Notes From My Knapsack 2-14-18

Notes From My Knapsack 2-14-18

Jeff Gill

 

Love and other vital signs

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My apologies at the outset; for friends and casual acquaintances, it's been clear on my social media and in other outlets like this column that I'm not quite as cheerful and optimistic these days as I'd like to be.

 

Thank you to expressions of concern from any and all, but in fact I am blessed indeed with a wife who loves me, a son who's finding his way with class and distinction, and work that fulfills me. In my life, all is well.

 

And with Julian of Norwich, I haven't lost my sense, as a Christian and a pastor, that all shall be well. (If you've not read any Julian, give her a look online – much to enjoy even four centuries on.) All shall be well, indeed, but we're not promised an easy path to get there.

 

Which is why in my vocation and avocations, in and around Licking County and Our Fayre Village, I do worry about just how hard a path we have before us. Incomes are increasing, employment is high, and Elon Musk just sent a Tesla to Ceres. There is much to call encouraging all around us.

 

But even as we are given a time of prosperity and ease like no culture has ever known, it feels to me that the levels of discontent, anxiety, and outright fear are off the charts. I've spent quality time in archives and records and journals from our pioneer era, when ox drawn carts brought families with a good axe, a ploughshare, and a bag of seed into this valley. They died young of odd ailments almost unknown today; they wore themselves down with labor few of us can even imagine doing for twenty minutes in the gym. Yet they had hope, and hopes, and good cheer in great measure when time and circumstance allowed.

 

The pre-Civil War times when timber frame houses were turning into brick and stone, with Grecian models of architecture pointing to aspirations for education and art, were still filled with sudden death and grinding work. Don't even ask about bathing or other creature comforts: yet the letters and diaries of that period are filled with grace and satisfaction, and aspirations which did not weigh them down in the present moment.

 

I could go on – until I get to today. Where anger and frustration and outright rage seem so common, in politics but also in family life; with suicide a storm cloud with flashes striking ever closer and more frequently around us; as images and visual culture soaked with violence and brutality both of a criminal and intimate variety.

 

Maybe I'm missing how the unpleasantness, the alienation, was always there, but unrecorded. It's quite possible. Kant's "crooked timber of humanity" from which "no straight thing was ever made" has been a reality for generations, I know.

 

Maslow's famous "hierarchy of needs" tells us that we need shelter and food and clothing first and foremost, but the next level of his pyramid is "safety" and the one after that is "love." As a community, in Granville and the state as a whole, I find myself worrying much these days that we're not even getting to love, because people just do not feel safe. Air bags and webcams on front doors aren't the cure. It's a level of safety of the heart, the soul, that we need to tend.

 

What would it mean to be a community where people felt truly safe? And what is undermining that sense which keeps us from getting to love? I think that's a needed thought in this Valentine's Day season.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been talking about our "hope deficit" for some time. Tell him where you see resources of hope and safety at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.