dayton area, and finally got to Huffman Prairie. It's a bit out of the way, even if you've found your way to the Wright–Patterson Air Force Museum (bigger, better, still free, go see it!) or Carillon Park (thanks, Col. Deeds!).

 

Not to offend any North Carolina fans out there, but Kitty Hawk? Feh. It was one step, an important step of sorts in the journey to flight, but just one intermediate step. People had flown gliders further, and looped about a bit, and the engine of sorts that pushed the first Wright Flyer in December of 1903 was a necessary step towards powered flight, but just a hop of a few hundred feet skimming the sand.

 

But what made flight a reality, and a useable technology, was taking off, flying a circuit, and safely landing after repeating that loop a few times. If you use that as the benchmark for "the invention of flight," it was a fall day in October and November of 1905 that really opened up the Age of Aviation, and it was in Ohio where Orville and Wilbur did that. The field, Huffman Prairie, is still open, and has seven large white banners marking the circuit they flew, once in December of 1904 and with greater skill and confidence, to the point of flying until the gas tank emptied, in the fall of 1905.

 

Julia Child and the Wrights are both in my mind as I think about how they are often seen as geniuses who produced a revolution with a burst of effort, yes, but mostly inspiration and circumstance. What happens when you look closely at their respective journeys, from idea to actuality, is that it took great persistence combined with cheerful flexibility and an unbending belief in their core inspiration.

 

That's a story that needs to be heard and learned and shared, and merrily thrown into the teeth of storylines that claim it's lottery winnings and reality show victories and a good publicist that get you to success.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 10-31

Faith Works 10-31-09

Jeff Gill

 

Not Too Many Saints On the Ballot

___

 

We've got an Election Day coming Tuesday, and many important choices on local representation and civic issues.

 

These are the votes that most directly make an impact on our daily lives (or drives), and call for discernment that considers people, personalities, and positions.

 

I'll admit to having a tendency to vote for candidates I've met, even when I don't entirely agree with them, policy-wise. That's not a terribly thoughtful standard in a time when I know that I don't spend as much time at home as I used to, or as my parents did, so who knows which candidates tried to knock on my door and got crickets?

 

Prayer and a seeking after more careful consideration is one spiritual fruit that an election can help produce. Not that election campaigning tends to promote that, but if you want to step back from the agitation and anxiety and frenzy that much political advertising can bring into our homes and heads, you have to intentionally cultivate a little more interior peacefulness to get there.

 

As you think about how and for whom you want to vote, see what it takes to set aside all the fears and aimless emotionalism, and ask for guiding signs that are rooted in calm, and confidence, and hope.

 

Trick-or-Treat is behind us, Time Change (Fall back, one hour!) is tomorrow, and it is also "All Saints Day" in some traditions, the root of Hallowe'en as the eve of "All Hallows" as ye olde English has it, as "gospel" is good news from the same linguistic source.

 

Saintliness is one quality you could look for in candidates, and the past "examples of heroic faith," which is one definition of what a saint is, can be a guide as well. To be perfectly candid, if not perfectly saintly myself, there aren't many saints to choose from in any party, and the candidates and office holders I know personally would likely agree without reservation. There's something about public life that isn't terribly conducive to sainthood, which is probably why Saint Paul said in Romans how important it is for us to pray for them!

 

Yet there's another definition of saint to consider, which simply encompasses all of us in the community of the baptized. Paul does talk about "the saints" in his letters in ways that make it clear he means the whole membership of the church, and in the Reformation, which led to so much backing away from talking about saints and sainthood, Martin Luther said "To forget that we are saints is to forget Christ and to forget our baptism."

 

So when Christians gather, there is a sense in which you are surrounded by saints, not just in that "great cloud of witnesses" mentioned in Hebrews, but next to you in the pew. They may appear no more saintly that the candidates you vote for on Tuesday, but today, they should point you towards God, which is the real function of a saint in any tradition.

 

Sunday afternoon, with All Saints' Day falling on most churches' day of worship, there's also a chance to get together with saints who can surprise you even more than the saint five rows over back in your own congregation. The Licking County Coalition of Care is holding their annual Gospel Celebration at the Midland Theatre, starting at 4:00 pm. Tickets are $20, with the proceeds going to maintain their work tying together the efforts of congregations all across the county to serve those who fall through the more official safety nets (which have more than a few holes in them these days). And they even invited me back to MC all the fun!

 

Choirs and ensembles from churches, academic institutions, and just gathered up from friends who love to sing and play, all will give us a couple of hours to spend with the saints. Where else would you want to be on the afternoon of All Saints' Day, anyhow?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's honored to help www.coalitionofcare.com again this year. Tell him about a saint you know at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 10-25

Faith Works 10-25-09

Jeff Gill

 

On the Importance of Dust, Et cetera

___

 

Orion is heaving himself up over the eastern horizon these days, right about the time all decent citizens of whatever faith tradition are sensibly heading to a warm and cozy bed.

 

Later, into winter, the three-star belted hunter will shine out as darkness falls, but right now you have to get back up about 5:00 am or so to see Orion; or Osiris, or Finnegan, or Nanabozho, or Mithras, or whomever your culture associates with the striding red capped figure walking across the night sky.

 

The Orionids are a meteor shower associated with Halley's Comet, that "short period" comet which reminds us of the vastness of scale used by astronomers, since it came in 1910 to carry Samuel Clemens away just as it had brought him, so to speak, 76 years before, and passed through our nights in 1986, not to be seen again until 2061.

 

While the comet's blaze in swinging 'round the sun is long past and won't come near again for decades, the debris trail left behind is a wider swath, which our planet crosses twice a year. This leads to a distinct, if sparse scatter of meteoric trails, originating from a spot in the sky just over Orion's shoulder.

 

I went out for the show, too late and again at too early, and saw a handful of silent, swift, emphatic slashes on the sky that left no lasting mark. Each one, no more than a speck of dust, really, but made incandescent by speed and friction and circumstance.

 

In fact, each day, literally tons of dust and micrometeorites settle onto the earth each day. Your roof may not have any blazing holes through it, but there are almost certainly a scattering of grains from beyond this planet that lay atop your house right now. Every year, tens of thousands, some say millions of tons of cosmic dust are added to the mass of our world as it orbits the sun.

 

With the new dawn, there are no more meteors to see, but the brilliance of the colors all around. Fall's glory turns to the usual autumn story of dropping leaves, with raking, mowing, mulching (and gutter cleaning) all to do. The bright colors fade into browns and greys, and the artist's palette of complete leaves drops to the studio floor, where they steadily break down into fragments and bits and . . . dust.

 

Water evaporates, materials compresses, and the whole drifted riot of leaf piles is no more than a thin layer of incipient soil – the agronomists assure us that it takes 500 autumns, 500 falls of forest leaf and dying vegetation, to make one inch of good organic soil. 500 years. Six inches of topsoil in your lawn? 3,000 years of dust laid down.

 

Even as you look up past the leaves in their descent, and enjoy the frequent stark blue of October noon, too quickly turning into dusk and dark, that cerulean is in fact the result of light scattering in the atmosphere, with the dominant color blue being due to . . . dust.

 

Then the skies grow less blue, not from impending evening, but with clouds rolling in from the west. Clouds, of course, being the moisture in the air coalescing around windborne . . . dust.

 

"Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." These ancient words of committal tell a truth about one element of the human condition, the source and destination of the essential building blocks for our bodies. We hear them at funerals and Ash Wednesday (perhaps), and just a whisper of those words, echoed in the sound of a dry leaf scraping along a pavement next to the cemetery. "Dust thou art . . ."

 

Is dust a hint of death? Should we see dust motes in slanting autumn light as a sign of insignificance?

 

Or does our close connection to dust remind us of our roots in the heart of stars where carbon is formed; that our story layers into a deep, rich, fertile tapestry; we are formed of the same dust that draws bright lines across the vault of heaven, or uplifts the tall cap of cumulonimbus along with the wind and rain.

 

With the last week of October, we look into the graveyard, across the tombstones, and into the blue sky over a fading forest, shedding its color into a remnant, skeletal stand. Do we shudder with fear, or shiver with wonder? "Fearfully and wonderfully made" we are, and "to dust we shall return" may not tell us all there is to know about where that dust may yet dance.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; shiver his bones with a tale sent to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 10-22

Chuck -- Two-way option -- if you have room for 450 wds next week, here you go; if you're good and full up, but have a nook or cranny, just run the first three paragraphs: 100 wds.  Enjoy proofing all those letters!  Pax, Jeff

Notes From My Knapsack 10-22-09

Jeff Gill

 

Community Discussions, Community Solutions

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With the outpouring of letters of support for candidates and critique of ballot issues filling the pages of our Sentinel, there is little room or reason for columnists in this pre-Election Day season.

 

Read them, consider their reasoning, discuss the pros and cons with your friends, and make sure to keep track of Trick or Treat jumping out at you next Thursday and Time Change falling back the following weekend.

 

And don't forget the Midland Theater Gospel Concert to benefit the Coalition of Care on Sunday, Nov. 1 at 4:00 pm; tickets are $20 at area churches or at the door.

 

So with all that you don't need much from out of my knapsack. I'll just pull out one last thing with the spread of worries over flu viruses and vaccinations and children's health.

 

Wisely, there's much said about keeping a child home when they are showing fever, body aches, and sore throat. Of course you should. What's not as easy to say quickly is that a huge challenge in maintaining student learning is consistent attendance, and the reality of "swine flu" can all too easily be used as the newest excuse in some homes for not getting kids up, out, and into where they need to be.

 

We've created a system where a major performance measure for administrators is simply daily attendance, and we see state funding tied closely enough to daily attendance to make the equation basically per diem "butts in seats." In an era with budgets so tightly constrained by unfunded mandates from above and public scrutiny from below, a small uptick in absence can literally bust a budget, making for many direct impacts on students.

 

And for most of the lowest performing students, regular attendance is a key correlation to their outcomes. Is correlation the same as causation? Nope, but there's a connection between the two, beyond a doubt.

 

Which all boils down to: wash your hands, teach your kids to wash their hands thoroughly (no, go back in there and do it again; I didn't hear the water running!), and if they are well, get them to school. If we have a huge upsurge in "pre-emptive absence" over an excess of fear about the flu, we will see major negative outcomes in our district outcomes on multiple levels.

 

Flu is serious, but it always has been. Maintain an even strain, as the astronauts and test pilots say, and get the kids to school. See you after the election!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Knapsack 10-17

Faith Works 10-17-09

Jeff Gill

 

Dropping By the Mounds On an Autumn Weekend

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If you aren't in the Reese Center at some point today to learn about the Newark Earthworks and Native American culture woven deeply into our cultural landscape, you're missing out. You've got until 4 pm; I'm the MC, so I should be able to promise we'll stay pretty much on schedule . . .

 

Or come out after church tomorrow and get a tour at the Octagon section of the earthworks. It's an "open house" day at 33^rd and Parkview, so no golf to worry about, just come and stroll and soak in the beauty of the turning leaves and the wonder of 2000 year old astronomy.

 

"I lift up mine eyes unto . . ." the moon? The sun? The stars? Of course the original Psalm 121 continues "the hills, from whence cometh my help," which is to say, it's a question.

 

Does my help come from the hills? Nope. "My help cometh from the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth."

 

So it's kind of funny, and as a Biblical scholar, a little frustrating, that almost everyone reads this passage as an evocation of the beauty of the scenery. It seems pretty clear that the Hebrew is trying to point us beyond the hills, beyond even the heavens and the earth, to a Creator.

 

This past week, with the "Walk With the Ancients" experience of pilgrimage, I've heard many prayers, some said, often sung, and not occasionally in non-English languages, calling on the Creator in thanks, in praise, and with humbly worded requests.

 

Native American spirituality is not a subject on which I can or should call myself an expert, but I've spent a fair amount of time around it. One thing that we "dominant culture" folk need to keep hearing is that, in the words of a recent book title, written by a relative of one of our leaders, "Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong."

 

Some Indians are, to use their own words, not interested in spirituality at all. "Sorry," one such fellow said in my hearing. He sounded more amused than sorry, and I could see his point. His job wasn't to be what the passerby wanted him to be, with or without feathers.

 

I've met Indian chiefs and tribal storytellers who are Methodist ministers; sat with drummers who sing the sacred songs who are Baptists with a passion for evangelism; stood and watched a moonrise over the alignments of the Octagon with people who sincerely say that the moon is a spirit who watches over us.

 

Theologically, I love these interactions because they push me to consider what my beliefs tell me about the world I'm given to care for, and in what way I can live out and embody and speak of my beliefs with respect for the integrity of the individual before me.

 

And it's reminded me that evangelism or mission cannot be, should never have been, won't be in the future to an "ethnic group." There's a racism, a sin of a slippery sort when you try to address a group as a homogenous whole. You don't minister to Indians any more than you can minister to "veterans" or "gays" or "singles." Any assumption you make about the needs of a person based on what group they affiliate with is likely to be wrong, and wrong in a way that can sneak up on you in the worst fashion possible. When you assume you know the opennesses and vulnerabilities of an individual because of a label, you may just have the contents all wrong.

 

Working with the last five years of Newark Earthworks Day programs has taught me all over again that listening is at least half of any meaningful conversation. We talk about what we believe, walking the mounds, strolling through display tables, and between the speakers in the Reese Center at OSU-N -- more than I overhear or have happen to myself on many Sundays inside church buildings.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.