Faith Works 8-13

Faith Works 8-13-11

Jeff Gill

 

Lost origins hidden in plain sight

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Last week I laid out my interest in the architectural & organizational setting of the Harry Potter books in Hogwarts, an imaginary place with some very specific real world roots.

 

If you visit Oxford or Cambridge or St Andrews in Great Britain, you are visiting both the origins of the modern university system for higher education, and three ancient monastic establishments as well, an architectural vernacular directly reflected in the general layout of Hogwarts itself.

 

You can easily see at graduation ceremonies the academic robes and mortarboards which point back to medieval monastic tradition, and at a place like Denison University there are a number of official occasions when the faculty wear their robes complete with hoods and other ceremonial headgear (depending on the particular traditions behind the institution where they got their PhDs), all designed to keep the dripping of dank stone ceilings from dampening your head, or your spirit.

 

Simple black monks robes were part of everyday wear for all undergraduates at one time: Oxford required academic "gowns" on students for attending class as late as the 1960s, and still are mandatory at test taking time or for visiting officials of the university, with gowns for dinner up to individual college tradition. The term "town and gown" has to do with the easily identified distinction between students in black robes and the everyday citizens of a college town.

 

All of this is because the great educational establishments of Europe began as places to educate clergy; they developed advanced degrees (master of theology, doctor of philosophy) and began to have their own officials parallel to those found in a monastic establishment (provosts and chancellors and deans).

 

Theology was then known as "the queen of sciences," a comment that would get you a sharp laugh or an angry look in a science department today, wondering what kind of odd joke you're making.

 

What is still anchored in science & technology today is first the monastic structure of undergraduate degrees; freshman or first-year, sophomore aka "wise fool," junior and then senior, four years leading to a baccalaureate or "bachelor's" degree signifying the "laurel" of honors in learning. Additionally, there is another, even more important element of Christian faith and tradition which supports learning and scientific advancement.

 

From the 12^th century foundations of learning, there was much debate over the nature of reality, and questions of the Divine Nature which created and maintains it. Much of the ancient world saw nature as capricious, changeable, and constantly in flux, with the only consistency coming from the orbit of the planets through the constellations of the zodiac, or nervously encouraged through our sacrifices to nudge cosmic forces into paths we could predict. Unpredictable outcomes meant that the sacrifices had somehow changed the balance of the cosmos in the wrong way.

 

Into this hyper-complex, Ptolemaic world of epicycles and wheels within wheels, the theology of western Christendom said "No." The Church said (in Latin, the language which could cross the many national borders and local tongues which fragmented the remnants of the old Roman Empire) that God is consistent, coherent, and wants us to understand clearly how the book of Nature works as much as we were to understand how the Good Book taught us how to live.

 

So on one hand, scholars began to delve into the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible (with some unexpected outcomes, granted), and on the other, monks and friars began to test Nature, looking for immutable laws which were always and everywhere applicable.

 

You could argue that it was this commitment to finding Natural Laws which gave the Christian West the basis for their unprecedented leap into science & engineering proficiency that burst into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; that argument continues, but what doesn't hold up at all is the idea that the Renaissance & Enlightenment were entirely movements that occurred in spite of religious faith, let alone in opposition to it.

 

We do see a split at work in today's world, not only between the scientific worldview and much of what is understood to be a religious worldview of almost any sort, but also between science and the humanities. Some of that division is more apparent than actual, not so much the lived experience of scholars as how it is seen & discussed (I know many religious scientists, for instance), but the problem persists.

 

Which is where I find it very interesting to replay the Harry Potter saga as a sort of allegory, with magic & wizardry as science & technology. When Harry & Hermione stand in Godric's Hollow and look at two tombstones, each with a Biblical quotation on them, they don't recognize the words as such.

 

Yet the words speak to them, and they yearn to understand them.

 

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

Knapsack 8-26

Notes From My Knapsack 8-26-11

Jeff Gill

 

A funny name, a fascinating history

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Every so often, you may find yourself having to explain something to out of town, out of state friends and families.

 

"Licking County? Really?"

 

Like many language shifts, the culture and our sense of what's ludicrous, silly, or vaguely off has changed over the centuries.

 

Over 200 years ago, quite a few Licking Creeks and Licking Rivers were named across the United States. It appears that we are the only Licking County, but the watershed that gave us our name, when we were peeled off of Fairfield County in 1808, has cousins in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

 

The origin, most folks know, is in salt licks. When you can identify a spot animals gather, you have an edge in hunting. Today some hunters still set out salt blocks to draw game to a particular spot. Salt licks have a potential commercial application in a frontier setting, where salt supplies have to come over the mountains from long distances, and cost accordingly. A local salt supply can be a real boon for a settlement.

 

Usually, you have less of an exposed area of mineral salts (which would dissolve quickly if exposed, anyhow) than you have a spring with a salt taste, stemming from a geologic source deep below the ground which is carried up by the artesian spring in question. Animals who crave salt in their systems will go out of their way to drink it, just as salty food doesn't taste too strongly salted if you've been out and working up a sweat. The body wants and needs a certain amount of salt, low sodium diets being a modern issue of too much all the time.

 

So a "Salt Fork" or "Salt Springs" is another indication of pioneer interests, and we have plenty of those around Ohio and beyond. Running right through Granville's own Spring Valley Nature Preserve is Salt Run.

 

Currently, the Granville Township Trustees, the Granville Recreation District, and some faculty & students from Denison University are working at returning Salt Run to a more natural flow. A low dam and retaining wall are almost all that remain of the old Spring Valley pool, and they are in the process of removal, which will be followed by some careful planting and un-scaping to give the natural plants and animals a chance to return and thrive.

 

Between the picnic shelter and Salt Run are two low parallel walls of earth. Preliminary research shows that they date to an attempt in 1820 to sluice off some of the Salt Run water and evaporate or cook down useable salt from the creek, which ended fairly quickly when it was determined that the energy it took to reduce salt from solution was not cost effective. There's also another low earthwork further south, deeper in the woods, that has been dated to the Middle Woodland period (c. 2,000 years ago) which may have been related to salt production as well.

 

During the research on all this, I went back to the question "how did Licking County get named?" The earliest note, preceding many later mentions of a conveniently unchallengable possibility of licks in the "Great Buffalo Swamp" which has been submerged under Buckeye Lake since the 1830s, is in the Journal of Christopher Gist, from 1751.

 

He enters what is now Licking County from the Coshocton area, cutting across the eastern half of the region, but with more to say, possibly told him by the noted trader George Croghan or one of the other members of his party already familiar with the landscape, that from "Licking Creek about 6 M from the Mouth, are several Salt Licks, or Ponds, formed by little Streams or Dreins (sic) of Water, clear but of a blueish Color, & salt Taste the Traders and Indians boil their meat in this Water, which (if proper Care be not taken) will sometimes make it too salt to eat." (Wednesday 16 January 1751)

 

Nowadays, the mouth of a river would be the end of it; for the modern Licking River, that's in Zanesville, and six miles up from that barely gets you to Dillon Reservoir, and there's no story that I can find of salt licks or springs near there.

 

Six miles up from where today's North Fork, South Fork, and the one-time so-called Raccoon Fork come together, as forks of the Licking drainage; six miles up the Raccoon fork of Licking Creek puts you right at where Salt Run empties into the larger stream.

 

It may well be, then, that when you hike at Spring Valley Nature Preserve, you are walking near the source of Licking County's name itself!

 

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