Faith Works 1-6-23
Jeff Gill
How far would you travel to know
___
Epiphany, also known as the Twelfth Day of Christmas, is necessarily on January the Sixth.
In the Christian calendar it marks the visit of the Magi, or "wise men from the East" in certain translations, to the presence of the newborn Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph.
In parts of Christendom, Epiphany is the day for gifts and celebration; in our neck of the woods, it's when the tree comes down if it hadn't long before. Across the history of Biblical interpretation around the birth of Jesus, from Balaam's prophecy in the Book of Numbers to the statements about camels and gifts in Isaiah, to the nativity tale in Matthew's Gospel, these mages, these wise folk, astronomers or perhaps astrologers, bearing three gifts whether that's how many of them there were or not, are said to have traveled.
They came from the east, the tribes and nations and peoples beyond the conquering arc of Alexander the Great, extending beyond the orbit of the Pax Romana. In this place beyond everything familiar, there were wise people who watched the skies and the stars, and who saw signs leading them first to Jerusalem in Judea, and then on to Bethlehem (or Nazareth, some suggest, but the question is open).
We don't get the details in the Matthean account, but we are told the consequences. The Magi traveled a long distance, which took a long time, across hazardous terrain. They entered a place they didn't know before, they had the boldness needed to approach the court of a distant king, by the name of Herod, and they continued even when they realized they'd backed into some vicious internecine conflict in this land.
Somehow, in some way, the movements of stars and planets and their positions in relation to the circling constellations, all told these intrepid pilgrims there was good news of some sort worth taking the effort to see first hand. Which leads me to a question.
Mark Twain in his "Innocents Abroad" of 1869 said: "To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else — these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment." Is this why the Magi came to the manger?
Contrariwise, Samuel Johnson in the late 1700s told potential tourists about a site in northern Ireland: "[The Giant's Causeway] is worth seeing, but not worth the effort of going to see." Yet the Magi, without knowing for sure what or who it was they would see at the end of their journey, continued on in the face of dangers and distractions and surely just the temptation to turn around and go home, where they had no doubt comfortable beds and knew in their sleep where the alarm clock was, to reach out and turn it off and doze another half hour.
Which makes one lesson of Epiphany, for me, this question: what news would motivate and empower me to make that kind of trip? Is there out there any learning or knowledge or illumination that I need or want enough I'd cross the Tigris AND the Euphrates to reach?
What possible information would keep me atop a camel, across a desert, and in defiance of a king's powerful and vicious will, to gain for myself, to know firsthand and see face to face?
My your Epiphany start you off on a journey of illumination and inspiration in 2023.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made some trips, but usually just to see family. Tell him what's put you on the road to find what you're looking for at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Friday, December 30, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 1-5-23
Notes from my Knapsack 1-5-23
Jeff Gill
Taking responsibility, sharing accountability
___
Welcome to a new year, 2023!
Or as Pete Townshend might have said, meet the new year, same as the old year. But I suspect we will get fooled again, now and then.
I do expect new events and changes in circumstances during the coming twelve months, simply because if the last twelve or the dozen before that are any indication, a year is long enough for stuff to happen.
But most of the stuff will be fairly predictable.
One of the challenges for a columnist is to ask of oneself, let alone of readers, what change or transformation or shift is possible, let alone necessary.
For myself and in my own views of the community in which I live, I find myself wrestling often with the tension between personal responsibility and community values. I do think it's important, as a general rule, for individuals to take responsibility for their choices, because that's the best way we can learn from them. If you do something dumb, a bad outcome is a great way to internalize the lesson "don't do that again." A common phrase which I think contains some deep wisdom goes "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
A modest form of this is one adults wrestle with in Scouting. We can work overtime to ensure every youth has all the items they're supposed to bring when they camp out or do an activity out in nature, away from home and stores and security. But at a certain point, you need to learn the lesson of packing your own gear, checking your supplies, ensuring your own comfort. If you skip layers, and it gets cold in the sleeping bag, you learn things that long night, awaiting the chilly dawn.
We adults are there to ensure safety, and I'd never want a youth in my care to be harmed or hurt or frostbitten just to learn a lesson. But there's a certain amount of discomfort we know it's not our job to prevent, in the interests of the young Scouts themselves.
In the adult world, this gets trickier in matters like, say, harm reduction. If you've never heard of it, let me say it boils down — for me, anyhow — to this: people may make decisions I don't agree with, but no one should die to learn a lesson.
Because death, and I ask y'all to bear with me, is the opposite of any lessons whatsoever. You don't learn anything, at least in an earthly sense, by dying. You cease to learn. And your opportunities to learn new lessons, to make different decisions, end.
This can result in some actions and interventions which cause us as a community to wrestle hard with that interplay between personal responsibility and community values. And I get it that providing life saving interventions to people who keep making the same mistakes which lead to hazard and unconsciousness and near-death seems like we would be not leading people to different decisions.
Except I will say again: death is the end of learning, in any earthly sense. I have good friends with different views on substance use and abuse than my own, but we agree on this: people should be able to live long enough to make different choices. Harm reduction may keep people using dangerous and even illegal substances for longer, but that's longer versus ending. Period.
In 2023, I hope and pray we can have some new conversations about harm reduction, and addiction, and recovery, and hope. Because I have grown tired of having some of the same ones for too many years.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's sure we can do better but isn't certain we will. Tell him how our community can balance responsibility and respect at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Taking responsibility, sharing accountability
___
Welcome to a new year, 2023!
Or as Pete Townshend might have said, meet the new year, same as the old year. But I suspect we will get fooled again, now and then.
I do expect new events and changes in circumstances during the coming twelve months, simply because if the last twelve or the dozen before that are any indication, a year is long enough for stuff to happen.
But most of the stuff will be fairly predictable.
One of the challenges for a columnist is to ask of oneself, let alone of readers, what change or transformation or shift is possible, let alone necessary.
For myself and in my own views of the community in which I live, I find myself wrestling often with the tension between personal responsibility and community values. I do think it's important, as a general rule, for individuals to take responsibility for their choices, because that's the best way we can learn from them. If you do something dumb, a bad outcome is a great way to internalize the lesson "don't do that again." A common phrase which I think contains some deep wisdom goes "play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
A modest form of this is one adults wrestle with in Scouting. We can work overtime to ensure every youth has all the items they're supposed to bring when they camp out or do an activity out in nature, away from home and stores and security. But at a certain point, you need to learn the lesson of packing your own gear, checking your supplies, ensuring your own comfort. If you skip layers, and it gets cold in the sleeping bag, you learn things that long night, awaiting the chilly dawn.
We adults are there to ensure safety, and I'd never want a youth in my care to be harmed or hurt or frostbitten just to learn a lesson. But there's a certain amount of discomfort we know it's not our job to prevent, in the interests of the young Scouts themselves.
In the adult world, this gets trickier in matters like, say, harm reduction. If you've never heard of it, let me say it boils down — for me, anyhow — to this: people may make decisions I don't agree with, but no one should die to learn a lesson.
Because death, and I ask y'all to bear with me, is the opposite of any lessons whatsoever. You don't learn anything, at least in an earthly sense, by dying. You cease to learn. And your opportunities to learn new lessons, to make different decisions, end.
This can result in some actions and interventions which cause us as a community to wrestle hard with that interplay between personal responsibility and community values. And I get it that providing life saving interventions to people who keep making the same mistakes which lead to hazard and unconsciousness and near-death seems like we would be not leading people to different decisions.
Except I will say again: death is the end of learning, in any earthly sense. I have good friends with different views on substance use and abuse than my own, but we agree on this: people should be able to live long enough to make different choices. Harm reduction may keep people using dangerous and even illegal substances for longer, but that's longer versus ending. Period.
In 2023, I hope and pray we can have some new conversations about harm reduction, and addiction, and recovery, and hope. Because I have grown tired of having some of the same ones for too many years.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's sure we can do better but isn't certain we will. Tell him how our community can balance responsibility and respect at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Tuesday, December 06, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 12-22-22
Notes from my Knapsack 12-22-22
Jeff Gill
How modern are we, really, in December?
___
We are modern, connected, high tech, highly evolved people here in 2022, and maybe we're ready for 2023 and maybe we aren't.
What we're still afraid of is the dark.
When nighttime starts just after noon, and morning doesn't come until long after we're up and at 'em, there's not enough daylight to give us the strength and hope and vision we need.
Our screens and texts and online content can't generate enough light and illumination to get us through our days, and we need . . . well, we need light.
So whatever your religion or spiritual orientation, you probably have some lights strung around somewhere. Garlands or menorahs or trees, strands outside or mantlepieces in the family room, we crave and covet and display our lights, shining out as evening settles around us and glowing where otherwise shadows would dominate.
Yard displays and candles in the windows are everywhere, and almost always welcomed. In downtown Newark, the longstanding tradition of lighting the courthouse has been shrouded by the necessity to limit the decorations, due to work finishing the refurbishment of the long-neglected seat of our county judiciary. Windows being replaced and cranes rolling about the lawn means the festive whole is about half this year — not forever, just for now — and the larger displays out on the grounds are nowhere to be seen. And people are fussing like you wouldn't believe, because we do not want less light, we want more.
More colors, more bulbs, in more places. Lighting the tree is not enough, it's got to be the staircases and side tables and up on the housetop if possible. Lights everywhere we can put them.
Because truth be told we're not all that modern. It may be 2022 but it's a thousand years ago or more in our hearts, and while the astronomers and almanac makers are confident that after about the 25th of December days will get longer, there's a part of us that's not sure. Daylight gets shorter and shorter and shorter and we're all getting to where we can't hardly remember what it's like to drive home under the sun and enjoy an evening on the porch. We dress in the dark in the morning and come home to . . . well, we hope to see our lights on if the timers work, because that's what we're pushing back against.
I do think each year at this time about the people who lived here for millennia, building mounds and earthworks, living in their log and bark and hide homes, looking into the fire and watching the smoke rise up to the opening overhead, tracking the sun and the moon but wondering: will days ever get longer again? Will all become night? How can we summon again the light and life of spring?
It's too easy to think of those as primitive times, and the people likewise, but we feel it in our bones as well. A certain uncertainty about day and night and light and dark. So we string our lights, light our candles, shine bulbs and spots and projectors into the night, to push it away, and call back the sun.
Soon, though, we will see it. And feel that, too, in our bones. Life will return; hope is coming.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready for some blue sky if not green shoots any day now. Tell him how you get through winter at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
How modern are we, really, in December?
___
We are modern, connected, high tech, highly evolved people here in 2022, and maybe we're ready for 2023 and maybe we aren't.
What we're still afraid of is the dark.
When nighttime starts just after noon, and morning doesn't come until long after we're up and at 'em, there's not enough daylight to give us the strength and hope and vision we need.
Our screens and texts and online content can't generate enough light and illumination to get us through our days, and we need . . . well, we need light.
So whatever your religion or spiritual orientation, you probably have some lights strung around somewhere. Garlands or menorahs or trees, strands outside or mantlepieces in the family room, we crave and covet and display our lights, shining out as evening settles around us and glowing where otherwise shadows would dominate.
Yard displays and candles in the windows are everywhere, and almost always welcomed. In downtown Newark, the longstanding tradition of lighting the courthouse has been shrouded by the necessity to limit the decorations, due to work finishing the refurbishment of the long-neglected seat of our county judiciary. Windows being replaced and cranes rolling about the lawn means the festive whole is about half this year — not forever, just for now — and the larger displays out on the grounds are nowhere to be seen. And people are fussing like you wouldn't believe, because we do not want less light, we want more.
More colors, more bulbs, in more places. Lighting the tree is not enough, it's got to be the staircases and side tables and up on the housetop if possible. Lights everywhere we can put them.
Because truth be told we're not all that modern. It may be 2022 but it's a thousand years ago or more in our hearts, and while the astronomers and almanac makers are confident that after about the 25th of December days will get longer, there's a part of us that's not sure. Daylight gets shorter and shorter and shorter and we're all getting to where we can't hardly remember what it's like to drive home under the sun and enjoy an evening on the porch. We dress in the dark in the morning and come home to . . . well, we hope to see our lights on if the timers work, because that's what we're pushing back against.
I do think each year at this time about the people who lived here for millennia, building mounds and earthworks, living in their log and bark and hide homes, looking into the fire and watching the smoke rise up to the opening overhead, tracking the sun and the moon but wondering: will days ever get longer again? Will all become night? How can we summon again the light and life of spring?
It's too easy to think of those as primitive times, and the people likewise, but we feel it in our bones as well. A certain uncertainty about day and night and light and dark. So we string our lights, light our candles, shine bulbs and spots and projectors into the night, to push it away, and call back the sun.
Soon, though, we will see it. And feel that, too, in our bones. Life will return; hope is coming.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready for some blue sky if not green shoots any day now. Tell him how you get through winter at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 12-30-22
Faith Works 12-30-22
Jeff Gill
Work, for the night is coming
___
Imperceptibly, the days are getting longer. You may have to take it on faith, but they are.
At year's end, we feel the darkness weighing down on us. Night is coming, we think, starting about half past noon. There's more evening than daylight, and night goes on forever. Or so it seems, getting up in the dark to head to work.
There's a hymn from my childhood that comes to mind this time of year: "Work, for the night is coming." I didn't realize until more recently the song comes from the Bible, in John 9:4 where Jesus says "We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work." Literally, the Greek of that last phrase is "it is coming night, when no one is able to work," inclusive in emphasis. No woman or man, no one can work when night falls, so let's get the job done now.
Or as the lyrics say: "Work, for the night is coming: Work through the morning hours; Work while the dew is sparkling: Work mid springing flowers…" The first verse starts with a hint of hope before turning to night, reminding us of the light we have, going on with "Work when the day grows brighter; Work in the glowing sun; Work, for the night is coming, When man's work is done."
Anna Louisa Walker was born in England, and when she wrote the lyrics of this hymn as a poem in the 1860s, her family had moved to Sarnia, Ontario where nights would have been even longer in the winter than they are in Ohio. Her father was an engineer on the railroads, which would certainly have been a daylight endeavor in the Nineteenth Century, building them or running on them. "Work, for the night is coming."
There's a somber turn in the lyrics: "Work, for the night is coming, Under the sunset skies; While their bright tints are glowing, Work, for daylight flies." And then downright morbidly: "Work till the last beam fadeth, Fadeth to shine no more; Work, while the night is darkening, When man's work is o'er."
Jesus may not have meant quite what Annie was saying, but in either case, the point is the same: use the time you have. Use it well, because as another more recent song says, we may never pass this way again.
If there is a midnight thought, a nighttime reflection I would take from both Christ's words in John's Gospel and this old-fashioned hymn, it's less about the waning of the light, as the fact that with night comes rest, and dreams, and in what Jesus is fairly directly implying, a new sort of day is coming where things are different, where work may not even be part of the next phase of the plan. We have light to do the work set before us, but when night falls, the task changes.
May the turn to the new year open up new light for you, as the sun sets on the year now past. Not so much an end, as a new beginning; but until then, let's finish what's at hand, or at least be ready to set it aside and move on to where God calls us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready to move on from 2022. Tell him what you're looking forward to at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Work, for the night is coming
___
Imperceptibly, the days are getting longer. You may have to take it on faith, but they are.
At year's end, we feel the darkness weighing down on us. Night is coming, we think, starting about half past noon. There's more evening than daylight, and night goes on forever. Or so it seems, getting up in the dark to head to work.
There's a hymn from my childhood that comes to mind this time of year: "Work, for the night is coming." I didn't realize until more recently the song comes from the Bible, in John 9:4 where Jesus says "We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work." Literally, the Greek of that last phrase is "it is coming night, when no one is able to work," inclusive in emphasis. No woman or man, no one can work when night falls, so let's get the job done now.
Or as the lyrics say: "Work, for the night is coming: Work through the morning hours; Work while the dew is sparkling: Work mid springing flowers…" The first verse starts with a hint of hope before turning to night, reminding us of the light we have, going on with "Work when the day grows brighter; Work in the glowing sun; Work, for the night is coming, When man's work is done."
Anna Louisa Walker was born in England, and when she wrote the lyrics of this hymn as a poem in the 1860s, her family had moved to Sarnia, Ontario where nights would have been even longer in the winter than they are in Ohio. Her father was an engineer on the railroads, which would certainly have been a daylight endeavor in the Nineteenth Century, building them or running on them. "Work, for the night is coming."
There's a somber turn in the lyrics: "Work, for the night is coming, Under the sunset skies; While their bright tints are glowing, Work, for daylight flies." And then downright morbidly: "Work till the last beam fadeth, Fadeth to shine no more; Work, while the night is darkening, When man's work is o'er."
Jesus may not have meant quite what Annie was saying, but in either case, the point is the same: use the time you have. Use it well, because as another more recent song says, we may never pass this way again.
If there is a midnight thought, a nighttime reflection I would take from both Christ's words in John's Gospel and this old-fashioned hymn, it's less about the waning of the light, as the fact that with night comes rest, and dreams, and in what Jesus is fairly directly implying, a new sort of day is coming where things are different, where work may not even be part of the next phase of the plan. We have light to do the work set before us, but when night falls, the task changes.
May the turn to the new year open up new light for you, as the sun sets on the year now past. Not so much an end, as a new beginning; but until then, let's finish what's at hand, or at least be ready to set it aside and move on to where God calls us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready to move on from 2022. Tell him what you're looking forward to at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 12-23-22
Faith Works 12-23-22
Jeff Gill
A manger is also a library of sorts
___
When you look at a manger scene, or crèche as some call them, you see a visual sermon that goes back to St. Francis of Assisi, we're told.
He arranged what today we call a "living nativity" outside a church at Christmastime, and you still see those, but from Italy now around the world it's common to see manger scenes in ceramic or plastic, woodcarved or handcrafted in any number of media, to depict the scene of Jesus having been born in Bethlehem.
We don't know there were three magi, but we go with it because of three gifts; the wise men are in a completely different account than the shepherds adoring the child born to be the Christ, in Matthew versus Luke's account where the stable setting may or may not be accurate to the time and place.
However, I want to sing out loud and strong on behalf of crèche sets and manger scenes, whether anachronistic or historically accurate. With good Francis and many other manger aficionados I celebrate how the classic crèche actually nods to a wide range of prophecies and citations from across the Bible to get us to that holy night. It's a library in miniature, the Bible fleshed out in an assembly of figures.
First there's the overall setting of Bethlehem, which we get from Micah 5:2: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times."
As for the stable, however you translate "ketaluma" from the Greek, there's Isaiah 1:3: "The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand" as the prophet notes that people in general will not realize what's going on, but everyday farm animals might.
A little further on in Isaiah, chapters 7 & 9, we get the young woman, a virgin giving birth, a baby to save the nation: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel… For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder - and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."
In Hosea 11 we hear of how the Messiah will come "out of Egypt" and in Psalm 72 the kings of the East come with gifts and gold; again we hear from Isaiah in chapter 60, "A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall bring good news, the praises of the LORD."
In fact, the star they follow along with the idea of distant kings coming to draw near and worship is foretold all the way back in Numbers 24, with the narrative of Balak the king and Balaam the vessel of God's blessings, and specifically in verse 17 "a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel."
And shepherds are all over scripture, but Isaiah 40:11 gives us a familiar picture of God: "He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young."
Your manger scene is a three-dimensional Bible waiting to be read by you this Christmas.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few manger scenes around the house with stories of their own. Tell him your tales at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
A manger is also a library of sorts
___
When you look at a manger scene, or crèche as some call them, you see a visual sermon that goes back to St. Francis of Assisi, we're told.
He arranged what today we call a "living nativity" outside a church at Christmastime, and you still see those, but from Italy now around the world it's common to see manger scenes in ceramic or plastic, woodcarved or handcrafted in any number of media, to depict the scene of Jesus having been born in Bethlehem.
We don't know there were three magi, but we go with it because of three gifts; the wise men are in a completely different account than the shepherds adoring the child born to be the Christ, in Matthew versus Luke's account where the stable setting may or may not be accurate to the time and place.
However, I want to sing out loud and strong on behalf of crèche sets and manger scenes, whether anachronistic or historically accurate. With good Francis and many other manger aficionados I celebrate how the classic crèche actually nods to a wide range of prophecies and citations from across the Bible to get us to that holy night. It's a library in miniature, the Bible fleshed out in an assembly of figures.
First there's the overall setting of Bethlehem, which we get from Micah 5:2: "But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times."
As for the stable, however you translate "ketaluma" from the Greek, there's Isaiah 1:3: "The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand" as the prophet notes that people in general will not realize what's going on, but everyday farm animals might.
A little further on in Isaiah, chapters 7 & 9, we get the young woman, a virgin giving birth, a baby to save the nation: "Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel… For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder - and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."
In Hosea 11 we hear of how the Messiah will come "out of Egypt" and in Psalm 72 the kings of the East come with gifts and gold; again we hear from Isaiah in chapter 60, "A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall bring good news, the praises of the LORD."
In fact, the star they follow along with the idea of distant kings coming to draw near and worship is foretold all the way back in Numbers 24, with the narrative of Balak the king and Balaam the vessel of God's blessings, and specifically in verse 17 "a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel."
And shepherds are all over scripture, but Isaiah 40:11 gives us a familiar picture of God: "He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young."
Your manger scene is a three-dimensional Bible waiting to be read by you this Christmas.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few manger scenes around the house with stories of their own. Tell him your tales at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 12-16-22
Ben — you've got the last of the courthouse series in hand, I trust, for 12-9, and here's 12-16; I will send along 12-23 & 12-30 shortly since I'm sure you're doing set-ups early.
Pax, Jeff
Faith Works 12-16-22
Jeff Gill
Angels in the architecture
___
Angels are part of the Christmas story, in Luke & Matthew, speaking and singing to shepherds and sleepers alike. Both Mary & Joseph hear from angels of the Lord, messengers of God.
Some are named, like Gabriel, others part of a heavenly host, a solid phalanx of angelic representatives.
I like how angels can appear in dreams, or in person; in the air, or behind closed doors. They are wherever God wants them to be; they speak for God, and keep the plans of God on track.
Jesus is not an angel; those who die are not transformed into angels although folk spirituality has created that impression. You could debate at length the nature and make-up of a heavenly host, which perhaps includes both angels and the saints in glory, all mixed together in a chorus of celebration.
What angels are is the Word of God made active; messenger is a close approximation of the Hebrew or Greek we translate into our English word which is mostly a transliteration of the Greek. "Messengers divinely appointed and empowered" is a wordy way to translate "angelos" or "mal'akh" but it helps to get away from the sweet faced winged robe-wearer, which is the visually "wordy" way we see angels when we think of them.
"Angels bending near the earth" is the carol's phrase, evoking their heavenly home while pointing out where they're at work, right here. A perennial challenge of the Christmas season is to get to where we "in solemn stillness" can get ourselves to that we might "hear the angels sing."
We may not talk about "cloven skies" as that Unitarian minister did in 1849 for his lyrics, a war ending in Mexico and peace, then as now, elusive, but we share with Rev. Sears a desire to "rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing." Over the cacophony of our world's "Babel sounds, the blessed angels sing" but we have to listen, we have to hear with open ears, welcoming hearts, in order to notice that God's messengers really are at work in the world. Angels, yes, some noticeable; some, well, as Hebrews 13:2 says "Forget not to show love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Angels may sing through classic carols and new, contemporary praise songs; they're even more likely to be encountered through those you help or even, God help us, those we let help ourselves. God can use almost anyone, even any donkey or ox or lamb, as a messenger, but kindly person is perhaps the most likely to be a messenger, intended or otherwise, unawares or entirely mindful.
We have angels in the art at the courthouse, whispering something I'm still straining to hear; there are angels at work in the streets, on Saturdays at noon along Main Street or evenings at the Salvation Army, on Sundays in churches and on any given Tuesday in the most unexpected of places. The world in solemn stillness waits, perhaps, to hear the angels speak of good will; to hear fellow creatures sing for joy, to hope for peace on earth, in angelic music or more earthly whispered reassurances.
May you never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly, as the old saying goes, and may your hearing never grow so dim as to not be able to hear the angels singing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad to run into angels even when they have to remind him to be not afraid. Tell him what you hear them singing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Pax, Jeff
Faith Works 12-16-22
Jeff Gill
Angels in the architecture
___
Angels are part of the Christmas story, in Luke & Matthew, speaking and singing to shepherds and sleepers alike. Both Mary & Joseph hear from angels of the Lord, messengers of God.
Some are named, like Gabriel, others part of a heavenly host, a solid phalanx of angelic representatives.
I like how angels can appear in dreams, or in person; in the air, or behind closed doors. They are wherever God wants them to be; they speak for God, and keep the plans of God on track.
Jesus is not an angel; those who die are not transformed into angels although folk spirituality has created that impression. You could debate at length the nature and make-up of a heavenly host, which perhaps includes both angels and the saints in glory, all mixed together in a chorus of celebration.
What angels are is the Word of God made active; messenger is a close approximation of the Hebrew or Greek we translate into our English word which is mostly a transliteration of the Greek. "Messengers divinely appointed and empowered" is a wordy way to translate "angelos" or "mal'akh" but it helps to get away from the sweet faced winged robe-wearer, which is the visually "wordy" way we see angels when we think of them.
"Angels bending near the earth" is the carol's phrase, evoking their heavenly home while pointing out where they're at work, right here. A perennial challenge of the Christmas season is to get to where we "in solemn stillness" can get ourselves to that we might "hear the angels sing."
We may not talk about "cloven skies" as that Unitarian minister did in 1849 for his lyrics, a war ending in Mexico and peace, then as now, elusive, but we share with Rev. Sears a desire to "rest beside the weary road, and hear the angels sing." Over the cacophony of our world's "Babel sounds, the blessed angels sing" but we have to listen, we have to hear with open ears, welcoming hearts, in order to notice that God's messengers really are at work in the world. Angels, yes, some noticeable; some, well, as Hebrews 13:2 says "Forget not to show love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
Angels may sing through classic carols and new, contemporary praise songs; they're even more likely to be encountered through those you help or even, God help us, those we let help ourselves. God can use almost anyone, even any donkey or ox or lamb, as a messenger, but kindly person is perhaps the most likely to be a messenger, intended or otherwise, unawares or entirely mindful.
We have angels in the art at the courthouse, whispering something I'm still straining to hear; there are angels at work in the streets, on Saturdays at noon along Main Street or evenings at the Salvation Army, on Sundays in churches and on any given Tuesday in the most unexpected of places. The world in solemn stillness waits, perhaps, to hear the angels speak of good will; to hear fellow creatures sing for joy, to hope for peace on earth, in angelic music or more earthly whispered reassurances.
May you never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly, as the old saying goes, and may your hearing never grow so dim as to not be able to hear the angels singing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad to run into angels even when they have to remind him to be not afraid. Tell him what you hear them singing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 12-2-22 & 12-9-22
Faith Works 12-2-22
Jeff Gill
Turning from thanksgiving to expectation
___
We spent most of November talking about the Courthouse angels, figures perhaps of harvest and death, but perhaps a bit more.
From the outside, four figures of Justice dominate people's image of the courthouse square. But if you go inside, if you are caught up in the austere majesty of the law at work, you will find Ludwig Bang's two angels keeping your attention. But let's not forget the man, the woman, and the child, clearly meant to be the same persons repeated in both paintings, while the angels seem different.
And the tools. In one the man wields a scythe, the other the same man a musket. It does not take a preacher, I think, for this passage to come to mind: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares; and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."
From Isaiah 2:4 we get a comprehensive vision of harvest tools, plowshares for grain, pruning hooks for grapevines. Mingled and mixed, grain and grapes, bread and wine.
But there's also an evocation of Revelation, chapter 14, in a section often headed "The Harvest of the Earth": "Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, "Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe." So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped."
You might well be thinking now not only of the Bible or the courthouse paintings, but of a song made famous by the Civil War, often sung in 1901 and still well known now: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," with the lines "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Grapes, wheat, pruning hooks, scythes, terrible swift swords, muskets.
The Revelation passage goes on: "Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, "Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe." So the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape harvest of the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God."
You could ask the question of our two angelic paintings behind the bar of justice in the heart of our courthouse: do I read them left to right like the printed page, or right to left? Is the message one of the soldier with the gun heading into battle, later on to turn his hand to the harvest, symbolically giving up his weapon for farming tools as Isaiah foretold? That works against the story of the nursing infant on the left, now an upright if young child clinging to a protesting mother now also erect on the right. The growing child indicates a traditional narrative from left to right, while the prophetic story runs right to left, as does the echo of Winslow Homer's "Veteran in a New Field."
Perhaps the story is a question for us, the citizens whose courthouse this is.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking that the prophetic call to beat swords into plowshares or scythes or pruning hooks is for every generation. Tell him what you think we need for peace to prevail at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 12-9-22
Jeff Gill
Preach the Gospel at all times, in many ways
___
Ludwig Bang is a minor German regional artist who has been preaching the Good News to Licking County since somewhere around 1901.
That's been my theme for some weeks now: to unveil the symbolism and messages in two paintings that perhaps too long have been seen as cryptic and obscure, not as the richly allusive and potentially compelling narratives they are.
Placed squarely behind the chief judge's bench in the center of the main courtroom in the Licking County courthouse, not only the artist who painted them but the officials who paid for and approved them had to be aware of what was being said in these visual images. They're not just two pictures selected for attractive, placid, decorative value.
There's a saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: "Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words." We're not sure who said it first, and it can be abused (nothing wrong with a good sermon!), but the message is clear. Good news, God's good news in particular, needs to be communicated by image and example and in song and story, not just from pulpits on Sundays.
I do not know Mr. Bang's religion. It would be safe but not certain to call him a Lutheran from his place of origin and ultimate destination, the resort community of Bad Doberan in northern Germany. I'm quite certain he knows his Bible from Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures to Revelation at the conclusion of the Christian testament.
And he knows his art, Winslow Homer much beloved in America, and Greek sculpture as seen through the lens of the Louvre.
The echo of "The Veteran in a New Field" is changed not just by the addition of a wife and child and angel overhead, but a subtle difference: he's wearing breeches and stockings in Bang's painting, evocative of Revolutionary garb. And the counterpart work showing the same man going off to war, if you look closely (and perhaps soon more visible after restoration work), shows unmistakably British soldiers marching across a distant battlefield. This may be work done in 1901 or just after, but the year 1876 is still blazoned across the exterior stonework, marking the centennial of American Independence, and the reminders are still all around of a heritage in wars both revolutionary and civil.
You could read the two paintings as a grim harbinger of doom, sacrifice bravely accepted even as a spouse mourns in advance, the child all uncomprehending, invoking the losses in 1776 and the 1860s as having built our republic to this date, flanked by two assassinated presidents on either side, Lincoln and McKinley. The price of liberty.
Or you could read them as a pairing which interrogates one other, and asks of us as the viewers: which way do we want the story to go? The angel of God's presence is with us in either case, but the initiative is with us as citizens, and as a nation. Do we continue to turn scythes into swords, or muskets, or worse, or can we send our veterans back to the farm, to their children and families, to peace?
The choice, Bang is saying, is ours.
You could call these paintings cryptic, and to the casual viewer, they are. But if you spend time reflecting and considering what the respective images are saying, to each other, and jointly to us, the viewers — witnesses and defendants and officers of the court and citizens in general — they are evocative and instructive works, which are still speaking to us, even in 2022.
And I suspect for many years to come.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates your patience in letting him guide you through these narrative paintings. Tell him if you think antique art can teach us today at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Turning from thanksgiving to expectation
___
We spent most of November talking about the Courthouse angels, figures perhaps of harvest and death, but perhaps a bit more.
From the outside, four figures of Justice dominate people's image of the courthouse square. But if you go inside, if you are caught up in the austere majesty of the law at work, you will find Ludwig Bang's two angels keeping your attention. But let's not forget the man, the woman, and the child, clearly meant to be the same persons repeated in both paintings, while the angels seem different.
And the tools. In one the man wields a scythe, the other the same man a musket. It does not take a preacher, I think, for this passage to come to mind: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares; and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."
From Isaiah 2:4 we get a comprehensive vision of harvest tools, plowshares for grain, pruning hooks for grapevines. Mingled and mixed, grain and grapes, bread and wine.
But there's also an evocation of Revelation, chapter 14, in a section often headed "The Harvest of the Earth": "Then I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man, with a golden crown on his head, and a sharp sickle in his hand. And another angel came out of the temple, calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, "Put in your sickle, and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe." So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped."
You might well be thinking now not only of the Bible or the courthouse paintings, but of a song made famous by the Civil War, often sung in 1901 and still well known now: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," with the lines "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." Grapes, wheat, pruning hooks, scythes, terrible swift swords, muskets.
The Revelation passage goes on: "Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, the angel who has authority over the fire, and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, "Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe." So the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape harvest of the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God."
You could ask the question of our two angelic paintings behind the bar of justice in the heart of our courthouse: do I read them left to right like the printed page, or right to left? Is the message one of the soldier with the gun heading into battle, later on to turn his hand to the harvest, symbolically giving up his weapon for farming tools as Isaiah foretold? That works against the story of the nursing infant on the left, now an upright if young child clinging to a protesting mother now also erect on the right. The growing child indicates a traditional narrative from left to right, while the prophetic story runs right to left, as does the echo of Winslow Homer's "Veteran in a New Field."
Perhaps the story is a question for us, the citizens whose courthouse this is.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking that the prophetic call to beat swords into plowshares or scythes or pruning hooks is for every generation. Tell him what you think we need for peace to prevail at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 12-9-22
Jeff Gill
Preach the Gospel at all times, in many ways
___
Ludwig Bang is a minor German regional artist who has been preaching the Good News to Licking County since somewhere around 1901.
That's been my theme for some weeks now: to unveil the symbolism and messages in two paintings that perhaps too long have been seen as cryptic and obscure, not as the richly allusive and potentially compelling narratives they are.
Placed squarely behind the chief judge's bench in the center of the main courtroom in the Licking County courthouse, not only the artist who painted them but the officials who paid for and approved them had to be aware of what was being said in these visual images. They're not just two pictures selected for attractive, placid, decorative value.
There's a saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: "Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words." We're not sure who said it first, and it can be abused (nothing wrong with a good sermon!), but the message is clear. Good news, God's good news in particular, needs to be communicated by image and example and in song and story, not just from pulpits on Sundays.
I do not know Mr. Bang's religion. It would be safe but not certain to call him a Lutheran from his place of origin and ultimate destination, the resort community of Bad Doberan in northern Germany. I'm quite certain he knows his Bible from Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures to Revelation at the conclusion of the Christian testament.
And he knows his art, Winslow Homer much beloved in America, and Greek sculpture as seen through the lens of the Louvre.
The echo of "The Veteran in a New Field" is changed not just by the addition of a wife and child and angel overhead, but a subtle difference: he's wearing breeches and stockings in Bang's painting, evocative of Revolutionary garb. And the counterpart work showing the same man going off to war, if you look closely (and perhaps soon more visible after restoration work), shows unmistakably British soldiers marching across a distant battlefield. This may be work done in 1901 or just after, but the year 1876 is still blazoned across the exterior stonework, marking the centennial of American Independence, and the reminders are still all around of a heritage in wars both revolutionary and civil.
You could read the two paintings as a grim harbinger of doom, sacrifice bravely accepted even as a spouse mourns in advance, the child all uncomprehending, invoking the losses in 1776 and the 1860s as having built our republic to this date, flanked by two assassinated presidents on either side, Lincoln and McKinley. The price of liberty.
Or you could read them as a pairing which interrogates one other, and asks of us as the viewers: which way do we want the story to go? The angel of God's presence is with us in either case, but the initiative is with us as citizens, and as a nation. Do we continue to turn scythes into swords, or muskets, or worse, or can we send our veterans back to the farm, to their children and families, to peace?
The choice, Bang is saying, is ours.
You could call these paintings cryptic, and to the casual viewer, they are. But if you spend time reflecting and considering what the respective images are saying, to each other, and jointly to us, the viewers — witnesses and defendants and officers of the court and citizens in general — they are evocative and instructive works, which are still speaking to us, even in 2022.
And I suspect for many years to come.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates your patience in letting him guide you through these narrative paintings. Tell him if you think antique art can teach us today at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Friday, November 25, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 12-1-22
Notes from my Knapsack 12-1-22
Jeff Gill
History doesn't repeat, but rhyme?
___
There's a patch of Indiana I've had a chance to watch for the last forty years, as it transitioned from farmland to fully developed exurb.
My wife's family moved to a location on the fringe of Indianapolis as she finished high school; I met her at Purdue, and my first visit to her parents' home was right on forty years back. Her father told me, pointing out the patio doors, that across the way was a dirt airstrip and how they saw pheasants and wild turkeys their first few years at the house.
Driving in, I could trace the clumps of trees that marked homesteads now gone, and over the years we dated and then were first married I watched subdivisions pop up around that one. Our shopping for them slowly shifted from one direction to the west around and along the interstate heading northeast; the route I tended to drive back to Ohio once we moved here took us up through rural Indiana, but year by year it took longer to reach the rural portion of the trip, that used to start just north of their home.
Now, as we care for my father-in-law, still in that house, the "new" shopping stretch is getting worn and tired, and you can tell in the selection and stocking of goods is getting demoted in favor of more upscale outlets now another exit further down the highway. Strip malls have empty storefronts and long frequented stops have memories associated with now vacant stretches which I suspect will be torn down shortly.
There's a church whose groundbreaking, and later new sanctuary dedication I attended with my late father, a pioneering church plant for my denomination not quite forty years ago; it's just a mile east of my father-in-law's home, and I go there when I'm around over a Sunday. The minister is a seminary classmate, and we chuckle ruefully over how this "new start" now is mostly made up of members older than we are, as the suburb itself has aged.
As we've been debating and discussing the implications of what's going on in western Licking County, I think about Marion and Hamilton Counties in Indiana; what I've seen, and what can be learned from their development. Castleton Square Mall was and still is the largest mall in Indiana when it opened in 1972; Easton Town Center opened in 1999, as the Route 161 bypass was completed around New Albany, where the Wexner development opened the door for the 2004 to 2008 expressway which literally paved the way for Intel's arrival.
There's an inevitability to development when you look backwards at it. Dominos falling, framing going up, pavement replacing crops. Or as Terence Mann says in "Field of Dreams": "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again." We have our moments when we want to reach back and undo the erasing, but we really never can. We mark the time, as Terence says about baseball, and claim parts of the past, of "all that once was good, and it could be again." But it gets harder.
What would we, could we preserve, if we can't stop those steamrollers and bulldozers? I'm going to keep thinking about that this winter.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen quite a few homes built in cornfields, fewer fields of dreams. Tell him what you'd like to see saved at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
History doesn't repeat, but rhyme?
___
There's a patch of Indiana I've had a chance to watch for the last forty years, as it transitioned from farmland to fully developed exurb.
My wife's family moved to a location on the fringe of Indianapolis as she finished high school; I met her at Purdue, and my first visit to her parents' home was right on forty years back. Her father told me, pointing out the patio doors, that across the way was a dirt airstrip and how they saw pheasants and wild turkeys their first few years at the house.
Driving in, I could trace the clumps of trees that marked homesteads now gone, and over the years we dated and then were first married I watched subdivisions pop up around that one. Our shopping for them slowly shifted from one direction to the west around and along the interstate heading northeast; the route I tended to drive back to Ohio once we moved here took us up through rural Indiana, but year by year it took longer to reach the rural portion of the trip, that used to start just north of their home.
Now, as we care for my father-in-law, still in that house, the "new" shopping stretch is getting worn and tired, and you can tell in the selection and stocking of goods is getting demoted in favor of more upscale outlets now another exit further down the highway. Strip malls have empty storefronts and long frequented stops have memories associated with now vacant stretches which I suspect will be torn down shortly.
There's a church whose groundbreaking, and later new sanctuary dedication I attended with my late father, a pioneering church plant for my denomination not quite forty years ago; it's just a mile east of my father-in-law's home, and I go there when I'm around over a Sunday. The minister is a seminary classmate, and we chuckle ruefully over how this "new start" now is mostly made up of members older than we are, as the suburb itself has aged.
As we've been debating and discussing the implications of what's going on in western Licking County, I think about Marion and Hamilton Counties in Indiana; what I've seen, and what can be learned from their development. Castleton Square Mall was and still is the largest mall in Indiana when it opened in 1972; Easton Town Center opened in 1999, as the Route 161 bypass was completed around New Albany, where the Wexner development opened the door for the 2004 to 2008 expressway which literally paved the way for Intel's arrival.
There's an inevitability to development when you look backwards at it. Dominos falling, framing going up, pavement replacing crops. Or as Terence Mann says in "Field of Dreams": "America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again." We have our moments when we want to reach back and undo the erasing, but we really never can. We mark the time, as Terence says about baseball, and claim parts of the past, of "all that once was good, and it could be again." But it gets harder.
What would we, could we preserve, if we can't stop those steamrollers and bulldozers? I'm going to keep thinking about that this winter.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen quite a few homes built in cornfields, fewer fields of dreams. Tell him what you'd like to see saved at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, November 07, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 11-17-22
Notes from my Knapsack 11-17-22
Jeff Gill
Even if you have to work at it
___
Understood. You may not feel thankful.
This has been a contentious, conflict-ridden, turmoil-sodden year. No doubt about that.
If you are in that interesting subset of people who read newspapers (print or online, bless you all) but aren't much interested in politics, you may feel differently. And that's a neat trick which many of us might want to learn from you!
I write and work on the assumption, perhaps wrongly, that those of you reading columns like this are more than passingly engaged with political discourse. And whatever your basic orientation, politically, it's been a wild ride the last few years, and it's not likely to slow down.
Full disclosure: I'm writing this just before Election Day. I know, in general we're supposed to keep the seams turned inside, make the rivets not show, but the reality is worth sharing here. I have no idea how the election results turned out from Nov. 8, and what I have to say is, I believe, valid however they go, unless a flotilla of flying saucers came down that Tuesday and declared the entire election null and void in favor of Emperor Zod taking over.
But Zod wouldn't be interested in letting unrestricted media be distributed, so it's a moot point in any case.
Friends, whether your candidate or issue prevailed, I think it's a small blessing of this time of year that shortly after we complete our electoral competitions (and let's be thankful we're not in Georgia with run-offs to keep the TV ads pouring forth), we are invited on a civic level and in most of our churches to contemplate thankfulness.
Yes, Canada already did that last month, but this is our Thanksgiving coming up, and historical debates about whom discovered who aside, there's a complex and rich and entirely proper history to pausing each harvest season to be thankful as a community.
If you think the harvest season has nothing to do with you, well, you're wrong. Pause in the Ross Market parking lot and listen to the musical rattle of corn and soybeans pouring down the chutes into the silos at Granville Milling. As the bumper sticker says, "If you can eat, thank a farmer." For agriculture, in Licking County and beyond, we are thankful.
To carry on the short elliptical phrases, there are bumper stickers which say "If you can read this, thank a teacher." Yes, for educators and their ongoing work in language and math and culture, we are thankful.
And from our food to our basic knowledge, on to our homes and vehicles and utilities: we are thankful for builders and contractors and people who are handy, for autoworkers and gas station clerks and tank truck drivers, mechanics and parts suppliers, for village service department crews keeping the pipes and plants working below ground while picking up leaves and debris above ground.
The point being if you look at your stuff, especially the stuff that is most crucial to your everyday activities, you should have no trouble thinking of people you are necessarily thankful for all the time, just not consciously.
For Thanksgiving, we spend some time being intentionally, mindfully thankful. And every year, I'm thankful for that.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows he's not as thankful as he should be. Tell him who and what you're thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Even if you have to work at it
___
Understood. You may not feel thankful.
This has been a contentious, conflict-ridden, turmoil-sodden year. No doubt about that.
If you are in that interesting subset of people who read newspapers (print or online, bless you all) but aren't much interested in politics, you may feel differently. And that's a neat trick which many of us might want to learn from you!
I write and work on the assumption, perhaps wrongly, that those of you reading columns like this are more than passingly engaged with political discourse. And whatever your basic orientation, politically, it's been a wild ride the last few years, and it's not likely to slow down.
Full disclosure: I'm writing this just before Election Day. I know, in general we're supposed to keep the seams turned inside, make the rivets not show, but the reality is worth sharing here. I have no idea how the election results turned out from Nov. 8, and what I have to say is, I believe, valid however they go, unless a flotilla of flying saucers came down that Tuesday and declared the entire election null and void in favor of Emperor Zod taking over.
But Zod wouldn't be interested in letting unrestricted media be distributed, so it's a moot point in any case.
Friends, whether your candidate or issue prevailed, I think it's a small blessing of this time of year that shortly after we complete our electoral competitions (and let's be thankful we're not in Georgia with run-offs to keep the TV ads pouring forth), we are invited on a civic level and in most of our churches to contemplate thankfulness.
Yes, Canada already did that last month, but this is our Thanksgiving coming up, and historical debates about whom discovered who aside, there's a complex and rich and entirely proper history to pausing each harvest season to be thankful as a community.
If you think the harvest season has nothing to do with you, well, you're wrong. Pause in the Ross Market parking lot and listen to the musical rattle of corn and soybeans pouring down the chutes into the silos at Granville Milling. As the bumper sticker says, "If you can eat, thank a farmer." For agriculture, in Licking County and beyond, we are thankful.
To carry on the short elliptical phrases, there are bumper stickers which say "If you can read this, thank a teacher." Yes, for educators and their ongoing work in language and math and culture, we are thankful.
And from our food to our basic knowledge, on to our homes and vehicles and utilities: we are thankful for builders and contractors and people who are handy, for autoworkers and gas station clerks and tank truck drivers, mechanics and parts suppliers, for village service department crews keeping the pipes and plants working below ground while picking up leaves and debris above ground.
The point being if you look at your stuff, especially the stuff that is most crucial to your everyday activities, you should have no trouble thinking of people you are necessarily thankful for all the time, just not consciously.
For Thanksgiving, we spend some time being intentionally, mindfully thankful. And every year, I'm thankful for that.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows he's not as thankful as he should be. Tell him who and what you're thankful for at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Thursday, November 03, 2022
Faith Works 11-11-22 & 11-18-22 & 11-25-22
Faith Works 11-11-22 & 11-18-22 & 11-25-22
Three columns, one story, and getting a bit ahead for Thanksgiving!
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 11-11-22
Jeff Gill
Angels of thankfulness in Licking County
___
My hope for you is that if you've seen the majestic West Courtroom of the Licking County Courthouse, it was on a tour, or a happy occasion to visit and reflect and learn
The reality is that probably the majority of people who've sat in the West Courtroom, up on the second floor of the 1876 county courthouse, have been there because of a trial. Maybe a jury member, perhaps a witness ready to give testimony, possibly even a defendant. I pray you found justice there, or at least peace.
Over the years I've been in that room in most of those roles (except defendant), watched inaugurations of public officials, shared occasions both joyous and painful as hearings ended and the gavel bangs down.
Judge Thomas Marcelain has presided in that room over many trials; i'd say too many to count, but if I hunted him up I suspect he'd have a precise answer for me. What he doesn't spend a great deal of time looking at (that I know of) is the pair of paintings right behind the judge's bench. He has an excellent view of the famous Tiffany stained glass windows around the upper edge of two walls, and some of the sculpture and bas-relief around the room, even the smoke darkened murals high on the south wall or on the ceiling around the coffered dome at the center.
Yet if you are in that courtroom for any reason, good times or bad, and spend time there, you really can't avoid noticing two angels and a few other figures on two paintings set neatly on either side of the judge's head, whether that was Samuel Hunter of sorrel horse fame, or Judge Marcelain these days. The jurist may change, but the two paintings flanking the judicial office holder have been there for over a century.
They don't date to 1876: the current courthouse, the fourth on the square since 1808 or so (log, brick, Greek Revival, and today's Second Empire rendition), had a bad fire not long after construction was completed, ruining most of the central tower and upper story. The splendors of the West Courtroom began to take shape after the 1880s, and as I will argue in subsequent installments, didn't finish until after 1901 for a reason staring you in the face from one panel of the artwork all around the room.
But it's those two paintings, each with an angel, that have gotten me thinking, and digging, and now writing. Often an escort with groups through the West Courtroom will refer to them as "The Angel of the Harvest" and "The Angel of Death." That's certainly one way of looking at them; those are surely bracing images for a defendant, or a prosector, to face as they work through our legal system towards justice.
I think there's a wider story, and perhaps even a more coherent one, than you get from a pair of angels, proclaiming respectively harvest-time and the sacrifice of death, in this case death in defense of freedom. The parallel of harvest and death have been enough for a few generations, but I think we can try to trace a higher, wider arc, and it starts with a name dimly painted into the corner: "L. Bang" was his name, and he's thankful for something, and wants us to know it.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been curious about our Licking County angels for some time. Tell him about angels you've seen out and about in the area at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 11-18-22
Jeff Gill
Angels from over the ocean and across our nation
___
What can I tell you about Ludwig Bang?
Or perhaps I should use his full name: Ludwig Friedrich Karl Bang, born in Germany, state of Mecklenburg, and the town of Doberan in 1857.
His friends called him Luden, and Luden Bang was already as a schoolboy noted for his drawing skill. His father was a humble forester, and it's not clear to me yet what sponsors or supporters arranged it, but he ended up in Lübeck and Düsseldorf and finally in Munich for his art training.
What he painted gained Luden enough income and fame to be able to travel, and he visited and studied in Lucerne, Switzerland, on to Italy, and in Paris, France.
At the age of 35 he crossed the pond and ended up in Chicago, Illinois for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where he had paintings on display and may have helped with the decorations of the Germany pavilion for that early world's fair. He spent some time in Chicago, which had a large German community, and shows up later in the 1890s in Toledo, Ohio, also hosting a vibrant German cultural enclave. Bang painted murals in the lobby of the Hotel Kaiserhof, and as I loosely translate out of the pages of Mecklenburg's tourist magazine, "There he created a new sphere of activity and became known in the city and in the surrounding region for his dramatic and lyrical paintings, again murals… [his] topics ranged from Ascension Day to German fairy tales to historical topics."
Somewhere in here, he was invited to Newark, Ohio.
Let's be clear: I'm simply arguing that the Ludwig Bang I've hunted up online is the artist in our West Courtroom who signed his name "L. Bang." I have no other direct linkage, other than he's up the road in Toledo at the right time, and his specialty is what we see our L. Bang at work on. Good enough?
The historic Luden Bang returns to Mecklenburg somewhere in the next decade, and lives out his life in his hometown. The 2018 article I found online says "What he had ended up doing in the USA, he began with at home – with landscapes and historical themes depicted in pictures. But this time with regional motifs…" filled, apparently, with symbolism and allusions to other well-known artistic works.
You can today visit the Möckelhaus, the central building of Bad Doberan and see his works on display; sadly, he ended up living in the municipal poorhouse, sitting afternoons in the park his father once tended, dying during World War II at the age of 87. His memory is still honored there as a "history painter" or "historienmaler," which is his epitaph on a civic monument to Ludwig Bang.
If you accept my assumption that their Luden Bang is Licking County's "L. Bang," then what can the story of this German artist tell us about the central images of two angels in our courthouse? What are they up to in the heart of our modern quest for justice and community, sitting there behind our senior Common Pleas Court judge, inviting the defense and the prosection, plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers and laity, to meditate upon as justice is served?
The artist Bang clearly was noted for taking monks and emperors, religious festivals and nature's turnings, common folk and regal processions, and making out of familiar motifs a story to illuminate the present day. I think whether those who hired him knew it or not, that's what he was doing here in 1901. Sacrifice, yes, and hope, and thankfulness for victories past and triumphs yet to come.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hoping you're getting curious yourself about what these angels are up to. Tell him about how visual images shape your faith at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 11-25-22
Jeff Gill
Angels of harvest, death, and victory
___
Ludwig Bang, as I've proposed over the last two weeks here, is a German born artist classically trained in Europe, hired to come complete the decoration of Licking County's 1876 courthouse in the now famous West Courtroom, intended as the completion of this centerpiece of Newark.
Since a fire shortly after completion ruined the upper portion, we know the detail work now visible in the West Courtroom is dated to after 1880, and there's reason to believe it was done piecemeal. The Tiffany windows up high went in to start, then the fine plasterwork creating frames and pilasters inside. There's additional stained glass that's not Tiffany, and portrait busts to accent the depictions of leading figures from American history in the windows. And then there are the paintings.
This has been debated elsewhere, but I would argue the choice to put William McKinley in one of the roundels along with the martyred Lincoln, and by-that-date deceased Grant, means these paintings (plus the Great Seal above a currently defunct water fountain) were done after his death in the fall of 1901. I think it's clear the portraits are also by the artist of the two angel paintings behind the judge's bench. The murals up high I would definitely credit to Bang, and once cleaned and conserved we're likely to find a signature we can't see under decades of cigar smoke today.
Then two angel paintings, at the heart of my speculation this Thanksgiving. They've been called "The Angel of the Harvest" and "The Angel of Death."
What I believe the "historienmaler" or history painter Ludwig Bang was after, though, was a bit more subtle. There is a harvest scene, and an angel hovering, in one. A woman is seated with a nursing child to one side; it's not hard to connect the newborn and the new harvest being gathered in by the figure with a scythe facing away from us.
Taken in isolation, the harvester looks quite like the then famous work by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field" of 1865. As was well-known, it showed a man returned from the Civil War, some of his surplus military garb and canteen gently obscured in the foreground. Our harvest scene has a humble earthenware jug in the place where Homer nods to the veteran's status. The spouse and child and of course angel are additions, but the tribute and meaning in the center of the painting seems quite clear as referring back to the earlier work, in a time when the role of veterans in American politics was changing - McKinley was the last Civil War veteran, as it turns out, to serve as President. **
Hovering over the counterpart painting, where a similarly dressed figure is now carrying a musket and heading into battle, is the image often called "the angel of death." Its face is obscured, and the robes are shadowed versus the brightly lit harvest angel, though I think cleaning might show them not as dark as we see now.
What I do see is a shape that Bang would have seen, freshly placed in the main staircase of the Louvre when he first visited Paris: the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Like the scythe-bearer in the harvest picture, it's not a precise copy, but Bang would not have been so obvious.
Yet I think it's fair to say that while death and battle may be in the shadows, the message of the second angel is beckoning the central figure not towards his doom, but to victory. In this life, as well as the next.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's enjoyed getting to know Luden Bang and hopes you've found his story interesting as well. Tell him what you see in these paintings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Three columns, one story, and getting a bit ahead for Thanksgiving!
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 11-11-22
Jeff Gill
Angels of thankfulness in Licking County
___
My hope for you is that if you've seen the majestic West Courtroom of the Licking County Courthouse, it was on a tour, or a happy occasion to visit and reflect and learn
The reality is that probably the majority of people who've sat in the West Courtroom, up on the second floor of the 1876 county courthouse, have been there because of a trial. Maybe a jury member, perhaps a witness ready to give testimony, possibly even a defendant. I pray you found justice there, or at least peace.
Over the years I've been in that room in most of those roles (except defendant), watched inaugurations of public officials, shared occasions both joyous and painful as hearings ended and the gavel bangs down.
Judge Thomas Marcelain has presided in that room over many trials; i'd say too many to count, but if I hunted him up I suspect he'd have a precise answer for me. What he doesn't spend a great deal of time looking at (that I know of) is the pair of paintings right behind the judge's bench. He has an excellent view of the famous Tiffany stained glass windows around the upper edge of two walls, and some of the sculpture and bas-relief around the room, even the smoke darkened murals high on the south wall or on the ceiling around the coffered dome at the center.
Yet if you are in that courtroom for any reason, good times or bad, and spend time there, you really can't avoid noticing two angels and a few other figures on two paintings set neatly on either side of the judge's head, whether that was Samuel Hunter of sorrel horse fame, or Judge Marcelain these days. The jurist may change, but the two paintings flanking the judicial office holder have been there for over a century.
They don't date to 1876: the current courthouse, the fourth on the square since 1808 or so (log, brick, Greek Revival, and today's Second Empire rendition), had a bad fire not long after construction was completed, ruining most of the central tower and upper story. The splendors of the West Courtroom began to take shape after the 1880s, and as I will argue in subsequent installments, didn't finish until after 1901 for a reason staring you in the face from one panel of the artwork all around the room.
But it's those two paintings, each with an angel, that have gotten me thinking, and digging, and now writing. Often an escort with groups through the West Courtroom will refer to them as "The Angel of the Harvest" and "The Angel of Death." That's certainly one way of looking at them; those are surely bracing images for a defendant, or a prosector, to face as they work through our legal system towards justice.
I think there's a wider story, and perhaps even a more coherent one, than you get from a pair of angels, proclaiming respectively harvest-time and the sacrifice of death, in this case death in defense of freedom. The parallel of harvest and death have been enough for a few generations, but I think we can try to trace a higher, wider arc, and it starts with a name dimly painted into the corner: "L. Bang" was his name, and he's thankful for something, and wants us to know it.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been curious about our Licking County angels for some time. Tell him about angels you've seen out and about in the area at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 11-18-22
Jeff Gill
Angels from over the ocean and across our nation
___
What can I tell you about Ludwig Bang?
Or perhaps I should use his full name: Ludwig Friedrich Karl Bang, born in Germany, state of Mecklenburg, and the town of Doberan in 1857.
His friends called him Luden, and Luden Bang was already as a schoolboy noted for his drawing skill. His father was a humble forester, and it's not clear to me yet what sponsors or supporters arranged it, but he ended up in Lübeck and Düsseldorf and finally in Munich for his art training.
What he painted gained Luden enough income and fame to be able to travel, and he visited and studied in Lucerne, Switzerland, on to Italy, and in Paris, France.
At the age of 35 he crossed the pond and ended up in Chicago, Illinois for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, where he had paintings on display and may have helped with the decorations of the Germany pavilion for that early world's fair. He spent some time in Chicago, which had a large German community, and shows up later in the 1890s in Toledo, Ohio, also hosting a vibrant German cultural enclave. Bang painted murals in the lobby of the Hotel Kaiserhof, and as I loosely translate out of the pages of Mecklenburg's tourist magazine, "There he created a new sphere of activity and became known in the city and in the surrounding region for his dramatic and lyrical paintings, again murals… [his] topics ranged from Ascension Day to German fairy tales to historical topics."
Somewhere in here, he was invited to Newark, Ohio.
Let's be clear: I'm simply arguing that the Ludwig Bang I've hunted up online is the artist in our West Courtroom who signed his name "L. Bang." I have no other direct linkage, other than he's up the road in Toledo at the right time, and his specialty is what we see our L. Bang at work on. Good enough?
The historic Luden Bang returns to Mecklenburg somewhere in the next decade, and lives out his life in his hometown. The 2018 article I found online says "What he had ended up doing in the USA, he began with at home – with landscapes and historical themes depicted in pictures. But this time with regional motifs…" filled, apparently, with symbolism and allusions to other well-known artistic works.
You can today visit the Möckelhaus, the central building of Bad Doberan and see his works on display; sadly, he ended up living in the municipal poorhouse, sitting afternoons in the park his father once tended, dying during World War II at the age of 87. His memory is still honored there as a "history painter" or "historienmaler," which is his epitaph on a civic monument to Ludwig Bang.
If you accept my assumption that their Luden Bang is Licking County's "L. Bang," then what can the story of this German artist tell us about the central images of two angels in our courthouse? What are they up to in the heart of our modern quest for justice and community, sitting there behind our senior Common Pleas Court judge, inviting the defense and the prosection, plaintiffs and defendants, lawyers and laity, to meditate upon as justice is served?
The artist Bang clearly was noted for taking monks and emperors, religious festivals and nature's turnings, common folk and regal processions, and making out of familiar motifs a story to illuminate the present day. I think whether those who hired him knew it or not, that's what he was doing here in 1901. Sacrifice, yes, and hope, and thankfulness for victories past and triumphs yet to come.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's hoping you're getting curious yourself about what these angels are up to. Tell him about how visual images shape your faith at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 11-25-22
Jeff Gill
Angels of harvest, death, and victory
___
Ludwig Bang, as I've proposed over the last two weeks here, is a German born artist classically trained in Europe, hired to come complete the decoration of Licking County's 1876 courthouse in the now famous West Courtroom, intended as the completion of this centerpiece of Newark.
Since a fire shortly after completion ruined the upper portion, we know the detail work now visible in the West Courtroom is dated to after 1880, and there's reason to believe it was done piecemeal. The Tiffany windows up high went in to start, then the fine plasterwork creating frames and pilasters inside. There's additional stained glass that's not Tiffany, and portrait busts to accent the depictions of leading figures from American history in the windows. And then there are the paintings.
This has been debated elsewhere, but I would argue the choice to put William McKinley in one of the roundels along with the martyred Lincoln, and by-that-date deceased Grant, means these paintings (plus the Great Seal above a currently defunct water fountain) were done after his death in the fall of 1901. I think it's clear the portraits are also by the artist of the two angel paintings behind the judge's bench. The murals up high I would definitely credit to Bang, and once cleaned and conserved we're likely to find a signature we can't see under decades of cigar smoke today.
Then two angel paintings, at the heart of my speculation this Thanksgiving. They've been called "The Angel of the Harvest" and "The Angel of Death."
What I believe the "historienmaler" or history painter Ludwig Bang was after, though, was a bit more subtle. There is a harvest scene, and an angel hovering, in one. A woman is seated with a nursing child to one side; it's not hard to connect the newborn and the new harvest being gathered in by the figure with a scythe facing away from us.
Taken in isolation, the harvester looks quite like the then famous work by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field" of 1865. As was well-known, it showed a man returned from the Civil War, some of his surplus military garb and canteen gently obscured in the foreground. Our harvest scene has a humble earthenware jug in the place where Homer nods to the veteran's status. The spouse and child and of course angel are additions, but the tribute and meaning in the center of the painting seems quite clear as referring back to the earlier work, in a time when the role of veterans in American politics was changing - McKinley was the last Civil War veteran, as it turns out, to serve as President. **
Hovering over the counterpart painting, where a similarly dressed figure is now carrying a musket and heading into battle, is the image often called "the angel of death." Its face is obscured, and the robes are shadowed versus the brightly lit harvest angel, though I think cleaning might show them not as dark as we see now.
What I do see is a shape that Bang would have seen, freshly placed in the main staircase of the Louvre when he first visited Paris: the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Like the scythe-bearer in the harvest picture, it's not a precise copy, but Bang would not have been so obvious.
Yet I think it's fair to say that while death and battle may be in the shadows, the message of the second angel is beckoning the central figure not towards his doom, but to victory. In this life, as well as the next.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's enjoyed getting to know Luden Bang and hopes you've found his story interesting as well. Tell him what you see in these paintings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Saturday, October 29, 2022
Faith Works 11-4-22
[Note to editors down the line: his name is spelled THEODOR, and if you add the final E you will be incorrect! For Herzl or Gaster…]
Faith Works 11-4-22
Jeff Gill
Debts and appreciations and an anniversary
___
When it comes to the question of why we did something, even something in retrospect looking like a major decision made on the merits, it's hard to give too much emphasis to any one person or factor, let alone to ourselves.
How many of us have had occasion to look back at a choice we've made and ask ourselves "why did I do that?"
Grown-ups take responsibility for their decisions, I'd say, but that's not quite the same as how we then can learn from, and even teach others, about how we came to make them.
Forty years ago last week, I made the decision to go to seminary and become a parish minister. I was already a student assistant minister at a campus ministry, had been called to serve as a deacon in my home church, and preached a few times for the congregation and Fellowship of Christian Athletes services. Someone (another long story) had very specifically asked me years earlier about whether or not I'd considered a call to ministry, but I had at most thought about it as one option among others, and still not really the primary decision I was likely to make, or so my thinking had meandered over the previous two years.
What I was interested in at the time was anthropology and specifically folklore. Professors in my major had encouraged me to think about grad school. Ministry was still running a distant second.
Knowing my interest in comparative mythology and folklore, one of our campus ministers, Don Nead, a Presbyterian minister himself, talked to a scholar in residence over at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic campus ministry, Art Zannoni, who was part of bringing a noted scholar to the Purdue Hillel Foundation. (We were a pretty ecumenical outfit all around, as you can tell.) Don and Art arranged that I would get a chance to speak to this distinguished and somewhat intimidating speaker.
Theodor Gaster was best known in this country for a popular book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in England he was a scholar respected on many fronts. His father was Chief Rabbi of England, who named him for Herzl, and their household had people like Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, and Sigmund Freud dropping by; it was said Arthur Balfour wrote the first draft of his declaration that gave shape to Theodor Herzl's dream for Zionism in their living room. He had degrees from the University of London and Columbia, and taught basically everywhere: but he considered himself a folklorist.
The meeting, I should note, wasn't my idea: it terrified me, and I was afraid I'd come off the proper idiot in two shakes of a Hebrew manuscript. But the arrangement had been made, the day came (November 2), I walked into the Hillel Foundation at the appointed hour, and suddenly I was seated facing him, both of us with cups of coffee. He asked my interests, I shared them stammeringly, and he replied kindly. He asked how I came to be familiar with Hillel, and I explained my role with the ecumenical campus ministry.
"Oh, so have you considered going into the ministry?" said Gaster. I said yes, but I was attracted to folklore studies.
"Any fool can become a scholar of folklore, my boy, but if you have any sort of call to pastoral ministry, that you should do. I implore you, give that serious thought. The world needs more of you, not more of me. You can always do folklore on the side." And we continued as if the matter was settled.
I guess it was.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; any foolishness he's gotten himself into is his responsibility and not that of Gaster, Nead, or Zannoni. Tell him about unexpected influences you've had at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 11-4-22
Jeff Gill
Debts and appreciations and an anniversary
___
When it comes to the question of why we did something, even something in retrospect looking like a major decision made on the merits, it's hard to give too much emphasis to any one person or factor, let alone to ourselves.
How many of us have had occasion to look back at a choice we've made and ask ourselves "why did I do that?"
Grown-ups take responsibility for their decisions, I'd say, but that's not quite the same as how we then can learn from, and even teach others, about how we came to make them.
Forty years ago last week, I made the decision to go to seminary and become a parish minister. I was already a student assistant minister at a campus ministry, had been called to serve as a deacon in my home church, and preached a few times for the congregation and Fellowship of Christian Athletes services. Someone (another long story) had very specifically asked me years earlier about whether or not I'd considered a call to ministry, but I had at most thought about it as one option among others, and still not really the primary decision I was likely to make, or so my thinking had meandered over the previous two years.
What I was interested in at the time was anthropology and specifically folklore. Professors in my major had encouraged me to think about grad school. Ministry was still running a distant second.
Knowing my interest in comparative mythology and folklore, one of our campus ministers, Don Nead, a Presbyterian minister himself, talked to a scholar in residence over at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic campus ministry, Art Zannoni, who was part of bringing a noted scholar to the Purdue Hillel Foundation. (We were a pretty ecumenical outfit all around, as you can tell.) Don and Art arranged that I would get a chance to speak to this distinguished and somewhat intimidating speaker.
Theodor Gaster was best known in this country for a popular book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in England he was a scholar respected on many fronts. His father was Chief Rabbi of England, who named him for Herzl, and their household had people like Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, and Sigmund Freud dropping by; it was said Arthur Balfour wrote the first draft of his declaration that gave shape to Theodor Herzl's dream for Zionism in their living room. He had degrees from the University of London and Columbia, and taught basically everywhere: but he considered himself a folklorist.
The meeting, I should note, wasn't my idea: it terrified me, and I was afraid I'd come off the proper idiot in two shakes of a Hebrew manuscript. But the arrangement had been made, the day came (November 2), I walked into the Hillel Foundation at the appointed hour, and suddenly I was seated facing him, both of us with cups of coffee. He asked my interests, I shared them stammeringly, and he replied kindly. He asked how I came to be familiar with Hillel, and I explained my role with the ecumenical campus ministry.
"Oh, so have you considered going into the ministry?" said Gaster. I said yes, but I was attracted to folklore studies.
"Any fool can become a scholar of folklore, my boy, but if you have any sort of call to pastoral ministry, that you should do. I implore you, give that serious thought. The world needs more of you, not more of me. You can always do folklore on the side." And we continued as if the matter was settled.
I guess it was.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; any foolishness he's gotten himself into is his responsibility and not that of Gaster, Nead, or Zannoni. Tell him about unexpected influences you've had at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Thursday, October 27, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 11-3-22
Notes from my Knapsack 11-3-22
Jeff Gill
Developers gonna develop, it's what they do
___
With all due respect to Taylor Swift or 3LW, I wrote a column two decades ago in reference to an infamous local character, saying among other things "developers are gonna develop, it's what they do."
That's why we call them that: developers. They want to develop properties and real estate and ideas, and they take risks, and I have some respect for them.
Wary respect.
Because developers gonna develop. Which means while they might go on at length about public spirited ideals and hopes for the community and all sorts of good intentions, when they get indignant if someone even suggests they're going to make money — millions, that is — from their idea, I get wary. It's based on hard experience. They aren't there to help support the comprehensive plan or even necessarily to improve the lives of everyone (some, maybe, themselves, definitely), they are developers. It's in the name.
Granville has long attracted the attention of developers, large and small. Small or large, they have something in common. They want to develop a parcel and make a bundle, and will wrap that bundle in a great deal of communitarian language, but it's all well and good as long as you remember developers gonna develop.
For over fifteen years I've been an appointive officeholder in Our Fayre Village, the last decade as chair of one of your official panels, and I'm here to tell you that there are few pieces of open land in the village that we haven't entertained proposals for and requests for variances to allow developers to push the edges of what our zoning and use guidelines call for.
And here's the main thing: for many of those open areas we have voted in favor of providing variances more than once, and they are still open. Financing is the final vote, if you will. Village residents vote on council and levies, council crafts a comprehensive plan and ordinances and sets up community panels like the Board of Zoning and Building Appeals or the Planning Commission, those formally empaneled citizens vote again . . . but if the bank won't float the loan, if the investors don't pony up, that last vote is crucial.
Sometimes developers, little local ones or larger regional entities, say the village is hostile to development. Frankly? I chuckle every time I hear that. I watch staff work overtime to help make a better presentation out of a scribbled request, I've presided over many outlandish expectations being dropped on our doorstep, and in general we've bent over backwards to make a proposal happen. We believe in allowing property owners to achieve maximum enjoyment of their holdings within minimum impact on neighbors, as defined by village ordinance and Ohio judicial standards.
What's going to change, though, is that the money is heading our way (has headed, is coming in hot and fast). And not-so-great ideas may not have that last check and balance of investor oversight weighing them down from floating off into la-la land.
Which means we all will have to be judicious, thoughtful, and mindful of what kind of community we are trying to create here. Developers? God bless them all: they're here to develop. Trust them to do that, whatever else they say. Building community is going to be a shared task.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been on a few municipal commissions over the years, and heard way too many developer presentation. Tell him what you're skeptical of at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Developers gonna develop, it's what they do
___
With all due respect to Taylor Swift or 3LW, I wrote a column two decades ago in reference to an infamous local character, saying among other things "developers are gonna develop, it's what they do."
That's why we call them that: developers. They want to develop properties and real estate and ideas, and they take risks, and I have some respect for them.
Wary respect.
Because developers gonna develop. Which means while they might go on at length about public spirited ideals and hopes for the community and all sorts of good intentions, when they get indignant if someone even suggests they're going to make money — millions, that is — from their idea, I get wary. It's based on hard experience. They aren't there to help support the comprehensive plan or even necessarily to improve the lives of everyone (some, maybe, themselves, definitely), they are developers. It's in the name.
Granville has long attracted the attention of developers, large and small. Small or large, they have something in common. They want to develop a parcel and make a bundle, and will wrap that bundle in a great deal of communitarian language, but it's all well and good as long as you remember developers gonna develop.
For over fifteen years I've been an appointive officeholder in Our Fayre Village, the last decade as chair of one of your official panels, and I'm here to tell you that there are few pieces of open land in the village that we haven't entertained proposals for and requests for variances to allow developers to push the edges of what our zoning and use guidelines call for.
And here's the main thing: for many of those open areas we have voted in favor of providing variances more than once, and they are still open. Financing is the final vote, if you will. Village residents vote on council and levies, council crafts a comprehensive plan and ordinances and sets up community panels like the Board of Zoning and Building Appeals or the Planning Commission, those formally empaneled citizens vote again . . . but if the bank won't float the loan, if the investors don't pony up, that last vote is crucial.
Sometimes developers, little local ones or larger regional entities, say the village is hostile to development. Frankly? I chuckle every time I hear that. I watch staff work overtime to help make a better presentation out of a scribbled request, I've presided over many outlandish expectations being dropped on our doorstep, and in general we've bent over backwards to make a proposal happen. We believe in allowing property owners to achieve maximum enjoyment of their holdings within minimum impact on neighbors, as defined by village ordinance and Ohio judicial standards.
What's going to change, though, is that the money is heading our way (has headed, is coming in hot and fast). And not-so-great ideas may not have that last check and balance of investor oversight weighing them down from floating off into la-la land.
Which means we all will have to be judicious, thoughtful, and mindful of what kind of community we are trying to create here. Developers? God bless them all: they're here to develop. Trust them to do that, whatever else they say. Building community is going to be a shared task.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been on a few municipal commissions over the years, and heard way too many developer presentation. Tell him what you're skeptical of at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, October 24, 2022
Faith Works 10-28-22
Faith Works 10-28-22
Jeff Gill
Ministry in transition, online or up close
___
Many denominations have a "Week of the Ministry" in October, or some sort of ministerial appreciation month this time of year.
Preacher, padre, reverend, evangelist, elder . . . the terminology for the person can vary, but in our area there's a fair amount of consistency to a few aspects of what it means to talk about ministry.
If your local church is part of a larger church body, or denomination, there are probably pretty firm guidelines for what it takes to be ordained. From the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church to Protestant ministry, many functions of ministerial work are reserved for someone who has the formal recognition of a diocesan bishop or conference board of ordained ministry or regional commission on ministry.
Presiding at communion is often a function of ordained ministers only; my own tradition is somewhat unique in that almost anyone can preside at the table, but even for us you'll most often see an ordained clergy member at the table. There's usually a sacramental understanding that links ordination and presiding at the table, and frankly the less sacramental the theology of a tradition, the less restricted you'd see for the function of presiding.
Baptism similarly is often performed by the minister, regardless of the sacramental theology of the church involved, but more and more often you'll see lay members ("laity" simply is a general term for anyone not ordained) involved in baptism . . . and in fact most sacramental traditions have major exceptions allowed for any believer to do baptisms under certain circumstances.
Then you get into weddings and funerals, the first of which is also linked to a presider's status with the State of Ohio, and the latter being something anyone can do, but you'll find many friends of couples willing to do a wedding but not so many lining up to offer to conduct a funeral service, so again that becomes a de facto ministerial function.
But I've mentioned ordination a number of times as the effective "gateway" into a ministerial calling. In the last century, that's become an act, a sort of churchly blessing on the person called to ministry, which is offered after not only a course of study (some church bodies require a college degree, many a seminary degree beyond that), but a process of discernment in the local church, the wider church, and usually with a "laying on of hands" by leaders who stand in relation to the historic witness of the church from the apostles on down to today.
Ordination is considered a once given, always held sort of blessing; one can be ordained but not be granted standing, which is a sort of licensure or certification which many traditions review annually. You can lose standing for whatever reason, and get it back; ordination is fairly permanent, but if some cause leads the wider church to rescind that, it's what people call "defrocked" and rarely is restored.
I've been asked if I'm "still a minister" since I'm not currently serving in a pulpit, other than as a supply preacher. Well, my ordination is still valid, and my standing has been renewed up to the present time, I just am not serving a "call" as a parish minister. But yes, I think of myself as a minister.
What my ministry is largely involved in these days is supporting a nationwide online program to serve commissioned ministers, who may never be ordained but have a commission to serve a specific church or task. Ministry today is a flexible, online and off-line, in person and at a distance calling; I'm trying to flex with it!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's teaching ministers from California to New England these days. Tell him how you're learning new things about ministry at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Ministry in transition, online or up close
___
Many denominations have a "Week of the Ministry" in October, or some sort of ministerial appreciation month this time of year.
Preacher, padre, reverend, evangelist, elder . . . the terminology for the person can vary, but in our area there's a fair amount of consistency to a few aspects of what it means to talk about ministry.
If your local church is part of a larger church body, or denomination, there are probably pretty firm guidelines for what it takes to be ordained. From the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church to Protestant ministry, many functions of ministerial work are reserved for someone who has the formal recognition of a diocesan bishop or conference board of ordained ministry or regional commission on ministry.
Presiding at communion is often a function of ordained ministers only; my own tradition is somewhat unique in that almost anyone can preside at the table, but even for us you'll most often see an ordained clergy member at the table. There's usually a sacramental understanding that links ordination and presiding at the table, and frankly the less sacramental the theology of a tradition, the less restricted you'd see for the function of presiding.
Baptism similarly is often performed by the minister, regardless of the sacramental theology of the church involved, but more and more often you'll see lay members ("laity" simply is a general term for anyone not ordained) involved in baptism . . . and in fact most sacramental traditions have major exceptions allowed for any believer to do baptisms under certain circumstances.
Then you get into weddings and funerals, the first of which is also linked to a presider's status with the State of Ohio, and the latter being something anyone can do, but you'll find many friends of couples willing to do a wedding but not so many lining up to offer to conduct a funeral service, so again that becomes a de facto ministerial function.
But I've mentioned ordination a number of times as the effective "gateway" into a ministerial calling. In the last century, that's become an act, a sort of churchly blessing on the person called to ministry, which is offered after not only a course of study (some church bodies require a college degree, many a seminary degree beyond that), but a process of discernment in the local church, the wider church, and usually with a "laying on of hands" by leaders who stand in relation to the historic witness of the church from the apostles on down to today.
Ordination is considered a once given, always held sort of blessing; one can be ordained but not be granted standing, which is a sort of licensure or certification which many traditions review annually. You can lose standing for whatever reason, and get it back; ordination is fairly permanent, but if some cause leads the wider church to rescind that, it's what people call "defrocked" and rarely is restored.
I've been asked if I'm "still a minister" since I'm not currently serving in a pulpit, other than as a supply preacher. Well, my ordination is still valid, and my standing has been renewed up to the present time, I just am not serving a "call" as a parish minister. But yes, I think of myself as a minister.
What my ministry is largely involved in these days is supporting a nationwide online program to serve commissioned ministers, who may never be ordained but have a commission to serve a specific church or task. Ministry today is a flexible, online and off-line, in person and at a distance calling; I'm trying to flex with it!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's teaching ministers from California to New England these days. Tell him how you're learning new things about ministry at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, October 17, 2022
Faith Works 10-21-22
Faith Works 10-21-22
Jeff Gill
Giving, getting, going
___
Yes, Virginia, the Christmas commercials have started running on television.
Retail outlets are hard at work, online and in real world terms, getting you to think about spending money for the holidays, and they'd rather you start spending now and thinking less. Just do it, you know.
It is a good time to think, though, and even to pray about how you spend your money, how you budget your income through expenditures, and certainly time to give prayerful consideration to how you are going to give in 2023.
Many faith communities are sharing with members and attenders their plans for the year ahead, and the needs they have financially. Some call it stewardship, or sacrificial giving, or one version or another of tithing. It all comes down to the basic reality that if a church owns a building and employs staff, there are some basic costs that have to be covered somehow.
In a state church arrangement (which is still true in much of Europe) the government collects certain kinds of taxes, and pays many of the bills for keeping the roof from leaking and paying the preacher, and offerings are more specifically for benevolences. We included that in our American experiment as something we didn't want from 1787 on, so churches are on their own.
Many congregations before the late 1800s used pew rents to cover the basic budget; the Free Methodist Church came into being both because of their stand against slavery and for freedom, but also because they were opposed to pew rents. By the end of the Civil War, the trend was towards offering plates; early in the 1900s, the idea of pledges came into popular practice, to allow church leaders to make better forecasts for what they could anticipate spending.
All of these models are based on the idea of church costs being met through intermittent donations of cash; after World War II, the acceptance of checks was controversial in many sanctuaries, but by my youth in the Sixties, the offering time was accented with the perforated tearing sound of checks being written all around us.
Now we have QR codes and various tools to allow people to give to the church through electronic means, and just as pew rents ending was a fuss and checks upset many church treasurers some decades back, we can spend time debating digital donations. What we can't do is force people to carry cash, which they often don't, or use checks, which many don't even have.
So we have a time of transition again with the changes from a barter economy to the cash economy and now the credit economy driving the need to adapt giving opportunities in church life.
What doesn't change is that our spiritual health is tied to our economic health, and not in terms of how much we have or make or even how much we give, but in how intentional and conscious our stewardship is. If we just let the expenditures pour out, if we aren't aware of what we've been blessed with and how we use it, we can end up in a dry season and a sorry state . . . spiritual or financial.
Whether you give with recurring donations set up through your financial institution, a set amount per month that puts a baseline on your donations on which you can always add more, or you put paper currency in a plate, your intentions around money weave in and around your deeper intentions. One can lift, or pull down, the other.
Which will you plan to do in the year ahead? Grow, or drift? Decline, or find new health? Be thankful, or wary?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he doesn't carry a checkbook around much, either. Tell him how giving has blessed you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Giving, getting, going
___
Yes, Virginia, the Christmas commercials have started running on television.
Retail outlets are hard at work, online and in real world terms, getting you to think about spending money for the holidays, and they'd rather you start spending now and thinking less. Just do it, you know.
It is a good time to think, though, and even to pray about how you spend your money, how you budget your income through expenditures, and certainly time to give prayerful consideration to how you are going to give in 2023.
Many faith communities are sharing with members and attenders their plans for the year ahead, and the needs they have financially. Some call it stewardship, or sacrificial giving, or one version or another of tithing. It all comes down to the basic reality that if a church owns a building and employs staff, there are some basic costs that have to be covered somehow.
In a state church arrangement (which is still true in much of Europe) the government collects certain kinds of taxes, and pays many of the bills for keeping the roof from leaking and paying the preacher, and offerings are more specifically for benevolences. We included that in our American experiment as something we didn't want from 1787 on, so churches are on their own.
Many congregations before the late 1800s used pew rents to cover the basic budget; the Free Methodist Church came into being both because of their stand against slavery and for freedom, but also because they were opposed to pew rents. By the end of the Civil War, the trend was towards offering plates; early in the 1900s, the idea of pledges came into popular practice, to allow church leaders to make better forecasts for what they could anticipate spending.
All of these models are based on the idea of church costs being met through intermittent donations of cash; after World War II, the acceptance of checks was controversial in many sanctuaries, but by my youth in the Sixties, the offering time was accented with the perforated tearing sound of checks being written all around us.
Now we have QR codes and various tools to allow people to give to the church through electronic means, and just as pew rents ending was a fuss and checks upset many church treasurers some decades back, we can spend time debating digital donations. What we can't do is force people to carry cash, which they often don't, or use checks, which many don't even have.
So we have a time of transition again with the changes from a barter economy to the cash economy and now the credit economy driving the need to adapt giving opportunities in church life.
What doesn't change is that our spiritual health is tied to our economic health, and not in terms of how much we have or make or even how much we give, but in how intentional and conscious our stewardship is. If we just let the expenditures pour out, if we aren't aware of what we've been blessed with and how we use it, we can end up in a dry season and a sorry state . . . spiritual or financial.
Whether you give with recurring donations set up through your financial institution, a set amount per month that puts a baseline on your donations on which you can always add more, or you put paper currency in a plate, your intentions around money weave in and around your deeper intentions. One can lift, or pull down, the other.
Which will you plan to do in the year ahead? Grow, or drift? Decline, or find new health? Be thankful, or wary?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he doesn't carry a checkbook around much, either. Tell him how giving has blessed you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
Faith Works 10-14-22
Faith Works 10-14-22
Jeff Gill
Talking to the dead, as one does
___
Speaking as a Christian believer, I would describe speaking to the dead as an entirely logical and reasonable behavior.
If a more pragmatic, not to say materialist philosopher were to ask me if they answer back, that is where the conversation might get awkward.
Because they do. I understand that an atheist might challenge me aggressively about the idea of communicating with God, but there tends to be a more gentle approach from skeptics of all sort when it comes to people asserting they speak to the dead, recently or longer ago. We have all sorts of psychological inferences we can make in the modern age, suggesting it's more a conversation inside our head than with any objective external . . . and J.K. Rowling plays interestingly with this idea inside a sort of heavenly King's Cross between Dumbledore and Harry Potter, a conversation you either know or you don't, so I'll leave it there.
However, all sorts of people who are not Christian believe their loved ones communicate with them after death; Spiritualists come in a variety of flavors, theistic and otherwise — we once had a large settlement of such folk at Summerland Beach on the southwest corner of Buckeye Lake, and their summer lands were not vacations in July but the Spiritualist name for the Life Beyond, however understood.
Christians even have a variety of views on the afterlife and how it works, both for those entering into it and for how we, the living, might hear from it: including the firm belief that you do not, and shouldn't.
I'd put myself at least on the cautious side, warning people that trying to communicate with the dead does happen in the Bible, but it rarely is a good idea if it's the living making the effort to break that barrier down from our side. Obviously, if someone once dead returns through the veil, that's different (and that's usually Jesus).
My own talking to the dead is a more benign and less anxious activity, and is often a matter of walking through cemeteries, being open to what the stones and their stories are saying. You've read some of those dialogues right here, as I learned about the struggles families in Indianapolis had in the early 1940s as young men died in training, even before the war began, and after the conflict started, a shocking number died even before the enemy was anywhere near. It's a message I could have learned in books or heard from a narrative, but I found it on tombstones, in a section, told in pieces.
Oh, that's not talking to the dead, some might say. Well, I don't know about that. I think about dates and days and lives and families gathered at such a spot, and I start to see images and feel emotions. Is it all projection, imagination, psychology? How can you be sure?
Or it is the dead, speaking softly, and not just in cemeteries. This is a season when we have a chance to listen, in church and elsewhere, to stories that aren't in today's news, but still have resonance to speak to us. From where? We can discuss that, can't we?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in a number of cemeteries recently, and isn't that October for you? Tell him about your favorite graveyard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Talking to the dead, as one does
___
Speaking as a Christian believer, I would describe speaking to the dead as an entirely logical and reasonable behavior.
If a more pragmatic, not to say materialist philosopher were to ask me if they answer back, that is where the conversation might get awkward.
Because they do. I understand that an atheist might challenge me aggressively about the idea of communicating with God, but there tends to be a more gentle approach from skeptics of all sort when it comes to people asserting they speak to the dead, recently or longer ago. We have all sorts of psychological inferences we can make in the modern age, suggesting it's more a conversation inside our head than with any objective external . . . and J.K. Rowling plays interestingly with this idea inside a sort of heavenly King's Cross between Dumbledore and Harry Potter, a conversation you either know or you don't, so I'll leave it there.
However, all sorts of people who are not Christian believe their loved ones communicate with them after death; Spiritualists come in a variety of flavors, theistic and otherwise — we once had a large settlement of such folk at Summerland Beach on the southwest corner of Buckeye Lake, and their summer lands were not vacations in July but the Spiritualist name for the Life Beyond, however understood.
Christians even have a variety of views on the afterlife and how it works, both for those entering into it and for how we, the living, might hear from it: including the firm belief that you do not, and shouldn't.
I'd put myself at least on the cautious side, warning people that trying to communicate with the dead does happen in the Bible, but it rarely is a good idea if it's the living making the effort to break that barrier down from our side. Obviously, if someone once dead returns through the veil, that's different (and that's usually Jesus).
My own talking to the dead is a more benign and less anxious activity, and is often a matter of walking through cemeteries, being open to what the stones and their stories are saying. You've read some of those dialogues right here, as I learned about the struggles families in Indianapolis had in the early 1940s as young men died in training, even before the war began, and after the conflict started, a shocking number died even before the enemy was anywhere near. It's a message I could have learned in books or heard from a narrative, but I found it on tombstones, in a section, told in pieces.
Oh, that's not talking to the dead, some might say. Well, I don't know about that. I think about dates and days and lives and families gathered at such a spot, and I start to see images and feel emotions. Is it all projection, imagination, psychology? How can you be sure?
Or it is the dead, speaking softly, and not just in cemeteries. This is a season when we have a chance to listen, in church and elsewhere, to stories that aren't in today's news, but still have resonance to speak to us. From where? We can discuss that, can't we?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in a number of cemeteries recently, and isn't that October for you? Tell him about your favorite graveyard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Friday, October 07, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 10-20-22
Notes from my Knapsack 10-20-22
Jeff Gill
Water is both a path and a barrier
___
Here I am thinking about county growth and development and watersheds, and right in mid-mulling we're hearing in the Granville area about bridges.
The big one across Rt. 16 just got renovated (essentially replaced in pieces), but you actually cross Raccoon Creek at the Cherry St. viaduct, the big curve from Rt. 16 up into the village, and on Main St. you cross it just after the fire station as you come into downtown.
You can go west and cross Raccoon Creek beyond where Raccoon Valley Road forks north, and take the parallel over towards Alexandria alongside Rt. 161 on Moots Run Rd.; it used to be Granville's third river crossing when you could shoot west and jump onto the highway before it got highwayified.
And then the fourth Granville crossing was actually just outside of even today's village limits, over where Arby's and Bob Evans and Speedway front on the highway east of the village, and Cherry Valley Hotel stands just beyond the border.
Beyond that, on past the new T-intersection for Thornwood Crossing, is/was the "Cherry Valley Bridge" as the ODOT signs now say, or historically the "Showman Arch Bridge." Our fourth river crossing, now closed to traffic, pushing drivers on east into Newark to make their way north over Raccoon creek at Church St. or as far as 21st St. let alone the official detour down W. Main in Newark to Rt. 79.
Why so far? Well, the T-intersection was never meant as more than a stop-gap. Plans have always been to build a Thornwood Connector from where River Road and Thornwood meet then swerve onto Reddington Rd., straightening it out to leap the creek and connect Thornwood Crossing to Thornwood Drive. We got the first part built, the interchange, and the rest is coming . . . just not soon enough, it appears!
The three arch stone bridge we took for granted for so long was built in 1832 to 1833, so almost 190 years of service: first as an aqueduct, then after the Granville Feeder was no longer in service for the Ohio & Erie Canal (pieces of which still loom over Raccoon Creek if you know where to look), it was filled in and became a bridge for carts and horses and wagons, and finally some 10,000 motor vehicles a day.
Why no other bridges to get from south of the creek in west Newark to the east side of Granville? Geography and geology. Park Trails sits atop a line of bluffs, sharp and steep, formerly known as Rattlesnake Heights, once dotted with Native American mounds. Opposite that obstacle, on the other side of the river just to the east, is Ashley Hill and what was once the famous Dugway, a cut bank and road around the base of the hill following the creek. Now the deep chasm of modern Rt. 16 slices right through the southern prominence, and most miss it. But for a long time, it was a major barrier to Newark-Granville traffic, unless you swung south onto the Old Columbus Road, today's W. Main and veering onto what's now Cherry Valley Road through Central City, and crossing at the Showman aqueduct bridge.
To replace it will take time, and the only time we have is ahead of us. So that's when it will be done, and we'll have to make the best of today while we have it.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes wading creeks and climbing hills to get to see this stuff to tell you about. Tell him anything but how much you wish they'd built the new bridge last year at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Water is both a path and a barrier
___
Here I am thinking about county growth and development and watersheds, and right in mid-mulling we're hearing in the Granville area about bridges.
The big one across Rt. 16 just got renovated (essentially replaced in pieces), but you actually cross Raccoon Creek at the Cherry St. viaduct, the big curve from Rt. 16 up into the village, and on Main St. you cross it just after the fire station as you come into downtown.
You can go west and cross Raccoon Creek beyond where Raccoon Valley Road forks north, and take the parallel over towards Alexandria alongside Rt. 161 on Moots Run Rd.; it used to be Granville's third river crossing when you could shoot west and jump onto the highway before it got highwayified.
And then the fourth Granville crossing was actually just outside of even today's village limits, over where Arby's and Bob Evans and Speedway front on the highway east of the village, and Cherry Valley Hotel stands just beyond the border.
Beyond that, on past the new T-intersection for Thornwood Crossing, is/was the "Cherry Valley Bridge" as the ODOT signs now say, or historically the "Showman Arch Bridge." Our fourth river crossing, now closed to traffic, pushing drivers on east into Newark to make their way north over Raccoon creek at Church St. or as far as 21st St. let alone the official detour down W. Main in Newark to Rt. 79.
Why so far? Well, the T-intersection was never meant as more than a stop-gap. Plans have always been to build a Thornwood Connector from where River Road and Thornwood meet then swerve onto Reddington Rd., straightening it out to leap the creek and connect Thornwood Crossing to Thornwood Drive. We got the first part built, the interchange, and the rest is coming . . . just not soon enough, it appears!
The three arch stone bridge we took for granted for so long was built in 1832 to 1833, so almost 190 years of service: first as an aqueduct, then after the Granville Feeder was no longer in service for the Ohio & Erie Canal (pieces of which still loom over Raccoon Creek if you know where to look), it was filled in and became a bridge for carts and horses and wagons, and finally some 10,000 motor vehicles a day.
Why no other bridges to get from south of the creek in west Newark to the east side of Granville? Geography and geology. Park Trails sits atop a line of bluffs, sharp and steep, formerly known as Rattlesnake Heights, once dotted with Native American mounds. Opposite that obstacle, on the other side of the river just to the east, is Ashley Hill and what was once the famous Dugway, a cut bank and road around the base of the hill following the creek. Now the deep chasm of modern Rt. 16 slices right through the southern prominence, and most miss it. But for a long time, it was a major barrier to Newark-Granville traffic, unless you swung south onto the Old Columbus Road, today's W. Main and veering onto what's now Cherry Valley Road through Central City, and crossing at the Showman aqueduct bridge.
To replace it will take time, and the only time we have is ahead of us. So that's when it will be done, and we'll have to make the best of today while we have it.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he likes wading creeks and climbing hills to get to see this stuff to tell you about. Tell him anything but how much you wish they'd built the new bridge last year at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Tuesday, October 04, 2022
Faith Works 10-7-22
Faith Works 10-7-22
Jeff Gill
A shifting season of leaves & light
___
November 6 is the day we fall back an hour, returning to standard from daylight savings.
We already know the sunset is falling back, coming earlier, even as the sunrise is later. Less light, more dark, cooler air and crisper leaves.
This is also a time for seeing more stars, paying more attention to the moon. You don't have to be a night owl to be out and see the Big Dipper wheeling in the north, and the rise of Orion in the east (one of his many names).
The Newark Earthworks, along with other Hopewell culture period ceremonial mounds and enclosures, are helping us watch the cycle of moonrise points along the eastern horizon. There's an open house coming at the Octagon Earthworks, the last of four for the year, on Sunday, October 16th, all day on the 135 acre property and with tours and programming at 33rd St. and Parkview just north of W. Main St., between Noon and 4:00 pm.
As a preview of the Octagon's open house, I'll be leading a walk for anyone who wants to see some hidden gems, not all preserved officially, of what was once a four and half square mile complex of interconnected geometric figures built two thousand years ago. My walking tour is starting and finishing at the Great Circle Earthworks, just off Rt. 79 between Newark and Heath, which is open daylight hours all year. I'm actually going to take those who come along on a three mile hike off of the park property, along sidewalks and down side streets plus a few alleys. There's more than you might think that's left, for all of modern development and demolition.
We meet at the museum on Saturday, Oct. 15th at 9:00 am and I plan to get you back to where we started by Noon. That's about one mile per hour, or strolling 3 MPH and pausing for some storytelling and answering questions here and there. Please come along if you are interested, just show up with a water bottle and good shoes.
I like to walk in any season, but especially autumn. The temps are congenial, the light has a certain angle to it, especially early in the morning or towards sunset, and the scents of fall are always around.
Scholars and students and storytellers (I've been all three at various times) think that people once walked great distances to experience moonrises, perhaps sunrises, at the Newark Earthworks. A circuit of the shapes, from creek to observatory to square to circle and back through square to ellipse, then to water again on another drainage, one path through that might have been "a" way if not "the" way, is seven miles, more likely ten if you circumambulate each figure.
Walking and prayer are very closely tied for me. The traditional view links worship, in a church, with prayer and vice versa, but many traditions include pilgrimages and circumambulations of their own: Stations of the Cross, labyrinths, walking the sawdust trail, coming forward to confess your sins, your faith. Walking, walking.
Many faiths come together at the earthworks. The story being told by and at the earthworks is still a narrative we're assembling, re-telling, renewing even, I hope. The moon is a focal point, but I believe even that heavenly body is simply an index, a guide directing eyes and hearts and spirits to something — someone — beyond even their rising light.
From whatever your perspective, come walk the earthworks with us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been learning about the mounds of this area for some time, with a long way to go. Tell him what you know, or would like to know, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
A shifting season of leaves & light
___
November 6 is the day we fall back an hour, returning to standard from daylight savings.
We already know the sunset is falling back, coming earlier, even as the sunrise is later. Less light, more dark, cooler air and crisper leaves.
This is also a time for seeing more stars, paying more attention to the moon. You don't have to be a night owl to be out and see the Big Dipper wheeling in the north, and the rise of Orion in the east (one of his many names).
The Newark Earthworks, along with other Hopewell culture period ceremonial mounds and enclosures, are helping us watch the cycle of moonrise points along the eastern horizon. There's an open house coming at the Octagon Earthworks, the last of four for the year, on Sunday, October 16th, all day on the 135 acre property and with tours and programming at 33rd St. and Parkview just north of W. Main St., between Noon and 4:00 pm.
As a preview of the Octagon's open house, I'll be leading a walk for anyone who wants to see some hidden gems, not all preserved officially, of what was once a four and half square mile complex of interconnected geometric figures built two thousand years ago. My walking tour is starting and finishing at the Great Circle Earthworks, just off Rt. 79 between Newark and Heath, which is open daylight hours all year. I'm actually going to take those who come along on a three mile hike off of the park property, along sidewalks and down side streets plus a few alleys. There's more than you might think that's left, for all of modern development and demolition.
We meet at the museum on Saturday, Oct. 15th at 9:00 am and I plan to get you back to where we started by Noon. That's about one mile per hour, or strolling 3 MPH and pausing for some storytelling and answering questions here and there. Please come along if you are interested, just show up with a water bottle and good shoes.
I like to walk in any season, but especially autumn. The temps are congenial, the light has a certain angle to it, especially early in the morning or towards sunset, and the scents of fall are always around.
Scholars and students and storytellers (I've been all three at various times) think that people once walked great distances to experience moonrises, perhaps sunrises, at the Newark Earthworks. A circuit of the shapes, from creek to observatory to square to circle and back through square to ellipse, then to water again on another drainage, one path through that might have been "a" way if not "the" way, is seven miles, more likely ten if you circumambulate each figure.
Walking and prayer are very closely tied for me. The traditional view links worship, in a church, with prayer and vice versa, but many traditions include pilgrimages and circumambulations of their own: Stations of the Cross, labyrinths, walking the sawdust trail, coming forward to confess your sins, your faith. Walking, walking.
Many faiths come together at the earthworks. The story being told by and at the earthworks is still a narrative we're assembling, re-telling, renewing even, I hope. The moon is a focal point, but I believe even that heavenly body is simply an index, a guide directing eyes and hearts and spirits to something — someone — beyond even their rising light.
From whatever your perspective, come walk the earthworks with us.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been learning about the mounds of this area for some time, with a long way to go. Tell him what you know, or would like to know, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 10-6-22
Notes from my Knapsack 10-6-22
Jeff Gill
When the ground is broken
___
One of the first merit badges I earned in Scouting was the one for "Fish and Wildlife Management."
I can honestly say I was interested in it because my grandmother had turned me on to Aldo Leopold with a copy of "Sand County Almanac," but truth is it looked cool, and I wanted it on my merit badge sash with First Aid and Woodcarving.
Three geese flying in front of low green hills, a forested lake in the foreground. It was everything I went to camp for in one patch, and at Camp To-pe-nee-bee in the summer of 1973 I earned it.
What I remember most from the work was about erosion. Anyone earning Fish & Wildlife Management had to put in some hours on a conservation project, and mine was installing rip-rap on the path down to the lake.
Before that summer, I'm sure I'd seen erosion. After that summer, I've never been able to stop noticing it. Six hours with axe, bowsaw, and a pick-mattock will help anyone to focus their mind, even someone almost twelve and thinking more about scenery than ecology.
Years later, I got to be the director on the summer camp staff for what we called then the Nature Area, later named Ecology-Conservation. We taught Mammals merit badge and Environmental Science and Weather and Astronomy and yes, Fish and Wildlife Management. Older and perhaps a touch wiser, I was now looking for possible conservation project locations around camp, and kept a list on a note card in my pocket.
What I was learning was how heavy use of a landscape, even a fairly undeveloped area like a Scout camp, creates erosion. If you've got wooded terrain, cut down a few trees and walk a few dozen boots across a slope, and there's a certain resilience to the soil under a patch of woods that gets broken down. It's as if the soil has a sort of skin, those layers of leaves and debris in various stages of decay, and grasses or mosses or whatever is growing in that particular amount of sunlight and soil chemistry, and they weave together to create a topmost portion which protects what's below.
Peel some of that leaf mold or turf mat away, and you have a more vulnerable soil beneath that can wash along and gully down and become a valley where once was a plain. Even slopes with the natural layers on top can hold together, but once just a few Scouts tramp directly down the slope it's amazing how quickly you can see after the next rain the marks of erosion. Angling trails across a downhill stretch is important, and putting in rip-rap or other erosion control barriers is often necessary.
Breaking the ground, cutting open the surface of the soil, is a ritual occurrence for new construction, but it's also a visceral reality in any landscape, one worthy of acknowledgement. Because the landscape will now start to change, regardless of what you build next.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking about watersheds and soil and erosion and conservation these days. Tell him about what groundbreaking means to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
When the ground is broken
___
One of the first merit badges I earned in Scouting was the one for "Fish and Wildlife Management."
I can honestly say I was interested in it because my grandmother had turned me on to Aldo Leopold with a copy of "Sand County Almanac," but truth is it looked cool, and I wanted it on my merit badge sash with First Aid and Woodcarving.
Three geese flying in front of low green hills, a forested lake in the foreground. It was everything I went to camp for in one patch, and at Camp To-pe-nee-bee in the summer of 1973 I earned it.
What I remember most from the work was about erosion. Anyone earning Fish & Wildlife Management had to put in some hours on a conservation project, and mine was installing rip-rap on the path down to the lake.
Before that summer, I'm sure I'd seen erosion. After that summer, I've never been able to stop noticing it. Six hours with axe, bowsaw, and a pick-mattock will help anyone to focus their mind, even someone almost twelve and thinking more about scenery than ecology.
Years later, I got to be the director on the summer camp staff for what we called then the Nature Area, later named Ecology-Conservation. We taught Mammals merit badge and Environmental Science and Weather and Astronomy and yes, Fish and Wildlife Management. Older and perhaps a touch wiser, I was now looking for possible conservation project locations around camp, and kept a list on a note card in my pocket.
What I was learning was how heavy use of a landscape, even a fairly undeveloped area like a Scout camp, creates erosion. If you've got wooded terrain, cut down a few trees and walk a few dozen boots across a slope, and there's a certain resilience to the soil under a patch of woods that gets broken down. It's as if the soil has a sort of skin, those layers of leaves and debris in various stages of decay, and grasses or mosses or whatever is growing in that particular amount of sunlight and soil chemistry, and they weave together to create a topmost portion which protects what's below.
Peel some of that leaf mold or turf mat away, and you have a more vulnerable soil beneath that can wash along and gully down and become a valley where once was a plain. Even slopes with the natural layers on top can hold together, but once just a few Scouts tramp directly down the slope it's amazing how quickly you can see after the next rain the marks of erosion. Angling trails across a downhill stretch is important, and putting in rip-rap or other erosion control barriers is often necessary.
Breaking the ground, cutting open the surface of the soil, is a ritual occurrence for new construction, but it's also a visceral reality in any landscape, one worthy of acknowledgement. Because the landscape will now start to change, regardless of what you build next.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking about watersheds and soil and erosion and conservation these days. Tell him about what groundbreaking means to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 9-30-22
Faith Works 9-30-22
Jeff Gill
Planning ahead one last time
___
It's no secret that the state funeral of her late majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, was planned literally decades before it was needed. "Operation London Bridge" and all that, plus "Operation Unicorn" if she died in Scotland. Every eventuality was taken into account.
When my father died a couple of years ago, and my sister and I went down to Texas to help our mother sort matters out, one thing very quickly occurred to us. My dad, who was a very thoughtful man in many ways, had never considered he might die in Texas. It wasn't their home, you see. It was just where they spent the winter in a retirement community by the Rio Grande.
For over a decade, they spent half the year in Texas. But my dad's plans all implied directly or indirectly that when he met his Maker, it would be from an embarkation point out of Indiana. It never occurred to him he'd die away from home.
Trust me, I'm not saying Queen Elizabeth was smarter than my dad, though they would have had plenty to talk about (Churchill, mostly). After all, she had lots of staff.
Yet just because we don't have a Steward to the Household and Black Rod and Chief of Heraldry and Lord High Chamberlain, et cetera, that doesn't mean we can't sit down with a pad of paper or a computer with a printer and knock out some final arrangement planning. It doesn't have to be a royal affair, but it does help to have a plan on paper, or in a 2022 sense, posted or uploaded or saved somewhere where people who care about you can find it, if say you die in Texas or something like that.
And at this point, I want to speak both to those planning for themselves, and those who are going to be responsible for executing those plans: often known as an executor, formally or informally.
Speaking as a longtime parish minister, one of the most painful parts after the initial grief for the family of someone who died is dealing with what is and is not prepared for. So many times I hear over and over "they took care of everything in advance," and then we learn this only meant there's a cemetery lot purchased.
With all due respect, if you've bought a burial plot, you've checked off one item on a very long list, and a fairly modest portion of the total cost. The funeral costs start with the handling of the body (we'll discuss cremation another day) and carry on into a number of areas where savings are possible, but there's still a number of expenditures involved, let alone details.
And it's also heartbreaking when family thinks "well, she had a small insurance policy to cover her final expenses" and in the process we learn the payments stopped on that policy, small though they were, when Great-Aunt Hattie Mae went into the memory unit three years ago. There are also times when everyone's sure there's some kind of provision for funeral costs but no one can find the paperwork.
Just to clear up a few other recurring confusions: Social Security has a death benefit, but last I checked it was in the low three figures. The deceased is a veteran? That will get you the flag and an honor guard of some sort, but it doesn't automatically cover everything. Or most of it.
Let's talk about the more uplifting parts of laying someone to rest, whether yourself or someone you love. I can't say this often enough, and I've said it many times, from pulpits and in print: there are few things that bring smiles to sad faces and cheer to a grieving family like opening an envelope and reading the outline written out by the deceased for their own funeral.
Lists of songs, music you like or even what you absolutely don't want at your funeral; preferred Bible verses are great, names of people you want to have speak at the service even better. If you want Corgis to be waiting on their leashes at the cemetery entrance when the hearse pulls up, you're going to need to say so in advance, and in writing. After all, you're not the Queen.
But as a pastor, I can safely say there are few situations where I've felt more secure and confident about how a service should go than when I'm working from a plan made out by the person whose homegoing we're about to honor.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a plan in an envelope in a filing cabinet. Tell him how you've made final plans at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Planning ahead one last time
___
It's no secret that the state funeral of her late majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, was planned literally decades before it was needed. "Operation London Bridge" and all that, plus "Operation Unicorn" if she died in Scotland. Every eventuality was taken into account.
When my father died a couple of years ago, and my sister and I went down to Texas to help our mother sort matters out, one thing very quickly occurred to us. My dad, who was a very thoughtful man in many ways, had never considered he might die in Texas. It wasn't their home, you see. It was just where they spent the winter in a retirement community by the Rio Grande.
For over a decade, they spent half the year in Texas. But my dad's plans all implied directly or indirectly that when he met his Maker, it would be from an embarkation point out of Indiana. It never occurred to him he'd die away from home.
Trust me, I'm not saying Queen Elizabeth was smarter than my dad, though they would have had plenty to talk about (Churchill, mostly). After all, she had lots of staff.
Yet just because we don't have a Steward to the Household and Black Rod and Chief of Heraldry and Lord High Chamberlain, et cetera, that doesn't mean we can't sit down with a pad of paper or a computer with a printer and knock out some final arrangement planning. It doesn't have to be a royal affair, but it does help to have a plan on paper, or in a 2022 sense, posted or uploaded or saved somewhere where people who care about you can find it, if say you die in Texas or something like that.
And at this point, I want to speak both to those planning for themselves, and those who are going to be responsible for executing those plans: often known as an executor, formally or informally.
Speaking as a longtime parish minister, one of the most painful parts after the initial grief for the family of someone who died is dealing with what is and is not prepared for. So many times I hear over and over "they took care of everything in advance," and then we learn this only meant there's a cemetery lot purchased.
With all due respect, if you've bought a burial plot, you've checked off one item on a very long list, and a fairly modest portion of the total cost. The funeral costs start with the handling of the body (we'll discuss cremation another day) and carry on into a number of areas where savings are possible, but there's still a number of expenditures involved, let alone details.
And it's also heartbreaking when family thinks "well, she had a small insurance policy to cover her final expenses" and in the process we learn the payments stopped on that policy, small though they were, when Great-Aunt Hattie Mae went into the memory unit three years ago. There are also times when everyone's sure there's some kind of provision for funeral costs but no one can find the paperwork.
Just to clear up a few other recurring confusions: Social Security has a death benefit, but last I checked it was in the low three figures. The deceased is a veteran? That will get you the flag and an honor guard of some sort, but it doesn't automatically cover everything. Or most of it.
Let's talk about the more uplifting parts of laying someone to rest, whether yourself or someone you love. I can't say this often enough, and I've said it many times, from pulpits and in print: there are few things that bring smiles to sad faces and cheer to a grieving family like opening an envelope and reading the outline written out by the deceased for their own funeral.
Lists of songs, music you like or even what you absolutely don't want at your funeral; preferred Bible verses are great, names of people you want to have speak at the service even better. If you want Corgis to be waiting on their leashes at the cemetery entrance when the hearse pulls up, you're going to need to say so in advance, and in writing. After all, you're not the Queen.
But as a pastor, I can safely say there are few situations where I've felt more secure and confident about how a service should go than when I'm working from a plan made out by the person whose homegoing we're about to honor.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a plan in an envelope in a filing cabinet. Tell him how you've made final plans at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 9-22-22
Notes from my Knapsack 9-22-22
Jeff Gill
Presidential groundbreaking presence
___
Hello, President Biden, nice to have you in Licking County!
I'm not quite sure on this, but I know we had Abraham Lincoln give a speech on February 14th in 1860 on his way to inauguration, from a train car just south of downtown Newark.
Other than that, which other presidents have we had in the area? In terms of "while serving" he's on a short list. Presidents Obama and Trump certainly flew over — can't miss the distinctive look of Air Force One, let alone the fighter escort — but didn't visit on the ground.
Andrew Johnson came shortly after Lincoln's assassination, and others have told that story at length, but it was another whistle stop more than formal event with "boots on the ground."
Rutherford Hayes from nearby Delaware, Ohio came here for Grand Army of the Republic events as a veteran himself, and at a couple of those James Garfield was present, though well before his presidency.
And I keep running into stories that Andrew Jackson passed through on the old National Road, but I'm not so sure of that one, though it's fairly well received that Jacksontown got its name from supporters of Old Hickory, if not from his actual presence here. Henry Clay did visit Hebron, and that's also a longer story with a powerful punch, but he is simply "the man who was almost President."
Presidents or potentates aside, the big question is "why a groundbreaking?" Especially when the ground is broken, dug, plowed, moved, and transported back and forth between piles and pits already.
Okay, so it's a symbolic act, like saying grace after a meal. You can be thankful after you've already eaten everything, right?
There's a "saying grace" aspect to public and political events like this. We took the first shovelful months ago, but today we celebrate that we started and we're well on the way to finishing. Speeches are actually more common than shovels, even when a dozen or more are wielded by a line of people noticeably not possessing manual labor skills: you see them all trying to coordinate that first scoop . . . on three, two, one, shovel! (Cue cheers.)
Why the attempt to synchronize shovels in the first place? It's actually a fascinating piece of tradition and a kind of religious ritual. The ancient idea is that the wholeness of the soil, which when untouched for long periods does indeed need cutting, not just shoveling, is something to respect. To break the ground is to open up what is below, and who knows what might get out?
In Japan, I am told, groundbreaking ceremonies are still quite overtly religious, in terms of calming spirits that might be disturbed and asking for blessings from powers that may be awakened, to protect the builders and occupants of what is to be put on the site. A few prayers for the construction crews and coming employees might just still be in order.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has prayed over a few construction sites, in fact. Tell him about the blessings you believe our community needs at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Presidential groundbreaking presence
___
Hello, President Biden, nice to have you in Licking County!
I'm not quite sure on this, but I know we had Abraham Lincoln give a speech on February 14th in 1860 on his way to inauguration, from a train car just south of downtown Newark.
Other than that, which other presidents have we had in the area? In terms of "while serving" he's on a short list. Presidents Obama and Trump certainly flew over — can't miss the distinctive look of Air Force One, let alone the fighter escort — but didn't visit on the ground.
Andrew Johnson came shortly after Lincoln's assassination, and others have told that story at length, but it was another whistle stop more than formal event with "boots on the ground."
Rutherford Hayes from nearby Delaware, Ohio came here for Grand Army of the Republic events as a veteran himself, and at a couple of those James Garfield was present, though well before his presidency.
And I keep running into stories that Andrew Jackson passed through on the old National Road, but I'm not so sure of that one, though it's fairly well received that Jacksontown got its name from supporters of Old Hickory, if not from his actual presence here. Henry Clay did visit Hebron, and that's also a longer story with a powerful punch, but he is simply "the man who was almost President."
Presidents or potentates aside, the big question is "why a groundbreaking?" Especially when the ground is broken, dug, plowed, moved, and transported back and forth between piles and pits already.
Okay, so it's a symbolic act, like saying grace after a meal. You can be thankful after you've already eaten everything, right?
There's a "saying grace" aspect to public and political events like this. We took the first shovelful months ago, but today we celebrate that we started and we're well on the way to finishing. Speeches are actually more common than shovels, even when a dozen or more are wielded by a line of people noticeably not possessing manual labor skills: you see them all trying to coordinate that first scoop . . . on three, two, one, shovel! (Cue cheers.)
Why the attempt to synchronize shovels in the first place? It's actually a fascinating piece of tradition and a kind of religious ritual. The ancient idea is that the wholeness of the soil, which when untouched for long periods does indeed need cutting, not just shoveling, is something to respect. To break the ground is to open up what is below, and who knows what might get out?
In Japan, I am told, groundbreaking ceremonies are still quite overtly religious, in terms of calming spirits that might be disturbed and asking for blessings from powers that may be awakened, to protect the builders and occupants of what is to be put on the site. A few prayers for the construction crews and coming employees might just still be in order.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has prayed over a few construction sites, in fact. Tell him about the blessings you believe our community needs at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 9-16 & 9-23
Two columns in one email . . .
Faith Works 9-16-22
Jeff Gill
State funerals and sacred occasions
___
Princess Diana's death in 1997 did not lead to a state funeral, although many remember it that way.
Princess Diana's death in 1997 did not lead to a state funeral, although many remember it that way.
The nuances of a royal ceremonial funeral versus a state funeral are probably beyond most of us, but it's worth noting that the United Kingdom actually hasn't had a true "state funeral" since 1965, when Winston Churchill died. The Queen Mother and Prince Philip also had royal ceremonies but not a state funeral per se.
What makes the key difference is, obviously, the involvement of the state itself, and in the case of the UK an act of Parliament. Queen Elizabeth II as ruler of the United Kingdom will certainly have a state funeral.
In the United States, we have a slightly looser set of guidelines for such things, but not that much looser. A state funeral is generally only for Presidents; the set of rituals around a state funeral largely were born around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and his extended memorials from lying in state under the Capitol rotunda to his burial in Springfield, Illinois.
General Douglas MacArthur was granted a state funeral in 1964, and other than former presidents, the last such was for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020. State funerals were also held for the Unknown Soldiers now at rest in Arlington National Cemetery.
My earliest memories of national news are not of the death of John F. Kennedy, but I recall bits and pieces of his 1963 funeral: the riderless horse with reversed boots in the stirrups, John-John about my age stepping forward to salute his father's casket.
What I first recall actually as a funeral was the one I saw in black and white from across the globe as the Vatican laid to rest Pope John XXIII a few months later. The open casket, the incense, the music was all quite striking to a young child.
At the end of January, 1967, many of the same elements of memorial and honors were seen in the funerals for the astronauts of Apollo I, with two at Arlington and one at the West Point Cemetery. The riderless horse, the honor guards, the salutes all seen on TV were my first experience of what I had yet to experience in person.
When military honors are given to a veteran, we participate in small ways in the larger traditions of state funerals. The flag draping the casket, a three volley salute with "Taps" played, the honor guard and presentation of the flag to the next-of-kin: all of these rituals connect any cemetery in the world to Arlington and the nation's Capitol, including the traditional phrase as the flag is presented:
"On behalf of the President of the United States, the (name of service branch), and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service."
In any funeral today, family members will seek to make connections between their grief and the mourning rituals they've seen and shared before. The challenge for many of us in conducting memorials is that it is more and more common for people to have relatively little experience with previous funerals, and their expectations are more oriented towards public events — like the services for Princess Diana — than a traditional family funeral. Smaller families and people spreading out adds up to not a few people reaching their 30s or 40s never having attended a funeral, and suddenly they have to plan one.
Some religious traditions have a liturgy, a very specific process through which the readings and speakers and acts of the attendees is already laid out. Many liturgical traditions will minimize personal stories about the deceased, guiding those sorts of speeches to a wake the evening before, or a community meal afterwards.
But the majority of people working out a plan for a funeral are not calling on such traditions, even as they have few of their own. As a preacher from a less liturgical tradition, I have plenty of latitude to work with, but the breadth can be overwhelming for a family as they grieve.
When it can get complicated is where people ask "can we do this thing I saw on TV?" Pop music used to be almost unheard of in funerals even outside of churches, but since Elton John sang for Princess Diana's, it has become quite common.
Have you planned your funeral service? It probably won't be much like Queen Elizabeth's…
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; yes, he's got his funeral outline planned, how about you? Tell him what you want or don't want at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
=+=+=+=
Faith Works 9-23-22
Jeff Gill
Thirty years of change & continuity
___
Last week while so many were thinking about state funerals and distant royalty, I had to address the obvious theme for faith communities around memorial services here and the effects of what's going on "over there."
Last week while so many were thinking about state funerals and distant royalty, I had to address the obvious theme for faith communities around memorial services here and the effects of what's going on "over there."
My thoughts, though, were actually intending to stay closer to home, and meditating on the last thirty years: specifically since September 18, 1992.
The day before that I sat down with two other intrepid incorporators, and let me pause to note Karen Bunning & I would honor the memory of Marie Kerns who was regal in her own right, but no longer with us.
We three signed incorporation papers which Deb Tegtmeyer then hand carried to Columbus, where then Secretary of State Bob Taft made official on the 18th of September the still developing structure of the Licking County Coalition for Housing, now more often called simply "LCCH."
By Thanksgiving week we had three families in transitional housing and a budget made up of baling wire and bubble gum; thirty years later we're a little more stable but tied closely to HUD grants and state support for programs which all allow us to improve and enhance the stability of housing for people at risk for homelessness.
We weren't, and still aren't an emergency shelter organization; there are others doing that work, and we all have needs still, but the impetus of getting a transitional housing program going in 1990 & 1991 was that we just didn't have any place to house folks coming out of emergency shelter type housing. Data then and now shows that people are much less likely to return to emergency shelter if there's a solid transitional housing program for them to work through on their way back to independence and stability for their own living arrangements.
After a number of ideas and proposals that are amusing to recall today, a group of community leaders and agency staff members working with housing came up with a plan for transitional housing, a coalition of partners and participants who could come up with a number of locations, cover the staffing and the upkeep, and give people a chance to live securely after having been homeless. We found a landlord who would let our motley crew lease four units to sublet, so to speak, and thirty years later we own hatful and still lease others, assisting forty some families and over twice that many individuals to have a stable residence while they work out their transition to independence . . . hence, transitional housing.
Over the last few years, unsheltered homelessness has gotten more public attention, and even a little controversy around how we can best respond as a community to the needs of people who are unhoused. I've talked to some of the folks who are concerned about how our network of response works, and hope to have more to say on that subject soon, but those have been positive and fruitful conversations. Everyone agrees that homelessness is a problem, but when it comes to what people who are homeless should do, or how a city or county might respond, I've learned over the last thirty years there is lots of room for disagreement.
What I've also learned, in our area and in travels and communication with other locations that struggle with some of the same issues, is that there are well-tested means by which we can increase the rate of people NOT returning to emergency shelter. That's the primary goal. You might be surprised to learn I'm not a fan of the phrase "end homelessness" because the reality is that as generations come and go, and people mature and face challenges, at any given time any community is going to have people at risk of becoming homeless. Our goal has to be ensuring that people only go through that only once if at all possible, that almost anyone can end up in a jam and find themselves in a tough spot, but they don't have to keep ending up in the same place.
LCCH has been most successful, I believe, in helping those who come to us for assistance get to where they can not only help themselves, but they also find themselves wanting to help others. The most interesting part of being connected to an organization that's now been helping people for three decades is how often I have someone pull me aside to say quietly "LCCH helped me when I was without a home, and that made all the difference." And they're often volunteers today in helping others.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not sure he really intended to admit he's been around for over thirty years, but there you are. Tell him what you think would make a difference in our communities at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
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