Notes from my Knapsack 12-24-20 & 1-7-21

Notes from my Knapsack 12-24-20

Jeff Gill

Lights of the season, shining bright

___

One of the delightfully pragmatic parts of the whole Advent season leading into Christmas Day is the stringing of lights, inside and outside, around our homes and across the community.

The reality of the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is that it's getting dark. Very, very dark. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, which means the longest night, and we get three or four indistinguishably at that length from Dec. 21 until, oh, about December the 25th, when a careful observer can first discern that, in fact, the days are starting to get longer — oh the joy!

And yes, speaking as a Christian, I am happy to admit there's no Biblical or mandatory connection in faith between Jesus being born in Bethlehem and the end of December. But there was a strategic decision early in the history of the church to tie the two together, and even if it doesn't quite work the same way in the global church of today for believers in Australia or South Africa, the idea is there.

For me, while I don't think I deal with seasonal affective disorder, I know some who do, and their plight is one we all share to some degree if not in scale: the lack of light and weight of darkness can put pressure on one's overall mood. Your spirits can get heavy and drag like chains across Scrooge's front porch with the gloom and shadow and dimness of early evenings and quickly descending nights.

But give me some brightly colored lights, strands of white ones along railings and around trees, or multi-hued garlands, glowing ornaments or pulsating ceramic decor, and my heart lifts. Light is good, and many small lights can be just as good; they can do in sum what the big one overhead is no longer taking care of, except for a few hours in the middle of the day. Come 3:00 or 3:30 pm, we need those light supplements, candles in windows, trees down Main & Broadway.

After Christmas, I am sorry the courthouse and so many homes give up the ghost, so to speak, so quickly. This is where the religious tradition of Christmastide might just be helpful, in faith and in practice, those "twelve days of Christmas" you might have sung about, from Dec. 25 to Epiphany on January 6. In some traditions, you hold off much of the Christmas stuff until at least Christmas Eve, and you carry on with trees and lights and song right through Jan. 6, with some going on until the older church feast of Candlemas, which you might know better as Groundhog Day, Feb. 2.

Whatever your preferred traditions or rituals, the fact is we need some supplemental light therapy of one sort or another for a month on either side of December 25. I'm not in favor of keeping the tree up year round, or leaving your lights in the shrubbery all the way until spring, which seems a bit lackadaisical, but shutting everything down Dec. 26 may be missing an opportunity. When all creation is making a head fake towards darkness, it's helpful to turn our hopes towards the light.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he generally keeps his tree up until Jan. 6, but to be fair it's artificial. Tell him how you keep illumination going in the dark midwinter at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

+    +    +

Notes from my Knapsack 1-7-21

Jeff Gill

Making a list, still checking it twice

___

Friends, I hope Saint Nicholas was good to you all, whether through doorstep delivery or down your chimney. Christmas came just in time, I'd have to say.

Now we enter 2021, for which we may have unreasonable hopes, and I say that not-un-optimistically. It's just that we can't expect too much from any one new year, and this one in particular.

As for the year past, which has surely had its share of postmortems even long before Dec. 31 . . .

My social media has made it clear that there are words and phrases that we're ready to set aside for a while, if not a very long time.

"Unprecedented" is high on that list. Yeah, pretty much everything about 2020 was unprecedented, but the unprecedentedness of the year got old in a hurry. At least in terms of calling things that . . . let's just leave it unsaid since it's already been said too much.

Along with unprecedented is its evil twin, the "new normal." Our new normals aren't normal, and in their newness are still not anywhere near what we can to get accustomed to as normal. So there's a groundswell to declare "new normal" as a proscribed category.

Here's a double barreled shot into oblivion: "going forward" and "until further notice." Going forward, we're postponing until further notice pretty much everything. So in that formulation, we are not going forward, and the further notice is likely to not come, as those postponing, aka canceling (let's come back to that one) are just hoping we will stop looking for any notice going forward and just forget the whole thing.

In terms of "postponing," we can't ban that word but it would be nice to use it appropriately. As in, when there's almost no chance it will be held later, or at least anytime short of a full year after originally scheduled, I don't think it's postponed, do you?

And these go back before COVID, but they're certainly been turbocharged by events of the last year, epidemiologically, and politically: "concerning" as in "I find thus and so very concerning," and also "disturbing." There's concern, and there's dislike or disapproval. Concerning, in the usages I keep hearing, is a term used to imply that the speaker refers to something that all right thinking people disapprove of, hence it's a matter of concern more than personal taste. Likewise when something is truly disturbing, it's likely to be a universal human response; anytime I hear in a political context a pundit talking about something being disturbing or concerning, I find myself immediately checking context. And questioning sincerity, just a bit. 

I just plain don't like "effectuate." Do I need to explain that one? No? Thank you!

But I don't know what we do about "virtual" or "remote." I think we're stuck with them, even though I know we're all tired of hearing them. How to use them accurately, in between pre-recorded and interactive, I'm not sure, but many virtual events I end up seeing are tapings from an earlier presentation, so I'm skeptical of their virtual-ness. Likewise an interactive online program where you can send in emails or type in chat boxes may or may not be interactive, depending on how well curated the feed is . . . but I will say that some online interactive programs I've participated in, when the chat function is used constructively, end up being more truly interactive between speaker and audience at large than in-person events where a few people ask long, rambling questions that are actually statements.

By the way, really do I read all my emails, and try to reply to each of them. Does that make this an interactive column? Stay tuned. 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he really does read all the emails that come in. Tell him what makes an event online interactive to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.