Notes From My Knapsack 6-3-07
Jeff Gill

A Few Words From 1889

Long, long days, warm nights, and food cooked outdoors.

Summer is here, and with the end of school and graduation behind most of us, camp season begins.

There are families that have their own hunk of land and a cabin they may call a camp, and many others camp at a campground that may have little enough ground showing in the camp full of asphalt and travel trailers.

But camp season for me is Scout and church camp, with the opening week always Cub Scout Day Camp.

Next week the Licking District Cub Scout Day Camp takes place out at Camp Falling Rock, under the faithful direction of Ric and Angie Eader from Etna. Over 300 Cubs, and nearly 100 adults and a dozen older Boy Scouts all come together with the theme “From Sea to Shining Sea.”

For seas they have Lake Peewee on the old camp end off Rocky Fork, and the pool up top, where the week long residential camps will fill with Boy Scouts all summer.

For this shakedown week, the younger Cubs will have their turn in the newly cleaned and filled pool – if they can make it up Cardiac Hill. More positive-minded Scout leaders try to call it “Cardio Hill,” which is a good intention, but tradition dies hard.
Some older traditions at Cub Day Camp are carved in stone, like making bird houses and tool boxes, or learning how to fold the American flag, or archery.

When I’m out at Camp Falling Rock, meandering from the original part of the camp around Franklin Lodge (75 years old last year) to the new camp “up top,” the road winds up past Lake Peewee, and levels a bit as Amphitheater Creek gurgles across the rocky path. It’s a kind of breather, with cool air coming out of the stone bluffs, before you slog up Cardiac.

If you look up as you step from rock to rock across the creek, you can barely make out an inscription cut deep, but weathered into the same lichened grey of the surrounding stone.

All it says is “Camp Whip-poor-will,” with the next line “Mount Vernon, 1889.”

It appears to be some kind of church camp, but I’ve never found a precise reference.

What I surmise (note: all that follows is eddicated guesswork, in other words) is that the area was used as a very early Christian Endeavour camp.

Christian Endeavour was originally a youth program, back when no one had youth programs, just a nursery and then “sit in church and be quiet!” It began in Maine at a Congregational (now UCC) church in 1881, and quickly grew, spreading across the US and around the world. The headquarters of this still-extant organization are in . . . Mount Vernon.

An ecumenical youth program, the strength of it was such that whole congregations were founded from the effort, such as Newark’s own Christian Endeavor United Methodist Church. Meanwhile, existing churches could pick it up as their youth meeting structure, and I found a century old, mostly decayed “CE” poster on oilcloth in the attic when I served at Hebron Christian Church.

Now youth programs are the norm, not a new idea, and camps are everywhere. 1889 was well past the pioneer phase of central Ohio, but I suspect Camp Whip-poor-will represents some real pioneering spirit. Whoever organized and led a camp program in 1889 out in northeastern Licking County had enough strength left to carve a message in stone, which tells me they must have planned pretty well.

We don’t believe in marking up the environment today (can you imagine a century of inscriptions each summer?), but most of the values and practices of Camp Whip-poor-will probably line up pretty well with what we do there today.

Whatever you do this summer, make sure to get outside, look around at nature, and make some food for yourself and others without a microwave. Watch a sunset, identify a bird, read a few psalms.

And find something to be thankful for. Thinking about how life was in 1889 can be a good start; then you can think about 2125 and how they’ll marvel at the inconveniences we put up with back in 2007.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about an inscription that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-26-07
Jeff Gill

Is There a Text at the Statehouse?

So, I won’t be delivering any public prayers at the Statehouse.

Not a surprise, since no one’s asked me. That is, not for a while, and all the spoken, public praying I’ve done in the past has been technically next door, in the Atrium.

I’ve offered invocations for a wide variety of gatherings outside of worship services, and as I’ve discussed here before (and gotten some interesting and thoughtful email in response), I will often choose not to close with “in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

To recap, that’s because a) I don’t end every prayer I pray that way anyhow, so b) why should I do it just to make a point, and c) there are interfaith occasions where my Christian faith is clear enough, and I feel it is both appropriate and courteous to keep a general setting prayer as broad based as seems right, which sometimes means a wrap-up along the lines of “as we are called to express Your love in this world,” or “committing ourselves to the work of Your justice and truth, Amen.”

No one has ever asked me to do a “public” prayer and said “um, please don’t say the ‘in Jesus’ name’ thing, OK?” If I were asked to not say it, I’d probably defer the whole occasion, or ask what the concern is and see where the conversation takes us.

Which isn’t why I won’t be praying over in the State Capital any time soon. Well, that’s part of it. About a year ago I wrote here about the dispute in my old home state, Indiana, where there was a fight over House rules that ended up in a court decision saying that the Indiana legislature needed to ensure that any opening blessings or invocations were Jesus-free.

When a number pointed out, “so I can pray to Allah, but Jesus is right out?” then they got a revision to the guidelines that basically said you can’t say anything but “God” or maybe “Lord” in the prayers to open proceedings.

Which meant rabbis who normally prayed their first half of an invocation in Hebrew were in a grey area, and some women objected to privileging “Lord” as an acceptable term.

Last I heard, Indiana went to all prayers offered by members, not invited clergy, where they could invoke Vishnu, Brahma, and Ahriman if they chose as elected representatives.

Fine, you say, that’s Indiana. Ah, but could Ohio be close behind?

Apparently some legislators have had their tender ears so wounded by sharp edged swinging of Jesus’ name (note to secularists, whom I trust some are still reading: most Christians regularly affirm that Jesus is, in fact, God, which means if you can call God Allah, you should be able to call God Jesus – that’s the point), that they’ve laid down two guidelines.

Remember, your faithful columnist has said that he’d be willing to pray without an obligatory use of Jesus, but I don’t feel comfortable being told that I can’t (He might come up, is all I’m saying).

It’s the second guideline that is surprisingly uncontroversial, or maybe the political reporters just haven’t asked enough clergy about it. Guideline two is, to check for appropriate names of the Most High, any invited prayin’ clergy need to submit a text of their prayer three days in advance.

To be fair, I would probably write a few notes down on a card if I were doing a public prayer in a place like the Capital, just as I do for a Scouting awards event, or special program. Maybe.

But for many clergy, the idea that a prayer has to be written out in advance is problematic. Does anyone involved with this decision know that?

Some folks can take this principle to a fault, and condemn anyone who doesn’t pray entirely spontaneously. That is not entirely fair, and many of those who so aggressively mock “set prayers” in favor of “letting the Spirit move” can sound awfully repetitious themselves over many different prayers – “Lord, we just want . . . We just ask, Lord . . . etc.”

There is a definite place for thought and preparation in prayer, and the great prayers of the saints used again and again, not to mention the Lord’s Prayer.

But to tell clergy that they can’t pray in a way that touches on events of the moment, or of last night; to set a guideline that requires the words to be set down in advance, let alone approved . . . never mind, say I.

Don’t worry, though; I will certainly still be praying for them. Just not up in front of them at the opening of their day. You can pray for them, too (see 1 Timothy 2: 1-3), and say whatever the Spirit leads you to offer.

In all fairness, quite a few of them appreciate those prayers, and count on them. Lift them up, and keep on praying for them all.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; say a prayer for him or just drop a line to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-27-07
Jeff Gill

Denison & My Name Is Earl

Many of you know that Steve Carell of “The Office” went to Denison, living here in Licking County for four years.

Usually on right before that show is “My Name Is Earl,” and as far as I know there are no local connections to that program (except some major déjà vu moments while viewing).

But I want to bookend our graduation season glance at the large inscriptions on the College Street campus gateways with an “Earl” connection of sorts.

Along with Earl and his brother Randy there are a number of recurring characters, including Earl’s ex-wife Joy, and a lady she does not get along with at all named Catalina.

Catalina’s immigration status is, um, currently under debate in Washington. Stay tuned to that… Anyhow, Catalina is pretty fluent in English, putting her a step ahead of most illegal aliens in the US, but occasionally, mainly when her character is angry, she launches into Espanol. Having taken Latin and German in high school, I have only scraps picked up on Southwestern trips and in reading the menu at Taco Bell.

But those years of Latin and culinary clues gave me just enough to prick up my ears when I was watching a re-run of an Earl episode.

In a first season episode called "Barn Burner,” it appears that Catalina is cursing out Joy in Spanish. It didn’t sound quite right, though. Later on, I did some Googling about on the internet, and found out something I think is quite clever: what she’s saying is "I want to thank the Latino audience that tunes in to watch the show every week. And to those of you who aren't Latino, I want to congratulate you for learning another language."

Catalina does the same trick, it turns out, at season’s end for both the first and this most recent season, and we can expect more hidden surprises and in-jokes with season three picked up by the NBC network.

Back to those distinguished looking campus gateways at Denison! Down by the intersection of Burg St. and College is the final pair of inscriptions, one long known to be a Ben Franklin classic about time being the stuff life is made of, and don’t waste it.

Opposite is a statement that has long been listed in college lore as “unattributed,” which just means that somewhere since President Emory Hunt picked it out a century ago, no one has been sure where it came from.

It’s kind of appropriate that the obscurity of the quote is tied to the quotation, which says in full “Languages are no more than the keys of sciences; He who despises one, slights the other.” The source is hard to track down because the original is in French, from an author named Jean de la Bruyere. La Bruyere was a student of Pascal and Montaigne, a contemporary of Racine and Corneille, and over to the English side of the channel, he strongly influenced Joseph Addison with his “The Characters, or Manners of the Present Age,” where the quote derives.

Addison went on to create the idea of short essays in cheap, public settings like broadsheets and newspapers, with a connection over time not preventing the enjoyment of any one.

Or, you could just say that Addison invented the role of newspaper columnist!

La Bruyere wanted, like Catalina, for us to appreciate the importance of having knowledge and familiarity with different languages. Emory Hunt wanted Denison students and any passers-by to see quotes affirming hard work (George Crabbe), aspiration (Longfellow’s Augustine quote), good use of time (Franklin), and the value of learning languages (La Bruyere).

In that way, the four quotes on the two gates from lower to upper campus make a perfect summation of what a liberal arts education is all about.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he speaks no French at all, sadly. Parleys-vooz with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-19-07
Jeff Gill

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

Does your church have a “no smoking” sign?

No, not the yellowing old hand drawn one on a shirt carboard made thirty years ago that’s taped to the back of the downstairs bathroom door.

I mean the “official” ones by the entrances that tell you what number to call if you find unauthorized smoking in progress.

Somewhere here in the last few years there was a major infiltration of the Statehouse legislators by the powerful, implacable “Sign Makers” lobby. We got a concealed carry law, which allows law abiding citizens to carry shoulder holstered weapons about inobtrusively. They ask you if you’re planning any criminal acts and if you’re crossing your fingers while you answer, and you fill out a dozen forms and then you are licensed for “concealed carry.”

Which was meant to get some balance through making the law inactive if you have a certain size, type, and design of sign at the entrance of your building.

Many businesses chose to put up an “uh-huh, sorry bud, not in here” sign, while many did not, whether they really wanted handguns waved about in a robbery or not. Most retail establishments have, as the centerpiece of their training for armed robbery, the principle “give it to ‘em, and ask if they want fries with that.” You could probably get fired for shooting a patron, even if they drew down on you first.

So that’s business, but then there’s other offices, like not-for-profits who serve the public directly.

I’m part of a service agency board that has long had a no booze, no drugs, no weapons policy built into our service program that all participants understand and sign. Apparently, the law didn’t take such common-sensical approaches into consideration, and we were told that if we didn’t a) vote to exclude concealed weapons, and b) put up the canonical signage to say so, we might not have the right to just tell them.

We voted and signed, like good citizens.

And churches?

Well, I’ve seen quite a few churches with the red circle, handgun, and red slash ornamenting their front entrances. I’ve also seen quite a few without such signs, most where I doubt packing heat is part of the approved vestment for Sunday worship. Maybe they assume that since they preach peace and affirm non-violence they don’t need lame graphics to make the point, nor would they sue a member who chose to take advantage of the absence of a sign to carry a blunderbuss under their choir robes some Sunday.

The fact is, tho’, that if a gun related crime takes place in a church where no vote or signage went into effect, there could be no charges related to their concealed weapon per se. Should we worry about that?

More problematic is the growing impetus behind that ominous word “fairness” when it comes to churches as “public space” and the state smoking ordinance. Will churches be required to put tacky plastic panels with bright red logos (which, by the by, inevitably fade over time, looking even more tacky, and maybe leaving a distinct gun in black but the faint memory of the slash), with the creepy “call this number to report smoking” tagline?

“Call this number” to report animal abuse, school threats, child neglect even, but a central state number to report smoking?

Did I mention that I don’t smoke, dislike being around lit cigarettes intensely, and wish people wouldn’t smoke right next to doors I’m going through?

In Great Britain, there is debate in Parliament over whether or not Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, and every other place of worship large and small will be required to post “no smoking inside” signs at every entrance. Y’know, like the West Front of Lincoln Cathedral, with massive Romanesque arches, Norman stonework in the arcading, and large Plexiglas placards with red circled butts of the tobacco variety bearing their heraldric slash.

For future debate in Columbus, or London, shall we discuss a “No Lawsuits Between Christians” sign, “Gossip forbidden here” banners, or just “Only Good Thoughts Welcome”? Is there a logo that affirms healthy eating, or regular exercise?

Or what about just posting the Ten Commandments at the door? That would set a comprehensive tone for what’s expected in a public space, wouldn’t it?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he did not have the foresight to invest in signmaking companies ten years ago, more’s the pity. Tell him about a sign that caught your eye at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-20-07
Jeff Gill

Imagine a sailor, long away from England.

His last leave-taking turned awkward, and our Roger was estranged from three brothers.
Forty years passed, and he returned from the ocean trade wealthy, looking to retire quietly in his home county. There were three nephews, a niece, and a cousin once removed who lived a bit of a recluse life in the forest.

Roger said to himself, as people say in poems of the year 1801:
“Yet hold! I’m rich; - with one consent they’ll say,
‘You’re welcome, Uncle, as the flowers in May.’
No; I’ll disguise me, be in tatters dress’d,
And best befriend the lads who treat me best.””

You’ve heard these kind of stories, no doubt. Roger goes as a beggar to the three nephews and is roughly treated and ill-used by each; even the niece shrieks and shies away.

When he wanders into the woods to search for “surly John,” where Roger finds him and says “I hunger, fellow; prithee, give me food!”
John does not run him off or condemn him for the “sin” of poverty, but simply replies:

“Give! am I rich? This hatchet take, and try
Thy proper strength, nor give those limbs the lie;
Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal;
And while that hand is thine, and thine a leg,
Scorn of the proud or of the base to beg.”

Our incognito wealthy sailor is delighted by the answer, reveals himself, and shares his fortune, saying to John “With beef and brandy (we’ll) kill all kinds of care;
We’ll beer and biscuit on our table heap,
And rail at rascals, till we fall asleep.”

When John dies, Roger leaves the rest for the benefit of the poor, but still none as inheritance for his relations. Or at least, that’s the story.

If you have walked from Denison’s lower campus along Granville’s Broadway, across College and up to “the Hill,” the gate next to Cleveland Hall carries an inscription on either side.

On the left, many laugh at the sentiment, proper for a long, long stairway leading up a steep hillside, speaking of “The heights by great men reached and kept/ Were not attained by sudden flight,/ But they, while their companions slept,/ Were toiling upward in the night.” a piece from Longfellow’s “The Ladder of Saint Augustine.”

The right hand inscription sticks in the imagination of many a DU grad, but the source is little known. It is two lines from a 2,400 line poem (filling around 58 standard pages) called “The Parish Register,” written in 1801 and published in 1807 by one George Crabbe.

Students are directly admonished: “Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,/
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal.”

Crabbe is little known today but indirectly; his poems were a major influence in Thomas Hardy’s novels, and a segment from another long poem, “The Borough,” was the basis for Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”

Already a century old and obscure in 1906, these lines stuck in the memory of one of Denison’s better read presidents, and they a literate bunch, to be sure. Emory Hunt was president at the college from 1901 to 1912, and was the first occupant of a new president’s home he named “Beth Eden,” or “House of Peace” in Hebrew. Oriental and English literature were all one to President Hunt, and when new ornamental gates to join upper and lower campuses were planned early in his administration, he personally selected the inscriptions, leaving an impression on students that continues today.

There is a second inscription-flanked gate which contains quotes from Franklin’s “Poor Richard” and another mysterious source, which will be another column anon.

The soft limestone of the panels had worn dangerously over the decades, and President Blair Knapp renewed them with sterner stuff in the 1960’s, but the cryptic quotes remained the same.

As honorary degree recipient Douglas Holtz-Eakin, economic adviser to the McCain campaign and former head of the Congressional Budget Office, said to the graduating DU class of 2007, “Your first task now is: Get a job.” He got the applause of many parents on the lower campus lawn last weekend, and I thought of George Crabbe, and hoped he was smiling.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; while approving of pastors who write poetry, he’s not so sure about a 58 page poem. Send him anything but a 59 page poem to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-12-07
Jeff Gill

Herod Lives, Kinda

With all the fluffy, heavily edited for TV, agenda driven archaeology that’s been in the public eye lately, the latest news will probably get little or no attention.

Every year, right before Easter, we get some barely credible theory floated that has an artifact or two in the promo shots. Now we’re after Easter, and the storyline is, well. . .

What has been found is not earthshaking, nor does it disprove anything in the Bible, so where’s the big deal? It’s just Herod.
That’s right, the tomb of Herod the Great has been found.

Herod is called the “Great” because while he was an amoral, vicious, family killing sack of slime, he built and built and built. The version of the Temple Mount where Jesus walked, prayed, and preached, where Saul studied Torah and Caiaphas presided (another name recently discovered on a bone box in a tomb by Jerusalem), that’s Herod’s work; all still visible is the famous Western Wall plaza, and the monumental Foundation Stone, which can be seen in the tunnel along the base of Herod’s construction project.

Herod built the mountaintop fortress and palace Masada, and the scale version of the Temple Mount above the Caves of the Patriarchs in Hebron (Israel, not Ohio). His grandest palace was in Jericho, where he died.

That isn’t where he was buried, though. Scholars had long thought he was buried near an odd little hilltop palace and fortress (yes, he built quite a few of these) outside of Bethlehem, called Herodion (yes, he had an ego that was as outsized as his architecture).

None of the excavations around the Herodion had turned up a tomb, just two massive palaces. Even the most diligent archaeologist can take a few decades to excavate a palace, especially one with a documentary record like Herod left.

So it was just a little while ago that some Israeli archaeologist found the funding and time to go back out into the desert and dig . . . wait for it . . . in between the two palaces! Sure enough, there it was.

Empty, and desecrated, likely done when the Herodion was, like Masada, taken over around 70 AD in a Jewish revolt. Herod liked to point out he was Jewish, and had re-done the Temple in gold and glory, always feeling he got little appreciation for the upgrade.

This may have had something to do with his habit of killing his wives, sons, and assorted in-laws when they annoyed him. Not to mention the tradition, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, that Herod ordered the killing of “the innocents,” any boy below age two, just to be on the safe and thorough side, thinking he would kill the prophesied Messiah.

It was his son (by a surviving fourth wife) named Herod Antipas who plays a role in the death of the child Herod tried to kill, some thirty years and more later. The name and shadow of this megalomaniacal puppet of Rome falls across the entire story of Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem.

So now, outside of Bethlehem, the burial place of the homicidal tyrant is now confirmed for history. Another major character in the Gospel narratives is confirmed by independent inquiry.

We have inscriptions of Pilate from Jerusalem and Caesarea (and from later in his career in Europe), along with texts by Josephus, Philo, and Tacitus. Gallio, the proconsul of Acts 18, has turned up in carvings from Achaea where he in fact ruled. Caiaphas has been confirmed from an ossuary outside of Jerusalem noted above, and Rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 5) is a significant source quoted in the Talmud, as is his grandfather Rabbi Hillel.

The stone-cut evidence to confirm portions of the Old Testament is a double-length essay itself. (Remind me, I’ll get to it!)
Over and over, the evidence of inscriptions shows that the four earliest sources of the story of Jesus, and the narrative in Acts and the Epistles is rooted in as much solid historical sources as Tiberius and Claudius, or even Nero, Herod’s true child in spirit.

Octavian, who became Caesar Augustus, has a wide and rich body of sources, in texts and inscriptions, and even his story is still debated by scholars. As it should be.

I really don’t mind scholarship debating the exact understanding and connections of events in the New Testament. John Dominic Crossan, for one, has done an amazing job of tying our growing understanding of the early church and the claims of the Roman Empire with “In Search of Paul,” which I commend to anyone wanting to understand what it meant to say “Jesus is Lord,” versus “Caesar is Lord.”

But when folks want to say “Maybe this never happened, but was all made up for religious purposes,” I can’t help but wonder if they say that about Vespasian.

And why not.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your historical notes with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-13-07
Jeff Gill

Tread Carefully On the Earth

So I’m walking backwards, slowly.

Warblers, cardinals, towhees, robins, all keeping up a steady symphony.

There’s a bird on a high branch of a nearby tulip poplar (yellow poplar, tulip tree, Ohio sequoia, whatever). The leaves are just past buds but not yet big and green enough to be anything other than springtime in two dimensions. And there’s a blue to the sky, behind the leaf and branch filigree, that we may not see again until fall, dry air and steady light spreading cerulean overhead.

A cedar waxwing had just coasted past me, tan and black accents, swooping up into a tree nearby. Truth be told, I’m not sure what a cedar waxwing’s song sounds like, even if I could spot their size and coloration from a township away.

This song is repetitive, but fairly musical; nicer than a starling, not quite a red winged blackbird trill. Somewhere above me, some forty or fifty feet, the bird is bouncing from branch to branch, and I want a clear look at whether this is my waxwing from a few minutes ago, or . . .

It turns out to be a Northern Flicker, also tan but with a dramatic red hood thrown back on his neck, but he’s singing and not pounding his tiny little head into the bark. That I hear him doing later in a mating display (listen to me build a home and hunt the bugs, ladies!).

What people don’t always seem to appreciate is how flexible you’d better keep your neck for birding. Birders may not be noted as Olympic athletes exactly, but along with an inhuman indifference to finding a comfort station for hours on end, they’re known for usually keeping their necks loose and mobile.

Walking backwards is also a useful skill in birding. Or for any outdoor activity. There’s giving tours to kids at a Licking Park District site, or around Dawes Arboretum, or as I was, at Flint Ridge State Memorial for the Ohio Historical Society. Even on your own, when a songbird has perched just behind you, up high, and often against the sun’s contrast, you don’t regret (much) all the time you’ve spent walking hindways.

Spring is a great time to watch birds and wander through forests, not yet too overgrown with underbrush, trying to figure out what that sunny shadow up three levels of branch is.

Sometimes, birds come to you whether you’re looking for them or not. Bird’s nests in the doorway, or animal adventures mixed with the gunpowder of curious children.

I had recently been looking up some information on William S. Denison, the namesake of a local university. His family migrated here from near Mystic, Connecticut, where the Denison Homestead is still standing and a noted area attraction, after the Mystic Seapot and, certainly, Mystic Pizza.

(And none of this can be confused with the local Denison Homestead program in Granville, which is having a 30th anniversary along with Commencement Weekened!)

There is also a nature center tied to the area of the 1717 Denison house, called the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center. Their website has a “FAQ” page on wild animals and particularly birds that is the best I’ve seen about anywhere: what to do or not do with them, and so on.

The website is http://www.dpnc.org/faq.html, and you can learn all the average outdoor wanderer needs starting there.
Congratulations to the ancestral Denison home in Connecticut for 290 years, and the environmentally-oriented community living experiment for college students in Ohio, celebrating 30 years. May they all have blue skies and singing birds and many years before them!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who knows that there’s a bird related reason to those medieval funny hats they wear at graduation ceremonies. Tell him about a cool bird you saw (or thought you saw) in Licking County at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 5-5-07
Jeff Gill

Idolatry Bad, But “Idol” Gives Back

Most of the great monotheistic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – have strong condemnations of idol-worship built into the very foundations of their belief systems.

Idols, themselves, are bad. So it is either a fascinating irony, or another sign of the decay of Western civilization, that “American Idol” is the behemoth and leviathan of popular culture these days in Christian America.

I use that last phrase, “Christian America,” advisedly and unironically. The most winners have come from the Birmingham, Alabama area, and their viewership and most passionate voters come from the South and Southwest. The “Idol” part of the name doesn’t seem to bother many. Maybe it shouldn’t.

What had me utterly fascinated was the spectacle a week ago with the theme “Idol Gives Back.” Inspirational songs were sung, many guest stars appeared, the obligatory Quincy Jones group song came out on the show and for internet download, and all to promote giving for “the less fortunate” in America and around the world.

What grabbed me about the show was not so much the images of hurricane ravaged N’Orlinians, which are all too familiar, the economically ugly but naturally beautiful hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky, or even the tragic scenes of so many dying of AIDS in Africa.

It was that the basic narrative and appeal of the whole program felt very, very familiar. It felt like so many mission and missionary programs I’d had in church, from childhood to, oh, last month.

Today we have video production values, not flannelgraphs, and the print materials include web addresses, not PO boxes, but the basic story and expectations raised were the same from “Idol” to “Church.”
Except for God.

Yep, I wasn’t startled at all to hear no God-talk in the “Idol Gives Back” pitch, but what did surprise me was the degree to which the whole deal felt rooted in church culture, but carefully avoided any religious references at all. Period.

This is where, I suppose, I could go off on a fairly predictable rant, but there is a sad acceptance I feel about elements of what “Idol Gives Back” was doing.

Simon, for one, was clearly impacted by his show-sponsored trip to Africa. Impacted as in stunned, horrified, and even a bit disoriented. Clearly, the reality of poverty in the developing world, and the growing plague of AIDS, scattering orphans and sorrow in its wake, all came as a shock to Simon. They show him trying to be strong, attempting to be decisive and helpful, and then they show him collapsing in a heap, in tears.

One suspects that many viewers were like Simon, or at least it was pitched on that assumption. For many of us, none of this comes as a surprise, even if a mystery. We’ve been hearing missionary reports and joining women’s relief society programs and going on mission trips with our church, and know that the world is still broken, not fully healed, and calls on the best we can give to represent the promise of God’s love.

For those who have no church background at all, a segment of American society that everyone concedes is growing, even with no agreement as to what size, “Idol Gives Back” is their outreach committee presentation. This is their “relief work” appeal.

It worked, too. Seventy million dollars was raised, which goes to . . .

Well, what it goes to is a list of projects that I’ve been hearing about and seeing supported by churches and folk like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels for years. They weren’t mentioned in the program, but their buddy Bono, the great bridge builder of the modern era, surely was. UMCOR and OGHS and WOC and WRS/LDS and CROP and CRS and the SBC have all been buying malaria nets and digging wells and sending medicines overseas, no strings attached, for decades. Bono is a welcome brother, and if Simon and Paula and Randy and Ryan all want to join the helping hand brigade, then climb aboard.

I still wonder where this kind of compassion goes, based exclusively on emotion and empathy and sorrow. Why would you want to share the sadness of a stranger halfway around the world? How is that grounded or extended when you do not believe?

We may end up getting to vote on that question by cell, text, or internet; log on now.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has never voted for any of the contestants, not even Melinda (yet). Talk about outreach in today’s society with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 5-6-07
Jeff Gill

Sharing the Pursuit of Happiness

What do Steven Hawking, Heather Mills, and Roger Ebert have in common?

In recent days, all three of them have shown us a total lack of fear about being seen as less than perfect. They have set an example worth celebrating, and maybe for reflecting on coming up to this Tuesday.

Steven Hawking is the world famous astrophysicist (“A Brief History of Time”) who is also famously stricken with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He has long been not only confined to a wheelchair these last few decades, but must talk through a computer controlled by his eye movements.

He chose to let his situation be the focus of a fundraiser for ALS research, getting a trip on a zero-gravity airplane to experience weightlessness, taking fellow passengers who paid well for the day, and accompanying video cameras.
Hawking was essentially helpless, but clearly delighted by the chance to come so close to space.

Heather Mills was married until recently to Paul McCartney, and before that had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident. She chose to start a new chapter in her life by going on a national televised dance competition, and more than held her own, even when the prosthetic went south as she was heading north.

Much of the audience and all the judges were, quite frankly, stunned and grateful at the same time, realizing that their assumptions about what an amputee could do on a fake leg were the real limitation.

Then there was Roger Ebert, the movie critic out of Chicago. Ebert had cancer of the salivary glands, and had surgeries that did not work out as hoped. The cancer was largely eradicated, but he ended up with much of one side of his jaw missing, unable to speak and looking much the worse for wear.

His response was to put on a suit with an ascot (the better to loosely wrap around his tracheotomy) and go to his “Overlooked Film Festival” that he established at his alma mater, the University of Illinois. Asked if he was concerned about appearing in public looking so bad, he wrote, and his wife read, “Why? They’ve already written that I’m dead.” He later added “My mind is fine, it’s just my face that looks awful.”

He looks forward to getting back to writing film criticism for print, a task that requires no speaking, “and lets me sit in the dark!” Ebert still hopes to get further facial reconstruction, and be able to speak again. But he’s not going to wait at home until then.
All three of these celebrities have pursued their dreams, their happiness, without concern over looking perfect, or even normal. Why not? That is the question, given how often we hold back for fear that we won’t look good, whether in dancing or working or dreaming.

What we surely don’t want to do is hold others back for those reasons, but it happens. Hawking and Mills and Ebert probably had good, well meaning friends, who asked “are you sure you want to do this? Do you want to end up looking foolish, or pitiable?” Fortunately for all of us, they didn’t listen.

We get a chance Tuesday as a community, as Licking County, to encourage some 1,000 of our fellow citizens to pursue their dreams and follow their calling right out in the middle of our common life. The MRDD levy helps people who don’t always look or act quite like fashion models or Phi Beta Kappas to live their lives and pursue happiness pretty much like anyone else.

“Mental Health/Developmental Disabilities” is the long form of what we have a tax levy to support, and Nancy Neely and her crew is at work in every community of this county to serve their clients. MRDD clients do math, and dance, and I’m sure some one of them has reviewed a film somewhere. Send me a link, will you?

What we don’t want to do is be one of those well-meaning friends who says “maybe you ought to stay home. Let’s not go out where you might be disappointed or let down or embarrassed.” Our affirmation of this long-standing levy is a way to say, “let’s get out there and look silly together. Have you ever seen me dance?”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has size fifteen feet, a disability for most dancing-type activities. Share your bold accomplishment in the face of opposition at knapsack77@gmail.com.

* * *

Faith Works 4-28-07
Jeff Gill

Gathered, Step by Step

When civil religion is invoked, the text for the message of the day is often II Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

This is the voice of God, appearing by night to Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. Days and weeks of celebration and consecration have just ended for the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and if you have ever put on a big event like an anniversary or groundbreaking or commencement . . .

There is a moment of letdown after the crowds have dispersed and the dignitaries have gone home. You’re tired, but satisfied; you no longer worry at each turn what’s been forgotten, and you’re barely aware of your own thoughts starting to tend back to an arc towards the future.

For Solomon, he is at his bedtime prayer, or perhaps dreaming in the night – the context is ambivalent. What is certain is the sense that God is speaking, in the wake of the completion of the Temple first dreamt by his father and fulfilled during his reign.

“If my people, who are called by my name,” speaks to the set-apart nature of Israel, the land chosen to fulfill promises made in Haram and Egypt, a place where the unity of God would first be preached abroad.

“Humble themselves,” is the command, just as a place of beauty and opulence is finished atop the highest spot overlooking the City of David, itself a rocky ridge above the Gihon Spring.

“Pray, and seek my face,” a proper request in a Temple, but an odd thought when the record shows that “none can look on the Lord’s face, and live,” but the command is to “seek” that same soul-scorching sight.

“Turn from their wicked ways,” said just above a place to be known as Hinnon, or Gehenna, an ever-smouldering trashdump on Jerusalem’s edge, already a metaphor for lasting, enduring destruction.

“Then I will hear from heaven,” God says from above the Temple, to a king in a palace just below the hilltop, overlooking the citadel and the valley below.

“And will forgive their sin and heal their land…” with not just a spiritual good feeling, or an emotional adjustment, but a promise that Amazing Things Will Happen if these requests are answered by the people.

Thursday, May 3, is the 55th anniversary of the National Day of Prayer, going back to a Congressional Procalmation signed by President Truman. Different communities each have their own way to mark this occasion, often on the steps of civic buildings, and the Newark Area Ministerial Association will gather again on the steps of Newark City Hall (or to the council chambers just inside if the weather is inclement). Their plans are to begin at 12:20 pm, and be in prayer until 12:40 pm.

Whether there or at your own municipal building, there will be prayers for the nation, our local officials, safety forces, judicial system, schools, churches, and special observance of the memory of those serving overseas, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Wherever you pray, and whatever your faith tradition (there have been Buddhists and Jews involved in the Newark gathering in years past), don’t forget the promise of God that comes in the next verse, following II Chron. 7:14: verse 15 -- “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your community worship events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

* * *

Notes From My Knapsack 4-29-07
Jeff Gill

This month, the Jamestown Settlement celebrates the anniversary of three ships landing 400 years ago.

In 1607, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery sailed up the James River estuary, where they would leave not the first English settlement in what’s now the United States, but the first one that would last.

Today, a National Park occupies the spit of land where the settlement was built, a state park is nearby with replicas of Christopher Newport’s ships (the ones you see on the back of the Virginia quarter), and the former capital of the colony named for virginal Queen Elizabeth, Colonial Williamsburg, is just inland.

Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, still worshiping right along historic Duke of Gloucester Street, descended directly from the Jamestown congregation, and hosts a number of observances this month for the beginning of Anglican Christianity in America, the roots of The Episcopal Church, and the first ongoing Christian body in the USA. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip plan to attend, showing there’s no hard feelings about 1776 and all that.

Regular readers know that I always like to point out the Spanish heritage in New Mexico that goes back well before Jamestown. Let alone those latecomers in 1620, the Plymouth Pilgrims, but the New Mexico pioneers had missionary priests and we aren’t sure of a church built in Santa Fe until 1610, though it is still our oldest capital (and the oldest still-present town is Saint Augustine, Florida, 1565).

You still have to acknowledge that a huge chunk of our national heritage and identity derives from barely over a hundred folk who saw land at Cape Henry (just north of Virginia Beach) two weeks and four hundred years ago, watched Newport and expedition leaders Winfield and Smith erect a cross, and then slowly waited as they crept inland, until a spot was selected for them to land.

Like the Pilgrims thirteen years later and many miles to the north, less than half of the initial group would survive for long. In 1622 they would nearly be swept into the ocean by the Powhatan confederated Indians, who had quite enough of having their food borrowed, begged, and finally stolen, and their people killed in the process.

But the numbers and tools and technology ultimately could not be stopped – that, and a lack of immunity to both smallpox and the (in the Old World) common cold. By as early as 1707, some estimates say that 9 out of 10 American natives were dead, and the European settlers were still coming, and marrying, and adding to their own numbers…

…And starting to think of themselves as something new, something different. It was just another fifty years before Benjamin Franklin would come up with perhaps his greatest invention: he called himself and fellow British citizens of the colonies “Americans.”

In less than a hundred years, there would be 10,000 African slaves in the Chesapeake and south of the estuary, involuntary pioneers, but early arrivals who have a “First Families” claim of their own, if not the genealogy. Americans in chains; and many of the second wave of colonial immigration from Wales and Yorkshire and the urban underclasses of London carried an indenture, as servants a bare step up from chains and slavery. Read William Byrd’s diaries, only translated out of their private code a few decades back, for a grim peek into everyday life for most everyday people in the early colonies.

Truth be told, it was easier to sing a song of history back when we could tell comfortable lies that we almost believed ourselves. Bold, independent spirits came for freedom, selflessly, bravely pushing from a barren coast into a sparsely settled wilderness whose few occupants were a mix of savage primitivism and solitary unappreciated genius, plus an amazing number of Indian princesses, most of whom jumped off of high spots out of unrequited or unauthorized love. Then their families sadly wandered off into the west, where they would meet Hispanics who had been waiting for the border to be established so they could cross it by night to come and do our masonry work.

With the last two sentences being mostly and demonstrably false, the reaction of some is anger and more generally an indifference to history. Which is not only too bad, but like leaving a Buckeyes’ game in the third quarter.

Modern historians are finding the specific, individual tales, long buried in archives, or trunks, or in the earth, where courage and love and a bit of greed and fair amount of willful moral blindness mix to make people who sound like us. They tell us about situations we cannot imagine, and point us to possibilities we might just be able to achieve.

When the Queen of England and her Consort wander through the museums of Jamestown, they are themselves relics of another age, barely understandable today, but the 400 years gone stories told there could be our neighbors. They fled danger, and occasionally good sense, in pursuit of a better life for their families, which their decisions didn’t always reach. I know those folk, and I’d like to know them better, 400 years later.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; ask him about historical tales at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-28-07
Jeff Gill

Gathered, Step by Step

When civil religion is invoked, the text for the message of the day is often II Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

This is the voice of God, appearing by night to Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. Days and weeks of celebration and consecration have just ended for the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem, and if you have ever put on a big event like an anniversary or groundbreaking or commencement . . .

There is a moment of letdown after the crowds have dispersed and the dignitaries have gone home. You’re tired, but satisfied; you no longer worry at each turn what’s been forgotten, and you’re barely aware of your own thoughts starting to tend back to an arc towards the future.

For Solomon, he is at his bedtime prayer, or perhaps dreaming in the night – the context is ambivalent. What is certain is the sense that God is speaking, in the wake of the completion of the Temple first dreamt by his father and fulfilled during his reign.

“If my people, who are called by my name,” speaks to the set-apart nature of Israel, the land chosen to fulfill promises made in Haram and Egypt, a place where the unity of God would first be preached abroad.

“Humble themselves,” is the command, just as a place of beauty and opulence is finished atop the highest spot overlooking the City of David, itself a rocky ridge above the Gihon Spring.

“Pray, and seek my face,” a proper request in a Temple, but an odd thought when the record shows that “none can look on the Lord’s face, and live,” but the command is to “seek” that same soul-scorching sight.

“Turn from their wicked ways,” said just above a place to be known as Hinnon, or Gehenna, an ever-smouldering trashdump on Jerusalem’s edge, already a metaphor for lasting, enduring destruction.

“Then I will hear from heaven,” God says from above the Temple, to a king in a palace just below the hilltop, overlooking the citadel and the valley below.

“And will forgive their sin and heal their land…” with not just a spiritual good feeling, or an emotional adjustment, but a promise that Amazing Things Will Happen if these requests are answered by the people.

Thursday, May 3, is the 55th anniversary of the National Day of Prayer, going back to a Congressional Procalmation signed by President Truman. Different communities each have their own way to mark this occasion, often on the steps of civic buildings, and the Newark Area Ministerial Association will gather again on the steps of Newark City Hall (or to the council chambers just inside if the weather is inclement). Their plans are to begin at 12:20 pm, and be in prayer until 12:40 pm.

Whether there or at your own municipal building, there will be prayers for the nation, our local officials, safety forces, judicial system, schools, churches, and special observance of the memory of those serving overseas, and the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

Wherever you pray, and whatever your faith tradition (there have been Buddhists and Jews involved in the Newark gathering in years past), don’t forget the promise of God that comes in the next verse, following II Chron. 7:14: verse 15 -- “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place.”

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your community worship events with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-21-07
Jeff Gill

Where Do We Belong When We Don’t

Harper’s Magazine has a feature they’ve run for years called “Harper’s Index,” a series of statistics that usually tell some kind of a story, or series of stories.

In April, they led with these factoids, strung together for us to consider from either direction: “Percentage of American adults held either in prisons or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.68, 0.68.” Then, “Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75,” followed by “Percentage today who are in prison: 97.”

So to punch up this point, let me rephrase. If you took the total of US citizens who were either in a mental institution or prison, for both 1953 and 2006, the same fraction of the overall population is under state supervision in each year. It hasn’t gone up hardly at all.

But that total number, which hasn’t changed, has swung from being 75% in places like Central State Mental Hospital, to being 97% in places like Lucasville.

The implication of these numbers is that we appear to be dealing with mental illness as a society by jailing rather than treating the disease. Central State is no longer open on Columbus’ west side, and that may be a good thing. Large residential mental health facilities, formerly called “asylums,” got a very bad reputation, for very specific reasons, and the political tide turned against funding those places.

When they were closed, the argument was that the money saved would go to community mental health clinics and group homes and supportive services in people’s own communities. Those who work in the mental health field assure me that this money never made it out of the Statehouse, but was routed elsewhere (see entry “lottery, proceeds for education”), while the mentally ill were routed out onto the street.

We still have under 1 percent of our adults under state care, but the shift from 75% asylum to 97% prison convinces me that either a) in 1953 there were mostly criminals in mental institutions, or b) we’ve got a significant mental health population in the Department of Corrections. The word from our Ohio prison system leans to b).

Which brings us to the tragic intersection of the Blacksburg shootings and our own ongoing homelessness problem. Violence and mental illness is not an automatic association in any set of statistics, but for the public mind, they are stuck together.

Schizophrenics, for instance, are likely to commit a violent crime at a rate of 15 out of a 100. The general population is about .5 in a hundred. Do you focus on the data so that it says “schizophrenics are 30 times more likely to commit violent crimes,” or “85% of schizophrenics never commit violent crimes.” Both are true, but not equally accurate depending on circumstances.

Churches struggle with the mentally ill in worship and congregational life in general. People who don’t follow standard patterns of behavior or speak inappropriately and bizarrely create major disruptions in group settings, and it gets terribly easy to justify easing such folk back out onto the sidewalk, arguing “for the greater good” and “aren’t they a safety risk for the children?”

Are they? Do we look into these questions in the larger context of safety and security for all youth activities, as they apply to all adults? And in fairness, when a troubled individual treats any restrictions as unfair singling out, we tend to go to an “all or nothing” approach to guidelines that really helps no one.

The folks at Open Arms Emergency Homeless Shelter (www.lastcalloutreach.org), on East Main in Newark, just tallied up their situation, after 70 days of operation over 94 days (they had to move a few times, you’ve heard). They’ve helped feed and shelter 36 different homeless persons through those 70 days, some staying one night, others as much as 30, with the average in between.

Half of their guests have reported mental health or addiction issues leading to their situation, and half have spent time locked up – on that, go back to the first paragraph and read it again.

Where do we want people to go who don’t fit in? Where are churches called to be at work for those who don’t fit in, and how does that outreach fit into the larger mission of the church? Call Mental Health America of Licking County at 522-1341 (or check out www.mhalc.org), and ask them to come speak to your church’s leadership about how mental health can be part of your ministry.

It probably already is, and just isn’t spoken out loud. Bring the subject up, and see where God leads you.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your ministry efforts with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-22-07
Jeff Gill

Enjoying the Beautiful Game

Soccer is still not to the taste of all native-born Midwesterners. Not enough equipment, rare and glancing impacts, very few points: these all work against soccer in the minds of some.

The Little Guy is a fan and a player, if still more of an entomologist and botanist than aggressive forward. Five years after his first soccer league, he’s moved past having Dad as coach (and a good thing), and there are actual keepers (goalies, some say) guarding the net.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what makes an offsides call, which is scary because my first exposure to soccer other than an export of Brazil in social studies class was to be a soccer ref.

It was a new sport for my hometown, where football and basketball had long reigned supreme, and all four of the high school guys who got hired to ref soccer for 5th and 6th graders knew nothing, except for the Belgian exchange student, who taught us all we needed to know about corner kicks, throw-ins (keep your feet on the ground), and the mysterious yellow and red cards.

He didn’t tell us enough about offsides to stick, though it looks something like icing in hockey, which I’ve never understood either. But plenty of smart people don’t follow the intricacies of the infield fly rule, so I can’t let it bother me.

During our recent seasonably unseasonable weather (for an Ohio April), the team practiced cheerfully, but the home practice suffered. Outdoors, anyhow.

We compensated by putting in extra time on one of the most fascinating aspects of the video game industry I’ve yet seen. Right, right, you don’t play (or don’t let your kids play them), but do you know that not all video games involve shootings and explosions and pixilated gore?

FIFA Street is a video game soccer program. There’s a Madden-labeled football game, and the NBA has a basketball offering that approaches what I’m talking about. FIFA is the international soccer body, overseeing things like the every-four-years World Cup, and they have approved a legit soccer video game on green grass and many players.

But they also have released FIFA Street, where you travel the world, playing soccer under highway overpasses in New York City, in the favelas of Rio, and by the docks of Marseilles, in a four-on-four street league with major players from around the world.

The level of play, and the strategy of field and body positioning that comes across in a TV set and the standard hand controller, is amazing. You fake the ball around a defender, kick passes high or low, bop headers into the middle, and score on roundhouse kicks while falling gracefully backwards onto the pavement.

Meanwhile, police cars cruise by, carry-out delivery guys on bicycles pedal past, and locals hang onto the mesh fencing and talk amongst themselves while the eight players dash and dive on the makeshift pitch.

My computer days are medieval, and my last real programming was on a Commodore 64 (well, a bit on a 128), but I still hold in my mind’s eye the sub-structure of all this. Graphical interfaces built on programming tools assembled from machine languages comprised of hexadecimal spun out of the ones and zeroes of binary.

Deep within this delightful version of what all the rest o’ the world calls “the beautiful game” is a data tool scanning myriad on and off switches. That’s all. But work up through those layers, and you have a son and father learning from and between each other how to play soccer a bit better.

There is little more I can add about shooting and shooters and violence and grief, except that we can all have less of it in our lives, even if we cannot avoid it. Guns and explosions and death does not have to be our entertainment, and we can pluck it as aggressively as we do the dandelions.

And the dandelions do us much less harm. So let’s avoid our tendency to look for extreme answers and mass exclusions, and just choose our activities and amusements with care. Get out and kick it around with the kids, and find the ways inside the hosue where you can keep things interesting without detonations and demolition.

But I’ll warn you: FIFA Street is way too much fun (plus you learn some geography), so schedule all the outdoor time you can first, and leave the gaming to after sunset.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and a retired soccer coach and referee (by popular demand). Tell him about some of your favorite family activities at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-14-07
Jeff Gill

Post-Easter Hash, Eggs On Top

Serving leftovers after a busy week is a useful tradition in many kitchens, and also in this workshop.

Plenty of bits that don’t quite constitute a full meal can go together nicely, especially with some judiciously applied eggs, and since we all have our own hardboiled eggs still in the fridge, I’ll serve up some scraps that I think are tasty, but not a full column.

First, there’s a fundraising concert tonight for Open Arms Shelter, which now is open with all code and zoning approvals needed, at 350 E. Main St. The concert is at Heath High School in the auditorium, starting at 7:00 pm. Gospel and country and bluegrass and probably everyone singing “Amazing Grace” will be on the program, or whoever the Lord sends with an instrument under their arm and a voice to raise.

Roger and Marilyn Morgan and the gang still have some work to do which is noted on the occupancy permit, and could use a skilled plumber, among other things. But they are cleared to serve the homeless individuals they are called to minister with, and that is reason to rejoice. The concert is to help Last Call Ministries purchase the former Larry’s Drugs building where they’re at, almost to Cedar St. next to Heartbeats.

Check out www.lastcalloutreach.org for late breaking info!

Do I have anything to say about Don Imus? Well, just a bit (this is hash, recall).

In 1981 I wasn’t out of college yet, writing book reviews and features for the Purdue Exponent, the campus/community paper. My editor got this “bound proof” of an upcoming book in the mail, called “God’s Other Son” by a New York DJ eager to prove his capacity for blasphemy and crudity called (drum roll) Don Imus.

She thought I should do the piece, because I was a DJ myself, a Christian, and did most of the book reviews anyhow; what she wanted was a “phoner,” an interview with the author by phone to go with the review.

I caught the book flung at me when next I came down the steps (they used to be next to the boiler room in the student union, now they have a really nice building with windows – sniff), and picked up a phone and called the number on the letter than was stuffed in the cover.

A very nice publisher’s assistant with a major Bronx accent was immediately receptive to the phoner idea, and said she’d call back in the next hour with a time for the interview.

It was some years before I learned how unusual it is to a) get a helpful person at a New York pulbisher’s office, and b) for them to do what they say they’ll do.

The call came, and she asked if I could do it in about an hour and a half. This meant skipping a class, so of course I said “yes” (sorry, mom), and killed time fiddling with our still new DEC terminals with an early version of Qwark on them, and reading stuff coming over the AP ticker, the 1981 version of browsing the internet.

At the right time, I placed the call, and then . . .

That’s where I really have nothing useful to say, because Imus was stoned out of his mind. Apparently he has been sober for 17 years, alcohol and cocaine, and speaks out for rehab causes, and I’m happy for him. If the publisher thought it was a “cool” or “hip” thing to give a college paper an incoherent author for an interview, too bad for them. I spoke to a person I was told was Imus for twenty minutes, who answered no questions, and likely didn’t hear or comprehend them anyhow. I quietly said “thank you, I’m hanging up now” in the middle of his third or fourth rant, and had no interview to use, and we didn’t review his ghastly book, either.

Looking him up on wikipedia, I see he re-released the book in 1994 when he became famous again and it was a NYT bestseller. Too bad I don’t still have the bound galleys of that first one, but I threw it out, right after I hung up.

Closing on a much brighter note, the Community Sunrise Service was a joy and delight; I saw many old friends and a few new, and heard at least dozen people say I’m taller than my picture. In fact, I am five foot, seventeen inches in height.

Tomorrow morning, an interfaith prayer service rooted in Native American spiritual traditions will gather at Observatory Mound (just behind Licking Memorial Hospital, walking access from Octagon State Memorial at 33rd and Parkview) for a 6:00 am “Warming of the Earth” observance of spring. As with the moonrise observances, the fact that the sunrise may not be directly visible doesn’t change the meaning of the ceremony, and the company will be present, snow or shine.

And that’s our post-Easter hash! In theory, we’ll have more coherent content for you next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story (coherently, please) at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-15-07
Jeff Gill

Time Is Money, Or Taxes

Thanks to page 81 of the 2006 IRS form 1040, we know that the majority of American taxpayers spend 30.3 hours “doing their taxes,” as we call it.

I don’t know what you include in the process of “doing your taxes,” such as procrastination, ordering pizza, sharpening pencils, and looking at your comic book collection you ran across while hunting receipts, but here’s how the IRS sees it.
They allocate 19 hours to “record keeping.” Does that include time spent looking for the right size bin to store your folders in, in dark grey since your older bins are grey, but now they only have blue, and you don’t like blue, so you visit three stores, only to go back and buy the darkest blue you can at the first store because they’re cheaper.

Anyhow, 19 hours.

Then “tax planning,” four hours worth. That would sound like the time you spend, holding the remote in your hand, about to turn off the TV, listening to what Jean Chatzky says on the morning show about how to save money on your taxes. Five minutes each time, maybe twenty times through the year, that’s an hour and half, but maybe they think some people make appointments and go talk to financial professionals. You could do that, I guess.

We’re up to 23 hours, and next on the table is another 3.7 hours for “form completion.” You know, stapling the forms to the sheet, then peeling them off since that’s your draft copy you do in pencil, then recopy in ink, then staple to the one you’ll send in. Maybe with a check, maybe not. 3.7 hours for looking for the magnifying glass to read the tables and charts that tell you in the end what you “owe” and then subtract what you’ve paid to see if you get a “refund,” also known as “money of yours they’ve been sitting on that you’re not seeing any interest on, no sir, not a chance, but thanks for playing!” As you can tell, it doesn’t feel like a refund to me.

And it sure isn’t a windfall, which is how people inexplicably treat it. Now the tax prep businesses helpfully promote this wacky idea by offering scratch-offs when you come in. Hey, it’s all random chance, anyhow; let’s see what you won! Refund, lottery, wages – all the same.

3.7 hours to fume over that.

Then there’s “form submission.” Am I the only one who just plain doesn’t like the sound of that one? But I’m not thrilled about clicking buttons on my browser window that say “submit,” either, so perhaps “form submission” is a more neutral term than I’m giving the IRS credit for. Half an hour they give you, which I assume includes ransacking the pantry shelves for a stamp in the evening of the deadline (Tuesday, this year, the 17th – woo hooo!), driving down to the special Post Office line where you can trim the deadline and postmark right on the edge.

And my favorite category, “All Other.” 3.1 hours, which is time for six pizzas to arrive and, sadly, eat them as well. Making labels for the bins with the receipts and forms and pencil copies would go here, too, I guess.

But the total went at the start: 30.3 hours. At the end of the table is “Average cost (dollars)” which for the 1040 filers comes out “$269.” Hmmm. So if that’s based on an hourly rate, I get $8.87 an hour.

Which means the federal gov’mint says my time is worth $8.87 an hour. Better than minimum wage, I’ll grant you, and some who have painted or stacked block with me would testify it’s more than I’m worth. Still, it makes me wonder where that figure came from exactly.

The point, no doubt, is to let us know that the government understands we spend time, and time is money, to send them money (or ask for our money back), and our contribution is recognized. Sort of.

You don’t get to credit that $269 on your taxes, and there’s no receipt or anything. But if you disagree with their assessments or assumptions, there’s an email you are encouraged to use along with a street address for sending in feedback.

No indication of how much time they think it would take to do that, but it gives me a column to write. If only I could get the Booster to pay me . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, which means he files self-employment estimated taxes four times a year; don’t even get his wife started on that one. Send your form feedback to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 4-7-07
Jeff Gill

Holy Saturday Anticipation

Even those who aren’t in the mainstream of Christian observance have some knowledge that we just had Maundy Thursday and Good Friday on the liturgical calendar.

Tomorrow, of course, is Easter Sunday, where the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth on the “first day of the week” is celebrated not only once a year, but in each Sunday worship celebration. Jesus the Christ, the “anointed one of God,” proves the truth of all he’s said in the days before by living out his truth in rising from the grave, leaving behind an Empty Tomb.

But what’s today?

If you check out the calendar pages of this paper or most Christian church newsletters, you’d be forgiven if you thought it was the liturgical holiday “Easter Egg Hunt Saturday.” Folks of all sorts of faith perspectives hold this date as the sacred obligation to sugar up the little darlings as much as possible, from Kiwanians and Rotarians to Presbyterians and Free Will Baptists.

That actually isn’t what the day is for. Long enough ago, the eggs were rolled and hidden and hunted for after you got home from Easter worship and had a big family dinner – and many families do this themselves.
But with the advent of ending Lent with an outburst of nice clothes and flowers for mom, people didn’t want the chilluns rolling in the fresh, green grass in their powder blue slacks or white dresses with pink bows. That, and the big Easter egg hunt folks wanted to get it over with so they could go home and eat their ham with their family (and watch The Masters’ golf tournament on TV in the afternoon, falling asleep around the 14th fairway).

Any preacher worth their salt, or sugar, can justify the connection of bright colors, eggs, and rebirth, new life, and Easter. NASCAR theme pre-decorated eggs and Spiderman gift baskets, maybe not so much.

I have no concern with Easter Egg Hunts per se. But there is something reflective and profound about thinking, in the context of Holy Week, what this day really represents.

Yesterday, Good Friday, Jesus died. Were you there? . . .as the song says. We saw the centurion drive a spear in his side on the cross, and carried his lifeless body to the tomb.

Just the day before that, on Thursday, we celebrated the Passover with him, in a borrowed upper room, but with the timeless story of Egypt and the Red Sea and Mount Sinai. The Talmud teaches that we were there, that “all mankind was present at Sinai, at the giving of the law.” And we were there in Maundy Thursday services, as Jesus pointed out a different way of looking at the loaf of bread, and the cup of wine.

Today? Today he is dead. And we don’t quite know what to do. Some of us have hope, some have already lost it. Some know what to do, going around and gathering up spices and oils to prepare the body for the long sleep until the fullness of God’s plans are revealed, and others of us are just sitting, staring, wondering.

Were you, are you there? In Holy Saturday is a reminder that, even for all those whose faith is strong, there is the reality that death comes. Could God have raised Jesus in the moment the cross was lowered and the body touched the ground? If one, why not the other.

There is a significance, and importance that was hinted at with the references Jesus made to “the sign of Jonah,” to the “three days” from Friday noon to Sunday morning. There is an interval, a space set apart, and while we might want it arranged some other way, there is this pause, when all creation seems to stop breathing for a moment. Waiting to see what will happen, and only understanding it truly when -- what has already happened is accepted for what it was. Easter needs Holy Saturday for it to be fully what it is.

And what is that? Well, I suspect there’s a Sunrise Service somewhere near you, or you are most cordially invited to come to downtown Newark, before the sun rises, and join us in the Midland Theater at 6:30 am.

The Newark Area Ministerial Association is hosting a community service, and joining Second Presbyterian after to sponsor a breakfast whose proceeds go to the Licking County Jail Ministry. I hear that the sermon is on “Resurrection, Right Now!”

And if you don’t want to hear me preach, there’s going to be some joyful music and other prayers and dramatic readings shared. Wherever you go, may tomorrow be a day when new life and the rising of the Son be a Light for you and yours.

Today, reflect on the story not quite completed, and the place of Holy Saturday in that tale.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-8-07
Jeff Gill

Life Doesn’t Live Itself

Your lawn doesn’t need much to start growing.

If you want lush grass instead of a full crop of spring beauty (those lovely little white flowers), clover, and the nascent buds of crabgrass that will cover half your yard by July, you need some help. Bags o’ chemicals, all of which come with college textbooks helpfully taped to the side of the canister, sack, or jug, come in colors not known in nature.

These colors conveniently stain your skin, reminding you to wash up thoroughly before eating nachos. If you later fall ill, know that the corporate lawyer will introduce into evidence the fact that you “knew” this was an acceptable risk from the multi-fold label (“purchase of this product constitutes waiver of all rights and acceptance of all provisions of this document unless a notarized letter affirming your waiver of the waiver is received at our offices in the Turks & Caicos within two days of purchase, provision as such void in Vermont and Quebec”).

If you like a diverse ecosystem right in front of your front door, just let it go. If you live in a municipality, you’d better mow (six inches and then notes from the health dept. could show up on your door), but you’ll have something to mow no matter what you do.
Unless you spray wide-spectrum U-Kil-It on the whole deal.

Then you have a window of barren soil to look forward to, and then a sudden infestation of stuff only Howard Siegrist could love. Purslane and hairy dock and three kinds of plantain plus the inevitable dandelion army.

“Life will out,” or so it seems, and it takes a great deal of chemical death to stop life from growing in the patio cracks and through the mulch and along the fencerow. Some of the startling appearance of the drive along 161 to Columbus is from the wall of foliage coming down, revealing abandoned houses as disturbing to the eye as the recent family homes now gutted and gape-mouthed. A structure just left to overgrow a decade ago looks like Sleeping Beauty’s castle in the middle of the story, with no help from the spells of evil stepmothers, just the persistence of life.

Tell all this to the gardener, even now roto-tilling and planting peas and ‘taters. Life may run amok, but not necessarily the life we desire. The most organic of gardeners is still seeking a different equilibrium, placing marigolds to counter deer and corn where beans will later climb. You try to grow some things, and not others; that’s what sets gardening and farming apart.

Life alone is not quite a value; ask someone fighting cancer. Cancer is life and growth without control or intention, just for it’s own sake. When tumors thrive, “life” as we really mean it may be threatened.

Emerson famously said “he who is not busy being born is busy dying,” and the statement holds up in a variety of settings. What undercuts that paean to growth and life is when life chokes off more life than it promotes. This is the question and concern we feel as we drive along the Rt. 161 and Rt. 62 corridors. Seeds and sprouting are not always good news.

For much of the Christian world, this springtime weekend is a celebration of the victory of life over death, seen blossoming in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Some ask why a gift of new life would be so rarely given if a loving God actually could give it, usually with their own ideas about when and where they’d like to see life returned anew.

I don’t mind the question at all, but wonder if we really know what it would mean for rebirth from death into life to be more common. All the billions who have lived, and died, brought back to walk the earth again? No, just the “right ones,” most would say, with myriad definitions of who that would be.

Each of us has a person or people we would bring back, if only for a time, to share a last laugh, to clear up misunderstandings, or to help them finish uncompleted business. However we think that would work, it wouldn’t work very well in practice. There is new life, and harvest, and there is winter. We take in each in turn, and go through them as well.

Life is remarkably persistent, but has a cycle with an individual end, with those cycles tied into a larger weave rolling out longer (and stronger) than any one thread. Some of us see resurrection as part of what empowers this plan, but even if you don’t: Go easy on the pesticides and fertilizers, value each day you get out under the sun, mowing your lawn or hoeing weeds, and remember to plant some trees for the shade of future generations.
That’s a life plan all of us can agree on.

And a happy and blessed Easter weekend to everyone!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share a story with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 3-31-07
Jeff Gill

Do You Bury a Bible?

Beyond the hype, the story of the so-called Jesus family tomb has some interesting sidelights worth checking out.

One is the website, which has a great interactive feature on the Land of Jesus, even if I don’t think much of the “Tomb of Jesus,” at
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tomb/land/land.html.

The consensus of scholars, liberal and conservative, is that there wasn’t much “there” there in the story. My own lack of interest was rooted in remembering when the tomb first turned up, over a decade ago. I recall reading a few stories that pointed out the interesting cluster of names, confirming the everyday-ness of New Testament names, and mostly about the controversy over how the site should be stabilized, what with an apartment complex going up over the top of it.

What I never heard about, until the recent TV program, was what they did after the ossuaries were given to the governmental Antiquity Authority, and the bones given to Orthodox Jewish leaders for reburial. What about the tomb?

Well, as most of us know by know, they built structural walls around the area, capped the whole deal in concrete, and left an obscure hatch. After the series of towers went up, kids did what kids do, which was figure out how to break the lock and get in, so the hatch was replaced with a welded steel lid.

As for the now vacant tomb, the religious authorities did a very sensible thing, given the practices of Judaism.

They turned it into a genizah.

Genizahs aren’t part of Christianity, so I suspect most Licking Countians haven’t heard of them, unless they’ve done some serious Biblical studies, and even then they may have missed what a genizah was in the footnotes – just as you could have missed the re-purposed genizah even if you watched the “Lost Tomb” program.

In Jewish (and Islamic) practice, any text that includes the name of the Lord must be treated with particular respect. Mostly, this would refer to Torah scrolls, but in much of the ancient world contracts and other official document would include an invocation of the Divine Name, so they would come under this concern as well.

What do you do with an old scroll or document, worn almost to illegibility, or simply no longer of use? The idea was that they would receive a “proper burial” like any other valued member of the community of faith. You would set them aside for a term, usually seven years, and then take up the volumes and pages and texts and box them and bury them.

The Talpiot tomb, whoever really was first buried there, was full of old scrolls and books when the TV crew crawled in. The producers clearly wanted to move past this point and not get bogged down, but that’s what had been done with this rock-cut space now that all the human remains had been removed. Jerusalem genizahs (genizot for all you Hebrew scholars) had been emptied into Talpiot before the tomb was re-sealed.

Personally, I find this interesting because . . . well, look at it this way. The Barna Group says, based on data, that the average American house has five Bibles in it. If you count Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, and Spanish texts of scripture, I’m carrying more than my fair share: maybe 40 (lots of different translations, OK?).

Some of those I have because as more people have more Bibles, pastors more and more are getting asked by parishioners, especially after Great-Aunt Hattie dies or some such, “what’s the right thing to do with these very old, falling apart Bibles?”
It’s one thing to hold onto the big Family Bible with clippings inserted between testaments and a marriage and baptism list for the late 1800’s in the back. But we have more and more Bibles laying about, and still a desire to honor the word, and the Word, by how we handle, care for, and ultimately dispose of these texts.

Do we need a tradition of a Christian genizah? Church librarians are already starting to smile sadly and shake their heads, let alone clergy. Many of us have these in our basements already, not wanting to say “just throw it out,” but knowing that there is a steadily growing number of broken binding, crumbling page, non-reuseable Bibles slowly arcing their way towards us. The American Legion and the Boy Scouts often hold very moving “flag retirement” ceremonies at Memorial Day around the area, respectfully burning the tattered scraps. What of our Bibles?

I’ve already heard tales of boxes of old Bibles showing up on church doorsteps, like a child left at the orphanage. Truth is, folks, that just bumps the problem along; do we pulp them reverently, and use the recycled cellulose for the rosebushes by the sanctuary? Do we put them in a pine box and have a ceremony the Sunday after Easter each year? I’m seriously interested in your ideas.

You can tell them to me by email, or in person next Sunday at the Midland Theater, where the Newark Community Sunrise Service starts at 6:30 am. I’ll preach, I’ll shake hands after, but I won’t take your unwanted Bibles…

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-1-07
Jeff Gill

Excitement With Four Corners

Clint Bowyer should have a huge fan base and much more attention than he gets, in my ignorant opinion.

Am I missing some dark secret in his past, or is it because the driver of the “07” car is sponsored by an adult beverage (which, by the by, I don’t drink myself), or do we just need more pieces written on the poor man?

NASCAR has a driver who, a few weeks ago, at their premiere raceway – Daytona, fer Pity’s sake – crossed the finish line a) upside down, b) backwards, c) on fire. The fact that he was a top ten finisher is just gravy on them biscuits.

Upside down, backwards, on fire: is this not the glory that is NASCAR, in a handy carry-home pack? I find myself checking each week for how 07 is doing in his black Chevy, but apparently frontwards, greasy side down, wheels turning isn’t as good for him as the groove he found at Daytona.

Still, I’d think he could coast on that one finish for a very long time. Cheer for Clint, wouldya?

Maybe we’ll even get to see him race here in Licking County someday soon.

You see, what I think would be ideal for all concerned is this – ever since the NHRA moved their focus away from National Trail Raceway, down by Luray on US 40, the drag racing has continued, but what if they changed formats?

Next door is a small airstrip, paralleling the dragstrip. What if NASCAR came in, bought both, and added short straights north and south, banked ‘em some turns at the corners, and add an east grandstand to match what National Trail already has up?

Call it NASCAR Trail Raceway. You have an area between Hebron and Kirkersville that already is used to huge influxes of traffic a bunch of times a year, over half the track built already, and access to the Columbus media market and a short hop to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Throw in some Louisville folk who have sobered up after the Kentucky Derby in May, and you’d have a Midwest crowd hungry for live NASCAR action (although I hear they’re talking about switching from dirt to asphalt and converting Churchill Downs to NASCAR, so we’d better get hopping).

Why have all our local fans drive to Bristol and Charlotte and eastern Pennsylvania for their closest racing fix when we could draw those tourists right here to central Ohio? Between football season and basketball season for the Buckeyes, there’s room in our hearts for another sport, even with the Blue Jackets playing hockey until June.

There’s always time to sell more hotdogs, nights in hotels, shopping in local stores (like the new Hebron NASCAR Experience three story mini-mall), and the fan foam finger business could really take off. People may not love a down-wind ethanol refinery, but who wouldn’t want a race venue nearby? Especially any auto parts or RV repair businesses.

Yes, there’s a little thing called the Brickyard nearby, but no one really thinks that’s going to catch on. Indy is open wheel and really should stick to what they know, and leave the bumpin’ and runnin’ to the stock cars that can take it.

NASCAR Trails. What do you think, Licking County? Can we make this happen? I want to see Clint cross the line in front of the tower off the old National Road, upside down, backwards, and on fire!

Oh, and Happy April 1 everybody . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 3-24-07
Jeff Gill

We Devastate So We Can Build

If you haven’t recently driven from Newark to Columbus along Rt. 161, I need to warn you about something.

No, not the traffic, which is about as bad as ever, and steadily getting worse at certain times in different directions.

The landscape is devastated, and I really mean that. Even knowing what was coming, with the widening of the highway and the slow spread of orange spray paint on trees and little neon flags low to the ground, then the soil erosion fences near watercourses, you couldn’t be ready for this.

Of course, this being America, there are companies that specialize in narrow sub-fields, so a no doubt fine group of people called “Complete Clearing, Inc.” have taken the forefront. (“Woodchippers, Inc.” is no doubt at work, but they don’t have signage.)

With amazing speed and fearful efficiency, this particular part of the overall roadbuilding contract has stripped the hillsides and margins, buzzed the shrubbery and trees down more efficiently than a boot camp barber, and revealed, almost like a flasher, the naked outlines of the terrain.

Some salvage, and mainly demolition crews, have started in behind the tree chewers and earth movers to tear apart the houses and sheds and barns that flank both the current route and projected track of the four-lane 161.

These half-ruined (probably fully wrecked and obliterated by the time you read this) homes are the most viscerally shocking part of the trip. This may be a personal quirk, but this drive is one I’ve been making with semi-regularity for nearly twenty years. I’ve known a couple people who live along the route, but mostly I have a shadow narrative in my head of what it might be like to live here, and here, and next here, as I drive along.

Do you do this? Reflect on what houses look fun to live in, which farms or stables are part of a life you’ll never live, but fit into a “but maybe” scenario you toss around for a few moments each time you pass? And there have been houses that have always struck me as sad, sad looking before with occupants and tragic now with roof torn off and gaping windows staring crazily past you.

In fairness, some of those houses have been vacant almost as long as I’ve driven past them. But the shift from slow decay to sudden destruction – even that is a bit of a gut punch.

This is how we progress, so called. If cars are not to back up and slow and stop and idle and double pump carbon into the atmosphere, if we’re to get to the restaurant on time to meet George and Martha, if the trucks carrying the latest flat screen plasmoid hyperdrive quasi-3D TVs are to get into Licking County promptly, this is what we must do.

And there are spots, as you pass by and look rudely into the revealed landscape, where you can see that the familiar road itself supplanted another, older, slower, gentler road.

Near Moots Run, just before the Alexandria/Rt. 37 turnoff (where the Col. Scott house stands solitary, the lone reprieve along death row), you can see on the south where bridge abutments, long abandoned, now unbridged, softened by time, perch on either side of the creek. The narrow cut up the bank to the east shows where the roadbed once ran.

Many of the denuded banks of tree stump stubble are themselves the thirty-plus years gone overgrowth, run wild after the current road was thrust through, and I’m sure it looked ghastly then. The slopes drizzled soil, took root in grass, and the untended steeper banks went from shoots to stalks to the clumps of gangly trees that now are mulch.

We devastate, so we can build. Our waste and inefficiency may be more apparent than actual, but you can’t look at such a scene and not think: “is there a better way? What would that way look like?”

In this season, Christians think it looks something like resurrection. There are stones to roll away, oils and spices and unguents to set aside, grave wrappings to clear away, but life everlasting when the site prep is done. The Newark Area Ministerial Association has been kind enough to invite me to preach the Community Sunrise Service at 6:30 am in the Midland Theater Easter morning, and I’m looking for signs of new life and resurrection power.

Maybe they can be found even along the construction corridor of 161. I’ve got to drive it again today, so I’ll let you know.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 3-25-07
Jeff Gill

Making Predictions, Taking Chances

Of course, the wisdom of Yogi Berra says it all: "Predictions are difficult, especially about the future."

Ask Bill Gates, who said in the early days of Microsoft: “No one will need more than 637Kb of memory for a personal computer.”

He ended up doing OK, considering he was competing against the brilliant forecasters of IBM, who had told management in the 1960’s “The total requirements for computing in the United States can be satisfied by fewer than 100 IBM mainframe computers.”

Many of you recall growing up under the assumption that the US would always be in a state of near-war with the Soviet Union, which would dominate Olympic gymnastics, if not the world, pretty much always.

Through college, we all worried about the inevitable bloody end the everyone could see coming quite clearly for South Africa, what with Mandela still a prisoner and the white minority never letting go of control other than through a violent revolution by the majority.

And you may need to be a bit older to know who the Rev. Ian Paisley is, but for me it was a double shock to learn a) he’s still alive (soon to be 81, in fact), and b) about to meet with the Archbishop of Armagh, the Roman Catholic primate of Ireland. Apparently the peace negotiations have progressed to the point where “Rev. No” (among other things, he denounced Pope John Paul II to his face as the Antichrist) is saying yes to joining a government along with Sinn Fein, the political wing of the militant Catholic minority.

Nope, I didn’t see that one coming.

What’s going to happen in Iraq? I have not the faintest idea.

Donald Trump – sorry, The Donald – has no such hesitation. He said over last weekend that anyone can see how the whole place will turn into a bloodbath the moment we leave no matter what we do, so we should just leave now, the sooner to let them carnage it out.
Aside from the fact that Mr. Trump is making all the usual noises of a possible Democratic candidate for President (he almost did it once before, recall), I’m thinking he’s right in the one thing that he doesn’t realize is true.

Whatever the next major change is, in the land around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, steps to greater peace and everyday prosperity won’t come at the commands of armed men.

The sooner there are more leaders counting on their own quiet, future retirement than current riches and power; when business people are trying to plan for expansion rather than destruction as a tool for competition; once there are internet connections in villages and home improvement stores in towns and yes, Starbucks in the cities . . .

For all the wars and rumors of wars in the last century of this world, the sucker bet is still pessimism. A hundred years ago, the norm for a human being on planet Earth was actual or effective slavery (see “serfdom”), death by disease in the first three years, or around age 40 if you survived childhood, and fair measure of pain and discomfort through wars, harsh working conditions, and social viciousness (Google “lynching” and then come on back).

Today, we’ve seen some amazing things in the last twenty years that are still bearing fruit, such as in Northern Ireland. It wasn’t that long ago that the Palestinian problem and Northern Ireland were always mentioned in one breath as the intractable, unsolvable problems of now and forever.

Hamas and Syria and Hezbollah all keep me nervous about the likely near term outcomes for the Middle East, and the history of the Fertile Crescent justifies more wariness than the current administration seems to have used in planning their Iraq venture. But the desire of people, given half a chance, to nudge their leaders to less killing, more freedom, and general stability, is stronger than pessimism.

Here’s a crazy, wild-eyed prediction made in 1816: "Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a colossus we shall be." That’s just the thought of a gentleman farmer who was not himself so clear-eyed about slavery, but had a sense of what freedom might accomplish for his fellow Americans. Thomas Jefferson made a more outrageous forecast than Bill Gates and IBM put together, and all of them were looking at what was known, what had always been true, and what most people thought would be likely in the future.

It was the fellow from Monticello who added a small, measured dose of confidence, in people given a taste of freedom, who saw what might be done with that liberty, even beyond what he could see himself.

If I have to bet between The Donald and The Thomas, I don’t have to think long. As for the NCAA tournament, I’m for Butler…so don’t follow my brackets!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your tale of the unexpected at knapsack77@gmail.com.