Faith Works 9-20-24

Faith Works 9-20-24

Jeff Gill

Intervals of reflection, looking back, looking ahead
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This week marks one year since the World Heritage List declaration added the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, including our own Newark Earthworks, to the global roster of enduringly significant sites.

On Saturday, Sept. 21, there's a program at the Great Circle Museum, off Rt. 79 on the border of Newark and Heath, to officially unveil a plaque marking World Heritage List status, putting us in a distinguished category of locations alongside Mammoth Cave and the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall and a series of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. We are the 25th World Heritage Site in the United States.

The unveiling and speakers are at 10:30 am on Saturday morning, with tours of the Great Circle afterwards, and at 1:00 pm I will be taking anyone interested "off site," as we walk north into Newark and look for "remnants" of the once four and a half square mile complex of interconnected geometric earthworks.

That walking tour takes about three hours and starts and ends at the Great Circle Museum, covering some three and a half miles, mostly of sidewalk and alley. I recommend you bring water, and a hat perhaps: very little shade along the way! But the route is mostly level, and it's no spoiler to tell you we will see a number of bits and pieces and fragments and remnants of the walls and pathways and mounds once dominant between Raccoon Creek and Ramp Creek.

There are events planned for October, around the Octagon open house during the day on Sunday, the 20th, and later that evening as we begin having moonrises along the core alignment of that element of the earthworks complex.

As I've been contemplating in the last couple of columns, it occurred to me that the Newark Earthworks have been around for about a hundred of the 18.6 year lunar cycles they mark (among multiple other functions, no doubt). As scholars have noted, the Native American builders in the Hopewell Culture era had to have watched and monitored and recorded the lunar intervals over some time, at least three full cycles, to have then built what they did at the Octagon. So I claim no precision around my hundred intervals marked silently by the geometric figures west of 30th St.

What I do know is that as I see many in my demographic cohort talk about how "age is just a number, and mine is unlisted," along with other age-defying exhortations, I find it bracing to think about how brief my own span is against the backdrop of these ancient works. Last week I referred to it as "humbling, and I would also say inspiring."

My religious faith is tied in many ways to events of two thousand years past, and I've heard preachers talk about "a hundred generations" between the time of Jesus and our own. We come from a generation, we see . . . what? Three generations or four pass us by, and we have some sense of the passage of time from them. But it is so partial, so limited; our awareness is of a small circle of illumination cast around the place where we currently stand.

There were some in our community who asked when tens of millions of dollars were spent to restore our 1876 courthouse: why not tear it down, and spend the same amount to build a new one, which might be easier to adapt and occupy into the coming century? It's an argument, and one I know our leaders did consider warily.

Their decision in the end, though, I think was wise. We preserve from the past to give us perspective in the present. The future will keep coming at us, but the newest answer is not always the right one. It helps to keep some ancient wisdom on hand.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been around a few generations. Tell him what you're glad to see past at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.