Notes from my Knapsack 11-12-20

Notes from my Knapsack 11-12-20

Jeff Gill

Small gatherings, large memories

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In two weeks, we come to Thanksgiving, perhaps the one holiday of the year, whether for the religious or the secular, most tied to gathering.

In church circles, if you say let alone sing "we gather together…" you'll hear quickly back "…to ask the Lord's blessing!" For almost anyone, mention of Thanksgiving is less tied to Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock than it is to families and a dinner table of one sort or another., whether with a turkey or some other main course

Most all of my childhood Thanksgiving Day dinners were hosted by now departed family, their homes now in others' hands and even the table and chairs and china now dispersed after my father's passing and the breakup of my parents' household. Oddly enough, I don't recall a single Thanksgiving in the house where I grew up: we were always on the road, to grandmother's house over the river and through the woods, to the great-aunts' condominium, and more recently my parents in Texas for the winter meant my own family would head back to my wife's family, sometimes with a side trip to my sister's.

This year, unprecedentedly, we will be at home. 35 years of marriage, and we can only think of a couple of times we were in our own house for Thanksgiving Day. I've cooked turkeys in other people's ovens, or carried side-dishes down the highway in the trunk carefully wedged, and even made the restaurant pick-up maneuver a couple of times for other households. But starting to prepare in my own kitchen the night before, and giving no thought to how anything I make can be stowed for a long drive, but just carrying things across the dining room… I can barely imagine what to do!

Along with the losses of this year comes the COVID restrictions, looking to be on the increase as we head through November anyhow. So just us at our own home sounds prudent and necessary. This means I need to think through a rich assortment of traditions and recipes and service options, and craft a Thanksgiving for us. It actually feels less like a limitation than it does an opportunity. So many opportunities and obligations are of necessity whittled away, leaving us where we can sit down and reflect on what it means for us to be together.

We will, just three of us, gather together. Three can be together. Twelve or twenty are definitely a familiar sort of togetherness, but three is just fine. And I might make a turkey, or it could be a lasagna with turkey sausage in the meat sauce. I'm not quite sure yet.

We gather together, and we will indeed ask the Lord's blessing, who (as the hymn says) chastens and hastens us, so that God's will might be known to us, and we might pray that the wicked truly will cease oppressing and distressing. At the very least, we will say grace, and give praise to the One who brings us together in twos and threes as much as twenty-sevens and two hundreds, and remember that God "forgets not His own," as we remember those we've sat with at the Thanksgiving table in years past.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's definitely cooking up some cranberry sauce at home this year. Tell him your favorite family seasonal recipe at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 11-7-20

Faith Works 11-7-20

Jeff Gill

Believing in other people is faithful work

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Faith is often criticized as being ungrounded, not proven, someone's purely imaginary beliefs without a source that can be independently confirmed. And sometimes, that's what faith is.

Or, he said with an eye to the Christmas season ahead, "Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to." Hat tip, Doris Walker (don't worry, it'll come to you).

Rationalists like to condemn faith as always being that sort of emotionally driven, secondhand sort of attitude, not a way of using your mind to truly understand life and circumstances.

Yet we people of faith like to come right back with the reminder that much of life has to be taken on faith. I've never been to Russia, or Africa, or Poughkeepsie, but I believe they all exist. There's a webwork, a larger context of facts and inferences and (this is the big one) trust that allows me to believe in upper New York State, even when I've never been farther up the Hudson than Wappingers Falls.

For a Christian, our faith is grounded in stories from scripture, history and tradition in the life of our church community, and many would say the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is exactly the kind of subjective statement that frustrates hard core rationalists. You can't see or smell the Holy Spirit, so when someone says "my faith has been guided and affirmed by the working of the Spirit" they might retort with Scrooge (I do have Christmas on the brain, don't I?) to his ghostly visitor "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Our senses and even our thoughts can be misled. And beyond the conflict between faith and rationality, you have different worldviews which can be in conflict. My beliefs about where the universe comes from, even before a Big Bang, and where it's going, even beyond the strong likelihood of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics that I learned in high school, may not keep me from enjoying physics, even as another physicist might be a Buddhist and another down the lab bench an atheist. Worldviews can overlap and interact, even when they have some pretty strong differences beyond their respective margins.

Which is why I've been thinking for a while, and want to say now, that it is good for anyone's faith to learn about and even be challenged by someone else's worldview. This is one reason The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sends their young people out on missions, and why as a non-member I always enjoy conversations with their elders and sisters who are serving on one. They're not afraid to have their faith tested and they've gotten some basic training in how to challenge your assumptions, too.

But I'm not telling you to go hunt up a Mormon missionary (feel free if you want to!); rather, I just hope you can make a specific effort in the next few days and weeks to have a conversation with someone with a different worldview than yours. I'm betting they're not hard to find, and social media makes it even easier, despite COVID restrictions. Most people love to be asked about their worldview, and if you show you're willing to sincerely listen, they're almost certain to be willing to hear yours, as well.

Smarter people than me have pointed out that we live these days in a time of ever increasing "sorting." There's more I'd like to say about this, but in general, is that a worldview you'd take on faith from me? We view media that's in line with our assumptions and listen to others who reinforce what we already think, and even political lines are drawn to lump like with like.

Our nation, though, has a faith, a worldview built into our founding, and is inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States: "E pluribus unum." Or in English, "out of many, one." This country is designed around a faith that from our diversity, we can find unity. It can survive and thrive if we reach beyond our familiar understandings, and listen to those of the other, and think about how they have come to believe that, whatever that is.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his worldview isn't that unusual, but sometimes it seems like it might be. Tell him about how you've learned from the worldview of someone else at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.