Faith Works 9-13-24

Faith Works 9-13-24

Jeff Gill

When you are a generation, marking time
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When I was talking last week about the span of generations, we were looking past the ubiquitous Baby Boom, to Gen Xers and Millennials and Gen Z.

They're now watching children grow up, kids who are definite "digital natives," always having known not just the internet but smartphones: Generation Alpha has been proposed for those born since 2010, a step into the Greek alphabet. 

Other than these demographic labels, how do we mark the sequence of generations? There's calendars on the wall, and having one up probably dates you right there. Some of us watch our hair turn white, others haunt cemeteries, but all of us note the passage of time by some mental map, using relatives perhaps as our benchmarks, grandparents past and aging aunts and uncles, warily gauging our own relative youth against those newer on the scene.

Which is where I find myself reflecting on the Newark Earthworks, and how the vast landscape constructed by Native Americans here some two thousand years ago can fulfill a number of purposes, both spiritual and practical, and maybe occasionally both at the same time.

As you may know, the central alignment of the Octagon, through where it is connected to Observatory Circle, points from the high mound at the southwestern corner of the earthworks along the symmetry axis of the double geometric enclosure, to a point on the northeast horizon that our moon only reaches every 18.6 years.

Now, the rise point of the moon swings back and forth, south to north again, like a horizontal pendulum from a set observation point, like the logically named Observatory Mound. The sun does the same back and forth, only it takes a year to make an arc from northernmost to southernmost and back again, solstice to solstice.

The moondance is more complicated, swinging back and forth in terms of the rise point on the horizon over 28 days. Then each 28 day cycle expands and contracts, with the peaks approached ever more nearly until the true maximum, then swaying back and forth, retreating progressively in the same stately pattern. So while there's a true northernmost, there are a number of moonrises leading up to and afterwards which are so close you can barely detect the difference. Call them a dozen or so in total when you could see the alignment at its peak, along the architecture.

In any case, you only get a handful of chances, themselves subject to clouds and fog canceling the viewing for all but a few, but once a . . . generation? A time or two to mark the cycle then 18.6 years to wait for it again.

When Brad Lepper pointed out the Hively and Horn archaeo-astronomical research which first revealed this alignment to us, we quickly calculated when the Newark Earthworks would witness it next. It was frustrating in 1989 to realize it had just peaked a couple of years ago, and the cycle was now narrowing. We worked and waited to 2005 & 2006, and had some limited opportunities to see the earthworks stand witness to the astronomical moments it was built to mark.

It has been my privilege to see two cycles of the Moon's movements, and as we come up to the alignments coming into view during the end of 2024 and through 2025, I hope to live into a third.

That's three cycles of what I realize is about a hundred that the Newark Earthworks have marked. Just a few ticks on this cosmic clockwork of light and shadow, walls and enclosed areas, negative space and vertical elevations. A fourth I am unlikely to experience in full.

These lunar cycles, so memorialized, are generations of a sort, placing us in time, as well as shaping space. Humbling, and I would also say inspiring.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's aware the clock is ticking. Tell him how you make the most of your time at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.