Faith Works 7-3-21

Faith Works 7-3-21

Jeff Gill

What if the Golden Age is today?

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If some things are better today, am I writing off yesterday?

This is part of the question that previous columns have provoked, and I'm not ready to drop the subject yet.

When I suggested that "the good old days" were not great for everyone, I knew it would poke some sore spots. If you have good memories of how life in downtown Newark and around Licking County were, I have no interest whatsoever in taking them away, or even stomping on them before giving them back to you.

What I am interested in is the process of adding some depth to the picture, to look at angles not always in the center of the frame, and to see what the shadows can tell us.

In a pragmatic way, I love a series of books by William A. Frassanito about Gettysburg (where he lives) and Antietam and other Civil War battlefields, where he takes classic photography of the era, and uses the shadows and certainties of the older landscape to revisit and reassess what we can learn from visiting those places today. He uncovered some "arranging" and reframing that tells us today about parts of the story from then that were created, crafted, and in some cases just not true. Errol Morris has done much the same in documentary films and the pages of the New York Times.

There are shadows over Newark and Licking County in the century between 1880 & 1980 that, when looked at closely, reveal both detail within the darkness, and also some achievements worth noting that have been obscured. It's a package deal, in faith community life or civic affairs: you take the rain with the rainbow, the storm with the sunny day. If you try to make everything sunlight and warmth you end up with overexposed desert.

By the same token, we have quite a bit that's been done in recent years which I fear we miss out on appreciating as we might because of how we try to compare it to a Golden Age that maybe never was. Church life deals with this all the time: the idea that in the 1950s and 1960s everyone went to church, we all could keep our doors unlocked, and the stores all stayed closed on Sunday so we would all stay home and memorize Romans.

Do I think there's less Bible-by-heart work done today than formerly? Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I could also ask pastorally if we can be sure we were getting the outcomes we hoped for from making "memory verses" the heart of our youth programs. Mark Twain was writing caustically about the ways and means of memorization of scripture in 1876: go find a copy of "Tom Sawyer" and read it for yourself.

So last week I was asking out loud about education and industry, and whether or not we can't make a case for how we live in a Golden Age of sorts, with more high school graduates, more students with disabilities given both schooling and opportunities, and new paths into the workforce, than we've had in generations. What we've lost, and please believe me when I say I feel with you the lack of it, is a way for young people who don't want to keep on going into school buildings and sitting in classrooms to be able to make a way for themselves, towards a secure living and stable housing and a contented home life. The path into factory work and family living is not what it was.

We don't want to jam every high school graduate into a college program if that's not where they're called. But likewise, many more young people have paths forward other than factory work and hourly employment than was true a hundred or even fifty years ago. Our collective concern, and not a little pain, is that these opportunities come with a cost: the reality that many young adults leave to find those second and third steps into new possibilities, and go far away from where we raised them.

It's not to dismiss those losses, locally, that I'd like to first celebrate how much is, indeed, possible today for someone starting their adult lives. And to tip my hat to the recently semi-retired Conan O'Brien and his words: "If you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a bit more to say about discernment and vocation if you promise to come back next week. Tell him what you value from your work history at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.