Notes From My Knapsack 11-18-07
Jeff Gill

What Goes In First Comes Out Last

Basic to the challenge of making a traditional Thanksgiving feast is timing.

Each dish has its own demands on the stove or fridge or freezer, and the varying times and stages are the real trick of an all the trimmings dinner.

Truth be told, roasting a turkey is fairly simple – take the bag o’ stuff out of the body cavity, and the rest is easy.

Unless you leave it in the freezer until Wednesday night. That’s fine if you were serving steak, or an eight pound shoebox bird, but a twenty pound classic fowl needs a step-by-step plan for thawing, prepping, roasting, finishing, and carving, and that can be a two or three day sequence.

In between the occupancy of the oven by big bird, your other side dishes and baked goods weave in and out, with the rolls zipping through last. Meanwhile, the stove-top is bubbling on all four burners for many of us, with green beans and quartered potatoes and gravy and stuffing and noodles and a small saucepan of peas for we happy few.

But that’s more than four, which means some dishes have to rotate on and off the stove – no one gets to be too at home on the range, if you know what I mean.

Then there’s shuffling the refrigerator space, for jellos and relish trays and icebox pies and suchlike.

That’s the true art of a calm, happy Thanksgiving: to do all this and still smile, get the table set, and not bite the head off the first person coming in the kitchen to look for some ice for their soda.

I’ve done a few Thanksgiving feasts, but I have to admit that my overall affect of peace and tranquility was lacking. Gravy I can do, even pie crusts while roasting tom turkey I can do, but doing it all and not getting testy, not so much.

One piece of paper, with a rough sketch of an action plan, a timeline, would have done me and my loved ones a world of good. As it was, my sequence was largely in my head, which did no one any good who wanted to help, or even figure out how to get out of the way. (Dad wanting to know why there was no creamed corn -- he was lucky not to end up wearing some vegetables, but that wasn’t really his fault.)

Working with the Homer Curry family Christmas dinner years ago at St. Francis de Sales, my real joy in that was not feeding the lonely and hungry as much as it was having responsibility for gravy . . . nothing but gravy, about thirty gallons of it. Finish the gravy, and step onto the serving line and ladle your wares onto waiting plates, and life is good.

For Christmas, my dad has had the good idea of focusing the mealtime part of the day onto a massive pair of lasagna pans. You want starch, meat, dairy, seasonings, vegetables – they’re all there. Have seconds. Garlic bread on the side, and then back to sorting the stuff out of the stockings.

None of which helps us on Thanksgiving Day. Even Italians (which we’re not) don’t have lasagna on the fourth Thursday of November. Bird and beans and berries and bread must be served, whether at home or at some separate venue. Eight hours for the turkey, three stages of boiling and mashing and mixing with garlic cloves and butter for the mashed potatoes, and a hearty pan full of stuffing to stand-in for the former output of the interior, woven in with the boil and simmer of saucepans you’d forgotten you had from the back of the cabinets.

Here’s the good news, though; we will all forget to put something on, or out, or mix it up, and that thing will be found about when the pies get cut. And no one will care. We will be stuffed ourselves, not willing to even entertain the possibility of having wanted any more than we’ve had, and the missing item will go into the rondelay of leftovers for the next week. Our excess of cooking, to make up for the general lack of culinary effort from the preceding year, is enough for a a platoon of gluttons even when shy a pan of sautéed Brussels sprouts or some such.

Your gathering is thankful for whatever’s on the table, and that’s the truth. Me, I actually like green peas, especially with the last of the gravy. Enjoy the company first, the food second, and worry about the cuisine last, if at all. And give thanks.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your gravy-related misadventures at knapsack77@gmail.com.

OK, so I guess I'm in the right place these days . . .
Click the question below to take the test yourself!

What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan You are an evangelical in the Wesleyan tradition. You believe that God's grace enables you to choose to believe in him, even though you yourself are totally depraved. The gift of the Holy Spirit gives you assurance of your salvation, and he also enables you to live the life of obedience to which God has called us. You are influenced heavly by John Wesley and the Methodists. Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 75% Neo orthodox 68% Emergent/Postmodern 68% Roman Catholic 57% Reformed Evangelical 50% Charismatic/Pentecostal 43% Classical Liberal 39% Modern Liberal 36% Fundamentalist 21%

Dick Cheney. 1976. Make up your own caption.

Your Inner European is Swedish!

Relaxed and peaceful. You like to kick back and enjoy life.

Who's Your Inner European?

Faith Works 11-10-07
Jeff Gill

What We Don’t Own (Mostly Everything)

Working on important family projects with a vital household tool in hand, I suddenly realized that I didn’t own it.

Waiting for a small printer to spit out a receipt, I read on the back of my debit card from the bank: “This card remains the property of Major Financial Institution . . .”

This slab of plastic I use everyday isn’t mine, but the bank’s. Kind of like my house, which I own in some senses, but don’t in others. As divorcing folks realize quickly, there’s the spousal interest; even for those of us happily married, we own a home as a couple, in full partnership with the mortgage holder.

Which leaves me owning the eaves and gutters, it would seem, but I share those with the trees as a handy place to store their fallen leaves.

The bank never offers to help mow or trim shrubbery, but the neighborhood association has a claim on a broad swath where bushes suddenly appear, and then disappear in the maws of ravening deer, who have a family claim on my whole neighborhood going back to the last Ice Age.

Then there’s the municipal folk, who offer a courtesy call just before a truckload of workmen show up to dig holes in “their” easement and imperfectly replant the desirable, deer proof shrubs they shoveled aside.

The Lovely Wife and I do, in fact, own our cars, but many in our neighborhood lease, a relationship I’ve never quite understood. But you don’t own it, so you’d better not cut a moon roof in the top – can you put college stickers in the windows of a leaser?

Some of these leased vehicles get parked in front of my house, blocking the postal worker’s access to the mailbox, which I’m told we don’t own, mostly. Even if we bought it at BigBox ourselves and dug the hole and poured the concrete, the box itself is somehow the property of the Postmaster General (when is his turn to paint?), so the right to store or swap items around the block in that space is limited.

The upside being that this is why folks dropping fliers around the neighborhood are breaking the law if they put stuff “for free” in the PG’s mailbox.

Back in my wallet, there’s the driver’s license which allows me to drive the car I do, sort of, own; property of the state. Try to ask for the picture half back when you get a new one and see what I mean. It’s like you asked them to give you a $5 from their wallet.

Oh, that Lincoln engraving? The money you carry, that you earned, this “legal tender for all debts, public and private”? Not yours. It remains the property of the Federal Government while you make use of the symbolic value in everyday transactions.

And the change in your other pocket? That board almost filled with 50 state quarters? Well, the board may be yours, but not the quarters, not technically.

Just like the license plate on that car you “own,” the trash roller bin from the service company, the downloads on your computer, “your” library card, and your Tivo box. But unlike a few years back, we own our phones now, which may or may not be a good thing.

Your body, though, that you “own,” right? Well, science tells us that every seven years is the “turnover period” for your cellular material, with the stuff that makes up your corpus delicti swapped out for new matter on the old design. Which gives a whole new understanding to “you are what you eat,” doesn’t it?

The upshot of all of this being: we don’t really own much, even in an age of consumerism and materialism. We really are stewards in this life, the only question being whether we are conscious, intentional stewards, or fumblingly wasteful caretakers who deserve to be fired.

That’s the upshot of most stewardship campaigns that many churches conduct in November, reminding their members of what giving is really about, which is just putting our treasures in the right places. Giving as a primary part of our personal stewardship is a key step to remembering that we own nothing, really, but have a great gift in our care for a season, life itself, and what that life can shape and effect.

For the more hardened materialists, good news! Under Ohio law, your estate owns your corpse, and has a pretty much unassailable right of disposal as you choose. So there’s one thing you can own without variation or dispute, but only after you die.

Me, I’m thinking organ donation.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s a blood donor now and an organ donor on his driver’s license (property of ODMV). Tell him what you value at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 11-11-07
Jeff Gill

Veterans and Voters and Vehemence

Booster Snapshots’ publication date is November 11, which puts the anniversary of the end of World War I smack on Sunday. Some of you get tomorrow (Monday) off work, and the mail and banks and courts hesitate a day, along with a few schools.

Generally, the once Armistice Day, still Remembrance Day, is marginally recalled as Veteran’s Day, and is a good time to say a “thank you” to those who returned, just as we honor those who did not make it back from their service on Memorial Day in May.

But with the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month falling in the middle of many worship services, I hope there’s an acknowledgment on Nov. 11 of the significance of World War I, and a recollection of what this country began learing about wars overseas.

The lessons, of course, continue.

With the detritus of Hallowe’en still laying around the house, this is a good time for me to introduce you all to the Lovely Wife’s contribution to economic forecasting. Perhaps you’ve already heard of the “Chocolate Percentage Trick-or-Treat Index of Economic Optomism,” or CPTTIEO (which has a nice, authoritative ring to it).

When the Little Guy returns from his Beggar’s Night rounds, his practice is to carefully sort the candy into types and sub-types by brand. What the Lovely Wife adds to this process is a casual eye to how much of the total candy haul are chocolate-based goodies, or as she puts it, “real candy.”

Apparently pixie sticks and suckers never did much for her.

What my wife believes is that when the percentage of a standard haul on Hallowe’en night that is chocolate-based (C-B), then a decline in the C-B% indicates reduced economic optomism, while a C-B% uptick shows people feel flush and want to share it.

Sounds as useful as anything else Jim Cramer has to say. What did your neighborhood show?

There was also some interesting seasonal news out of Iowa, where some officious idiot realized that the profusion of small pumpkin sale operations (y’know, entrepreneurism) was due, in part, to the fact that if they only sold pumpkins, they didn’t have to mess with sales tax, since Iowa like most states exempt food items.

Ah ha, said the said bureaucrat, but they do not generally eat them, they use them as décor, which means – tonight, we tax! (Mwahahahahaha. . . .)

So the Iowa Farm Bureau and others put together a form, akin to the legal lie that associates itself with fireworks, for people to attest that they will eat some portion of their pumpkin purchase. No, really, this happened.

Which then made a number of religious thinkers ask: “Is it permissible to avoid an unjust tax by telling a lie?” Owww. Meanwhile, the bad publicity did what it was designed to do, and the legislature in Iowa will likely craft an exemption for pumpkins by next fall.

Around Sycamore Lodge, we avoid this whole problem by making pumpkin chicken soup, roasting acorn squash with butter and brown sugar (or maple syrup does nicely), and we always roast the pumpkin guts, both seeds and strings, on a cookie sheet with salt and olive oil. Take that, Iowa!

Spaghetti squash is a tradition in my family around this time of year, and the Little Guy was very skeptical as I made the sauce with the last of the garden basil, tomatoes, and green pepper. He had already figured out that the acorn squash, sweet and tasty as it may be, was a vegetable, and he was against it. So why would this big yellow thing be any different?

But the weird alchemy of scooping out real spaghetti looking stuff after an hour in the oven won him over, and he ate it all, including the sauce. Thus are small parenting victories won.

A last note, which I’ve been sitting on for a while as I don’t want to lapse into Andy Rooney parodism. This is something that’s really been bugging me for a while, though.

Surely someone can invent a radar speed measurement device for our fine state troopers that doesn’t involve shaping it like a cannon that works best when said trooper adopts a firing line stance, arms extended, sighting along the barrel, aimed right at your face?

My brief military service never involved getting shot at, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time around guns, and have spent much time teaching young people never to aim a firearm, even a toy one, at someone. And I’ve been shot at, twice, both in odd circumstances precipitated by irresponsible idiodicy on the part of others.

Anyhow, I’ve never been able to avoid a clench of my hands on the wheel and had to fight an urge to swerve when I round a bend on Route 16 and see, up ahead, someone lined up in ready position. Why should I get used to that feeling? Can’t we invent a more citizen friendly radar device? Peace out, y’all.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you know how to get the state to quit pointing things at us, contact Jeff at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 11-3-07
Jeff Gill

Fall Back Into November

“Novem,” the Latin word for nine, reminds us in this eleventh month of our year that New Year’s in ancient Rome was March.

But the new year, and all the events leading up to the turn of the calendar, liturgically and socially, are pressing in close.

On this fine fall morning, if you’re reading this and not planning to trot over to Columbus for the Wisconsin game, there are a number of options.

The Habitat for Humanity folks are working their way through the very last steps of completing the last house they’ll build on Monroe Street. The dedication has been pushed back to the start of December, and a few volunteers for trim painting and tacking up shed siding will be welcome today – just drive through the E. Main and Buena Vista intersection, cross the tracks and turn south immediately, then turn right before you enter the railyard, and go to the street’s end.

For the faith-formed folk who have kept the momentum behind our local chapter, many thanks; the new homeowners have been doing their sweat equity to make their down payment, and the interest-free payments they’ll make will roll on into the next house. Stay tuned for more updates on that!

Also today out at Camp Falling Rock is Apple Butter Day, which has no real religious connection at all, but if you want to start feeling thankful as practice before the big day, there’s little else that shows the bounty of nature and the grace of creation than an autumnal trip out past Wilkins’ Corners and up to Houdeshell Road, where you can help stir the copper kettle and smell the heavenly scent of apple butter cooking down from the beautiful fruit of the trees.

Some of you will start turning your clocks back around noon, which makes evening a preview of the official end of Daylight Savings Time, which isn’t chronologically until 2 am Sunday. Given the number of clocks we have around the house (coffee maker, blender, microwave, curler set, sound system, car dashboards, digital fireplace, light timers, watches, washing machine, electric toothbrush, running shoes, toaster – reset ‘em all), you may need to start before dark today.

Make sure that in the morning you didn’t forget that last clock-radio by the bedside, or you’ll find yourself at the early service. Or go and find out who attends that one! And check the church kitchen for clocks that may not get set back until Christmas (crock pot, can opener, dishwasher, battery clock on wall above the stove).

Speaking of which – if you haven’t already been hearing Christmas music, you must not be working with the children’s choirs at your church. They are all deep into rehearsals for programs and worship music and Christmas Eve, which I hear is on Dec. 24 this year.

The Granville Candlelight Walking Tour kicks off the season with Sat., Dec. 1, where children will sing all around you as you walk from corner to corner through the evening.
Thursday, Dec. 6 is the annual Newark downtown “Sights & Sounds” around the churches of the historic core, with many musical offerings in preparation even now. Mark your calendars, and if your town has a special community event for the holiday season, let me know.

For the liturgically minded, the First Sunday of Advent is actually Dec. 2 this year, so the Sunday after Thanksgiving is not a headlong rush into hanging o’ the greens and starting the church calendar (the first Sunday of Advent begins the new lectionary cycle, among other patterns which begin here, not with the calendar year). Many clergy and lay leaders look with special warmth on those years where a “breather” falls into the calendar, and you can stay an extra day at a family gathering or some such.

But for the very, very liturgical, this is “Christ the King Sunday,” as the grand wrap-up of the ending cycle of the church calendar, with the role of Christ Jesus as cosmic redeemer, enthroned in the heavens, highlighted in the songs and readings. That can clear our heads and hearts from cornucopias and turkey feathers from construction paper, putting us in a receptive frame of spirit for the day by day approach to a savior born in a stable.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your community Thanksgiving service coming up in a few weeks at knapsack77@gmail.com.

As the cycles swing back south, not to return for another 15 years to the main alignment at the Octagon Earthworks, a last time-lapse photo of this awesome phenomena from the night of Oct. 29th. Thanks, Tim, for the careful work over a looooong evening . . .
[click on image for a larger picture]

Notes From My Knapsack 11-4-07
Jeff Gill

Connections Hanging By a Thread

What does voting this Tuesday, with a lever, a punch through card-stock, or a touch on a television screen, have to do with the governing of our county?

Does the simple act of voting, with our limited knowledge as individuals and the unpredictability of human nature, actually mean much of anything to the choices our elected officials make? Or does election day just anoint one over the other on a basis perilously close to drawing straws?

Last week I was walking across the long lawns of a local soccer field, where the morning fog was melting off a wide stretch of grass still green. The nearest trees were a hundred yards and more away, and the only objects waiting for our arrival were a number of eight foot high goal cages, with a mesh net of woven twine hanging across the back and sides.

Even twenty feet to one side, as I walked past each soccer goal, I would feel the light, lengthy swipe of spider web stretch and snap across my face. A tall man, I’m used to getting those strands across my face and caught in my hair when walking forest trails, but rambling over a broad lawn is not where I expected to smack into spider web.

So I looked around for an anchoring point, and quickly realized that the spiders would logically enough clamber to the top of the goal, ready to cast their line far across the Midwestern plains. With a slow, steady breeze, they would unlimber many yards of webbing, hoping to snarl in a distant tree where the would walk, highwire fashion, over into a new world.

Or even more amazingly, they may have clambered up one of the riverside sycamores a hundred yards away, and attaching to a high branch, launched themselves out into the void, spinning a strand behind them, the gossamer thread billowing in the carefully calculated (but never predictable) breeze, until the long low arc intersected with the metal bar to my left.

Looking up to trace the possible sources for these weblines, I saw in the sky extended plumes with a feathery uplift at one end. These cirrus clouds, tens of thousands of feet in the air, were puffs of ice crystals caught up in the high blasts of the leading edge of an air system, ghostly trumpet heralds of weather to come tomorrow. That night I would see the circular rainbow around a full moon, made by the refraction of those ice crystals now spread across the sky more evenly, bending the reflection of the sun’s shine off the round moon into a circle of dim but distinct spectral colors.

The next day I took a walk in the light rain that fell from overcast skies, a result neatly predicted by the cirrus of yesterday morning stretching above the spiderweb. Up the road from me is the field that embraces a small woodlot where a house built in 1810 once stood. Paralleling the rows of corn, is a line that separates a modern development, in what was once a farm field, from where crops are still planted and harvested.

From back when that work was more by hand and closer to the ground, that line on closer inspection is a wall, or at least the remnants of a wall. Laid of field stone, slabs of sandstone, there are still about six courses worth of rock, stretching for over a hundred yards and surely once even longer, on to the side of the next hill. Overgrown with Virginia creeper and poison ivy, the wall is nearly invisible until you’re right on it.

Once you see it, though, you can’t help but think about how 200 years ago these stones were taken from freshly plowed fields, one by one, and carried over to slowly build this wall. How tall once was it? Hard to tell.

Webs and clouds and walls and lines of connection and separation – and votes. We connect ourselves to the process of government, and connect that process to ourselves when we choose to step aside from the everyday and wait in line, cast our vote, and cast our voice out into the electorate. It is a thin strand, to be sure, that connects us to great affairs, but a little more substantial if low to the ground when we vote on our local officials and levies.

Tuesday morning, 6:30 am sharp, the officials and judges and your neighbors will be waiting and ready. Connect yourself to the work of government, and while you’re at it, enjoy the fall as you walk away from the polling place. You’ve earned it!

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

Faith Works 10-27-07
Jeff Gill

Are Ye Able, Said the Master

“Are ye able when the shadows/
close around you with the sod,/
To believe that spirit triumphs,/
To commend your soul to God?

So sings the last verse of “Are Ye Able,” a classic Protestant Christian hymn written by Earl Marlatt in1926. In seminary at the time, he went on to teach at a number of Methodist institutions himself.

This week of observances for the eve of All Saints’ Day, or “All Hallows,” means that the creepy and crawly signs of Hallowe’en will be all around.

Many folks who wouldn’t be caught dead (ahem) walking through a cemetery will turn their front lawn into one. People who know nothing of the Latin phrase “Requiesat In Pacem” will scrawl R.I.P. on foam boards painted aged grey.

But what’s the deal with “the shadows” closing ‘round you with the sod? Ick. Sounds like a horror movie plot, “Buried Alive.”
Doesn’t it?

Perhaps this season of growing chill and grinning pumpkins, mocking darkness and death, is a good time to do some – theology! Ah, I scared some of you, didn’t I?

Theology is just thinking through our beliefs, making sure the implications of our ideas trace out in accordance with the Bible and point towards God.

What happens to us when we die? There’s a major point of interest for believer and non-believer alike. When you hear people talk about the soul and death, you tend to hear language that points to arrival in Heaven at the moment of death (when that is would take another column). Along with that understanding is the growth of a sort of “folk belief” that the recently departed are “angels.”

That is all a fairly recent way of looking at death, actually.

For much of the history of Western Christendom, the theology of death went like this – when you died, your soul went into the care of God, but your awareness and subjective reality essentially went into the ground, where your corpse was the “index” of what would, at the Last Judgment, be your resurrected body, where the physical and spiritual was reunited, judged, and given their eternal reward before the Judgment Seat.

This is why reverence for tombs and graves, and superstitions about corpses and relics, occupied such a large part of ancient thinking. The body was waiting, as was your soul, for the end of Time, and we the living, passing by the churchyard gravestones, waited with them. There is much medieval and Renaissance art depicting the drama of the Last Trump, when graves and tombs would open, the seas would give up their dead from the vasty deep, and saints would clatter back together from their sanctifiedly scattered situations, drawing their various bits and the faithful found nearby to the Valley of Jehosaphat near the Golden Gate, where the sheep and the goats would find their proper fold.

Granted, even in this perspective, from the decedent’s point of view, no “time” would pass between their passing and the end of “Time,” but pastoral allusions to the immediacy of one’s trip to stand at the foot of the Great White Throne became a sort of Ongoing Judgment, with each one’s death an end of time in itself, with eternal disposition on demand.

I’d argue that another pair of side effects of this shift is the lack of respect for cemeteries generally (just a bunch of cast-off husks, right?), and the rise of a devotional focus on the place, the moment of death. You’ve seen them from simple roadside small white crosses to elaborate six-foot tall engraved crosses surrounded by vigil lamps once only found in graveyards and a mound of flowers, stuffed animals, or Buckeye-logo pinwheels.

Why this new trend? Well, if the moment of death is the moment of arrival in Heaven and the culmination of God’s final answer, then the moment of death becomes much more a focal point for the living than the “resting place” (think about that term, right?) for the body.

Paul speaks of the power of the bodily resurrection, which may not be too tied to where your trimmed fingernails or knee-replacement joint goes, but does seem to say that God is interested in the whole person, and the spirit is manifested in a body, and the body is entwined with the soul, and you really can’t see God’s purpose fulfilled in one without the other.

Which is why that 80 year old hymn asks us to consider the long sleep awaiting Gabriel’s trumpet blast to truly end, and then . . .

Lord, we are able, our spirits are thine,/
Remold them, make us, like Thee divine./
Thy guiding radiance above us shall be/
A beacon to God, to love and loyalty.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he thinks a Jack-o’-lantern is an interesting way to think about a soul shining out through a body! Tell him your story of faith at work at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 10-28-07
Jeff Gill

What Really Frightens You?

Still another week to time change, and setting our clocks back an hour. The days get shorter, and (finally) cooler. Above, a full moon dances among the scudding clouds.

Are you scared yet?

No, that won’t do it. Just atmosphere and lighting effects won’t ruffle your goosebumps, we who’ve seen Freddy Krueger and Jason LeMasque.

Does the prospect of wearing white out of season tend a tingle up your spine? Is it the possibility of having your in-laws stay at your house for a week your worst nightmare?

Clearly, there are many who live in fear of being seen in public without proper hair products in place, and not a few who need the security of earphones playing their tunes to block out the sheer horror of birdsong and passing traffic.

But seriously, what scares you?

Running out of money could do it for most of us, except we have figured out how to hide the fact it happened three paychecks ago behind a curtain of credit card slips and payday loan paperwork, drifting off the counter unread.

Illness is the great fear for anyone, and the growth of the medical industry has as much to do with tending our fears as it does with keeping our carcass functioning smoothly.

Death waits behind the cemetery gate, but more and more our fellow citizens are choosing to skip the graveyard, if not the grave, with not only boutique memorial services, but specialized disposal plans – launched into space like Scotty (James Doohan) was, or made into a diamond for a piece of memorable jewelry.

It would scare me to end up, posthumously, in a pawnshop. Anyhow.

It may be the prospect of shuffling off this earthly coil in a particular way, like the endless junior high playground conversation – would it be worse to be hanged, or have your head cut off? Winston Smith feared rats knawing his face, which makes sense, even if betraying Julia didn’t, but that’s Room 101 for you (see “Nineteen Eighty-Four” for more details).

Agoraphobia is fear of the agora, which is to say “open spaces” beyond one’s home, like the Greek marketplace which gives a name. All fans of Charlie Brown’s nemesis Lucy VanPelt know that pantophobia is the fear of everything, which strikes good ol’ Charlie Brown as the right diagnosis. Yours?

Fears are various and changeable – I once feared stewed tomatoes, and now do not. I don’t like them, I just don’t have to have them around my house now that I’m the parent. On the other hand, my parents liked lamb brains, breaded and fried, and I kind of miss the taste. The giant beef tongue in the fridge after butchering season, slowly sliced into sandwiches, neither pleased not bothered me. Just keep your stewed tomatoes with stale bread soaked into them, and slowly stirred before my horrified eyes, far, far away.

Nope, nausea doesn’t quite add up to fear.

You can be made queasy and uneasy to the point where fear literally strikes through your vitals, as grandma might say; come to think of it, the page in the “Old Farmer’s Almanac” of the astronomical signs corresponding to the disemboweled figure (arrow pointing to “Vitals”) always left me quite ill at ease.

Watching a horror movie, or reading a Gothic novel, for the sheer thrill of fright, has never been my cup of tea, or cup of eye of newt, either. Some folks seek out the most gory haunted house or ask to sleep in the haunted room because fear is their catnip. Having rappelled down cliffs, buildings, and once from a helicopter, I know the raw wrench of fear, but that’s a reminder to me never to do so again unless something behind me is burning, or a baby is below me on a ledge.

You need to know the outlines of your fears, so a good grip is always available to you on ‘em, but to trace every inch of your anxieties, and revel in them repeatedly, just strikes me as a bit much.

Then again, I frequently get up in front of groups and speak, which polling regularly shows as a greater fear factor than death. Maybe I’m a thrill seeker and don’t know it.

What scares you? ‘Tis the season!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; his greatest fear is missing a deadline. Send him your timely observations at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 10-20-07
Jeff Gill

Atheism’s Superiority, Faith’s Humility

Christopher Hitchens is a brilliant writer on many subjects, a self-proclaimed contrarian, a former Trotskyite Marxist, and currently the most quoted anti-theist in the world.

His recent book is selling like ice water in . . . OK, I’ll restrain myself. It has the title “god is not great,” and the lack of a capital letter is not a typo.

His argument begins with Islamic fascism, where “Allahu akhbar,” “God is great,” becomes a background chant for murder and homicidal suicide, then quickly spreads, like sin in Sodom, across the entire religious landscape.

Religion, aka “theism,” is the source of pretty much all evil in the modern world.

How does this explain, oh, the slaughter begun by Leon Trotsky himself in the Lubyanka Prison, and continuing under Soviet communism long after his own party’s officials ordered his assassination in a Mexican exile just as World War II began?

Anyhow, the point is that Hitch, nonconformist in so many interesting ways and pursuer of truth and integrity in all things, believes that faith in a god is the biggest lie of all (his no-caps rule, not mine, but watch out for the new AP stylebook).
Candidly, I’d be perfectly happy to ignore him on this subject and keep reading his insightful coverage of world affairs and regional politics with great interest if a bit of skepticism, a skepticism he would encourage, to be fair. But he always feels the need to go on beyond “I don’t believe in any god or gods” to “and people who do are ruining everything!”

Which you would expect me to take personally.

Which I do.

But in the spirit of clarity and straightforwardness that Hitchens claims to pursue, in the steps of his spiritual mentor, George Orwell . . . wait, I mean journalistic mentor . . . I want to try to look at one of Christopher’s key arguments fairly and honestly.
In the seemingly endless book tour for “god is not great,” where he has debated all manner of comers (look up online the text of his Hugh Hewitt debate with Mark Roberts, where courtesy and coherence marked both sides), there’s one point Hitchens had made over and over.

“Ask yourself this question. Can you name one moral action, or moral utterance, performed or spoken by a believer that could not have been performed or spoken by an atheist?” That, he claims, is the killer argument, which no one has answered.
I would say, no one has answered to his satisfaction.

Which is the heart of the problem for people of faith debating with people like Hitch. My response to that challenge would be, “No, and I see no reason to insult you by trying.”

Really.

To claim that atheists can’t be or do moral things is incoherent and silly. Of course they do. Religious folk would say, privately amongst themselves out of courtesy, that one’s intention matters quite a bit. Maybe even eternally. The idea that we would say you can’t be a good person or do moral things until you share our beliefs is your angst, your issue, not ours.

But why would you be moral? Do you have a sustained case to be made for moral living? Even at that, I’ve heard non- and anti-theists make cases for a materialist ethic; they exist, and don’t automatically lead to a “state of nature, red in tooth and claw.”

Where I suppose I would play into Christopher’s “gotcha” game is the fact that what I do believe is that he, and others like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris grotesquely underplay the degree to which religious belief motivates goodness and caring and charity. For every heretic burned are a thousand thousand soup kitchens; for each bigot are visionary leaders building a society that works bottom up, not top down.

And I will go to the Heavenly bank on those ratios – that there are, and I’ve met them and worked alongside of them, atheists who do good works, and there is a force for good in religion that provides results of compassion and care much more reliably. Religion is a net good, even if it isn’t universally effective on adherents, and while atheism provides some delightful human beings, in general, the outcomes aren’t on Hitchens’ side.

In other words, give me 100 believers and 100 unbelievers, and I’m more likely to staff a food pantry out of the former.

Chris, I’m happy to have any help we can get to do God’s work from those who don’t believe, too. Bless you in your quest.

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

Notes From My Knapsack 10-21-07
Jeff Gill

Ah, Wilderness!

Henry David Thoreau and John Muir and Terry Tempest Williams, nature writers and essayists, all tell us about the necessity of a little wilderness to temper our civilized lives.

Orion Magazine and the Audobon Society and the National Parks and Conservation Association each try to get us involved in the story of preserving natural preserves and wilderness zones. The Lovely Wife and I support the work of groups like The Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Education Council of Ohio to that end.

With global climate change on the radar screen for political parties across the spectrum and in nations around the globe (and hey, congrats, Al, on that Nobel Prize), there’s a key role for each of us to play in supporting and safeguarding special places from the Licking Park District properties to UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

This all shouldn’t make us forget that we live in an ecosystem, right now. Your lawn is growing and respiring and decaying, the ditch down the road or over the fence may be an unintentional xeriscape or pocket tallgrass wetland, and that overgrown bush on the corner is harboring a flock of migrating songbirds.

The idea that all of the outdoors can be neatly divided into man-made and natural is the source of a great deal of confusion. Licking County can be limned into myriad zones of naturalness, from the pristine – well, maybe not – to the paved. In between is a spectrum, with gradations subject to the eye of the beholder.

One such zone that needs more awareness and understanding is “Edge.” An edge is a transition from one natural type to another, so a woods edge is one, and a pond edge is another. We don’t think of “Edge” as a natural location the way we do “Swamp” or “Prairie,” so we discount it.

One way we do hear about edge-ness is in the old-growth forest debate, because animals like the infamous spotted owl live in vast, unbroken tracts, and a Hundred Acre Wood with a road driven through the middle of it is now not only two fifty acre woods, but neither is as welcoming a habitat for Owl, Eeyore, and Pooh, or I should say their natural analogues.
More to the point, there are animals that prefer “Edge” as their habitat, just as owls need deep woods with aged trees. Can you guess some?

Of course you can! Yep, deer go for forest edge, and Canada geese go for pond edge. Increase little pockets o’ trees with lots of edge, and you get plenty o’ deer. Put in drainage ponds hither and yon across the landscape, and put an aerator in to keep the ice from freezing right across, and the Canada geese don’t migrate south for the winter.

Aby Johnson, one of the stalwarts of Camp Falling Rock for the Boy Scouts, reminds us that deer were non-existent in Ohio from before 1900 to about 1950, and through the 50’s, the Newark Advocate always ran reported sightings of white-tails on the front page of the sports section, until 1960 when they became a bit too common.

Now, they regularly put on the front-page stories of how villages and cities are working on plans to shoot deer.

We have a glut of deer because we’ve created an ideal habitat for them, in reproductive terms, anyhow, and we helpfully plant seasonal foodstuffs for them like tulips and petunias and day lilies. They thank you by having more children, and doubtless naming them after you in gratitude.

Plus, we forbid hunting. Out in the townships where they plant corn, they also carry carbines in the combine and rifles in the pickup gun rack. They have many deer, but not quite so many even with more and better food.

So the deer will be shot, and then . . .

What will happen next? The only thing I’m sure of is . . . something will happen. Nature abhors a vacuum, said Spinoza, and we live in nature, whether suburban, rural, or urban alley.

What defines your local ecosystem? Ditches that funnel run-off, nearby streams, lines of trees surrounded by knee-high growth of, stuff, a slope here, a clump of bushes over there. Where do rabbits come out of, and how many bird-feeders get pillaged by masked bandits (another edge fan, by the way)?

Mountaintops have their allure, but just as Thoreau said “I have traveled widely in Concord,” why not get more familiar with your own piece of nature? It may help us figure out how to manage it more wisely.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher who has traveled widely in Licking County; tell of your travels at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 10-14-07
Jeff Gill

Hello, World; We Are Newark

Last week I had the pleasure and privilege of sitting in on a conference call for the U.S. Commission for UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (check ‘em out at http://whc.unesco.org).

As the callers from across the nation – the guy in Hawaii was up before 5 am, standing in his kitchen in the dark – rang in, introducing themselves, I thought back to a few months ago.

The Lovely Wife and I decided to take the Little Guy to his maternal-side long-ago stomping grounds, Mammoth Cave National Park. When we were waiting for a bus to an outlying cave entrance on one of our guided trips, I stopped under the large American flagpole by the entrance, and copied down a bronze plaque’s inscription.

Under a circular logo with a diamond in the center, the symbol found at sites around the globe marking a World Heritage Site, these words were inscribed:

“Through the Collective Recognition of
the Community of Nations
Expressed within the Principles of the
Convention Concerning Protection of the World
Cultural and Natural Heritage
-Mammoth Cave National Park-
Has Been Designated a
World Heritage Site
And Joins a Select List of Protected Areas
Around the World
Whose Outstanding Natural and
Cultural Resources
Form the Common Inheritance
Of All Nations.”
Below that statement is the date “Oct. 27, 1981.”

Mammoth Cave is one of only twenty places in the United States, like Monticello, the Grand Canyon, Independence Hall, and Yellowstone, with the designation “World Heritage Site.” Those twenty share the title with marvels like the Pyramids of Giza and Macchu Picchu, Stonehenge and Teotihuacan.

That number is about to change, as ten more locations over the next decade will be presented through the Secretary of State to UNESCO for “inscription.” In 2009, the first two names proposed are Papahanaumokuakea National Monument on the northeastern shores of Hawaii (including Midway Atoll), and the Civil Rights Churches of Alabama.

Right on their heels come Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, Fallingwater, and . . .

The Newark Earthworks.

Someday very soon, somewhere in our community, a marker like the one at Mammoth Cave is coming for the “Ohio Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks,” an assemblage of both the myriad mound complexes in the Chillicothe area, and our own complex here, all built around 2,000 years ago.

I don’t mind admitting that I teared up a bit during the call, when the list of ten recommended sites was read, and just now when I typed out the official statement that goes with WHS status. Actually, I was pretty happy for the Hawaii guy, too, since he didn’t get up so early for nothing.

Ohio has done herself proud in this effort, with Serpent Mound from just a thousand years ago on the tentative list of ten, and then the Underground Railroad sites from Wilberforce down to Ripley as a recommendation for continued review on the next ten, along with the Dayton Aviation sites, which were on that second list with the suggestion that they resubmit alongside Kitty Hawk.

This is one historic state, and here in Licking County we are truly the “Land of Legend.” The world (and National Geographic) is taking notice, and now the National Park Service and the State Department are following suit.

If you ever wondered what it would be like to live in an ancient hill town in Italy, or by a pilgrimage site in South America, or next to a natural wonder in the US Southwest, wonder no more. You’re already there, and you’re home.

But we’d best be tidying up, because company’s comin’.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is a longtime volunteer guide at the Newark Earthworks sites and Flint Ridge. Tell him your tale of globe-trotting, even if it’s right down the road, at knapsack77@gmail.com.

CURRENT MOON

moon phase

Faith Works 10-6-07
Jeff Gill

Worldview Matters

Rick Warren, whose “The Purpose-Driven Life” has sat on many bedside tables and even been read before falling asleep, wants you to think about “world view.”

This Southern Baptist pastor whose influence crosses all sorts of denominational boundaries is speaking largely to pastors, and to anyone interested in helping their faith community impact the community around them.

Yes, he’s a Christian – you can say that’s his worldview, and you’d be right. His point on those wanting to offer their worldviews to others is that you can’t go at ‘em as if they have no worldview at all, and you’re offering one to fill the gap.

Pastor Warren reminds us that everyone has a worldview, and in the American mission field, there are about six that cover the vast majority of the 60 to 80% of most regions that are unchurched.

His analysis comes down to these six statements: “I’ve got to think of me and mine first,” “the one who dies with the most toys wins” (they even have a bumper sticker), “do what feels good,” “whatever works for you,” “you are your own God,” and “God doesn’t exist.” Most people, Warren argues, live basically out of one or two of those viewpoints on how the world works.

If you want to offer an alternative to those approaches, or philosophies, or whatever you want to call them, you have to first present why those viewpoints aren’t going to get you through life, let alone into the next.

Call them self-interest, materialism, hedonism, pragmatism, solipsism, and atheism, and they line up well down the side of a page, but how you write the definition shapes the response of an evangelist. And Warren is right to remind us of this fairly obvious point, because we do forget that folks don’t pick their worldview out of a philosophy text or mail order catalog, but we live into them, step by step. We adopt them because, in one context or another, they work for us, so we keep them – often long after they no longer make sense, even to ourselves.

What Warren doesn’t get into, being much less long-winded and wordy than your host in this column, is how these worldviews often persist right into the life of faith.

We hold out our faith in God’s guidance and provision, but we hold onto our belief in “whatever works” when it comes to program and planning for church life; our hearts are firmly fixed on Heaven as our true home, and still pursue our own comfort and safe surroundings for fellowship and study.

I haven’t sold 35 million books recently, but I’d step in front of Brother Rick and suggest that we need to have an honest encounter with our own worldview issues within the church, in order to have a saving impact on the fallen worldviews of others.

Are we pursuing growth for a sense of success and security in our own frame of reference, or because we sincerely need to reach out to people we see heading towards their own ultimate sadness with grim intensity?

Can we as believers build up the body, for the purpose of equipping the saints for the work of ministry, without falling into the desire for easy fellowship and cheap grace around a Buckeye game on the big screen?

Most crucially for the Christian faith in this country, and right here in our corner of it, do we want to point fingers at the family arrangements of others just to give ourselves a sense of solidarity among me and mine, when our homes and marriages and children are not being strengthened and built up for a lifetime? We need to put solid foundations under the homes of the faithful before we can out offering ourselves as consulting engineers for everyone else’s contractor business.

What worldview are you living? If a visitor to your church were asked on the way out, “What do you perceive to be the governing philosophy of living in this place?” – what would they say?

In fact, you could try that sometime. Don’t do it unless you’re willing to listen to what they say.

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

Notes From My Knapsack 10-7-07
Jeff Gill

Free Speech Works Oddly, But Works

President Ahmadinejad of Iran managed to show off one of free speech’s best features at Columbia University.

Some voices argued with great passion and pretty decent debating points that he shouldn’t be given a public platform, given his use of “free speech” to argue against the Holocaust (all just a misunderstanding), for the obliteration of a country (Israel has no right to exist), and that Iran only wants nuclear plants so he can make that cool glow-in-the-dark paint for watch hands (OK, not quite).

But when he was in New York City for the opening of the United Nations’ General Assembly, he dropped by Columbia for a little meet ‘n greet with the students and faculty.

Turns out Columbia has a president, too, and Lee Bollinger took the podium first to tee off on the human rights record of Iran under the ayatollah-ite regime, and their lack of political freedom, such as restricting the right to breath for some dissidents, hanging a number of peaceful Bahá'ís, along with a quite a few Jews accused of spying on flimsy pretexts. Pres. Bollinger covered it all, with citations.

Pres. Ahmadinejad countered by saying, loudly, clearly, in unambiguous Farsi with a very skilled translator removing all doubt, “There are no homosexuals in Iran.”

Don’t know about you, but that one statement justified Columbia giving him a platform more than any excoriation by the school’s executive officer. Knowing that this fellow thinks he can say something like that with a straight face (sorry, I know) puts us all on the same page about the viewpoint of the current regime.

The great thing about free speech is that if it really is as free as possible, we all learn where one another are coming from, and what we intend. Press releases and sound bites can’t quite deliver that sense of who and what a person’s about.

You could call it the “give ‘em enough rope” philosophy, but that assumes this only works as a negative check and balance. I like thinking of it as more of a “Glass cleaner” approach, with more than a little circle rubbed through the dirty window, but a wide field of view showing as much as possible.

If a candidate for school board says at an election forum, “We have no kids with special needs in our district,” or a municipal candidate says “We don’t need more economic development around here,” or a township trustee race evokes the comment “We don’t have any roads or bridges that need upkeep,” I’d wonder if that was possibly what they meant as a one-line quote in an election guide.

When they keep talking after the room breaks out in laughter, as if everyone were nodding their heads up and down, I’ve learned something useful.

We’re a month away from what I think of as the “real elections,” when school boards and local councils and trustee panels go before the voters. Millions of dollars worth of TV ads during presidential campaigns can cloud men’s minds more surely than The Shadow, but in a local election, not so much.

There are irrational people running for local positions, though, and they often have one rational line they’ve ridden on the road to Election Day. You need to hear the whole statement sometimes, or hear their tagline in a broader, conversational context, to realize “this person is nuttier than grandma’s banana bread.”

If your area has a candidates’ night or election forum, make the effort to drop by and spend an hour listening. What you hear is free speech at its best, and the best solution to the problems people claim come from the wrong kind of speech is more free speech, not less.

Speak out, too, but make sure to listen to some of that free speech first; there’s a price for not doing so.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s met politicians who are unhinged and tightly buttoned down, sometimes in the same person (different days). Tell him your Election Day story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-29-07
Jeff Gill

If Only In Our Dreams

Tomorrow begins the second half of Ken Burns’ “The War” on public television, with last week repeated through the day tomorrow on most PBS stations.

You’ve probably heard that the story of World War II is covered largely from the point of view of the home front, using two small towns and two medium sized cities of the United States as the lenses to view this global conflict.

The selection of just the right pictures, now including color and movie clips alongside the classic “Ken Burns effect,” panning across old black and white photos, is complemented by precisely the narrator voice and exactly the music background for bringing out the unvarnished emotion of everyday men and women. Even the sound effects are just right, just so, justly praised.

An image from last week that sticks with me, as no doubt intended, is a shot of women in a Catholic church, kneeling in prayer while wearing black lace mantillas, loops of rosary beads between their hands. The picture homes in on those prayer cords, and then dissolves into IV tubing, held aloft by a corpsman tending a fallen comrade. Their helmeted, framed faces, drawn and weary, echo the women’s appearance as they prayed back home, the connections between them as real as a rosary, an IV, a vein.

Burns’ team at Florentine Films does a good job helping us sense the absolute lack of inevitability about war’s end, even in 1944, and anxiety about what that end would look like.

In my contact with Americans of the WWII generation, there’s a love of the song “White Christmas,” but the tune that can bring a room of them to absolute silence is “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.” When Bing sings, “you can count on me,” even us younger folk know he’s saying “as far as it’s in my power,” but we all know that the tone of the song is not about optimism for Christmas next, but a prayer for some Christmas soon, and not just in our dreams.

For many in service, Atlantic or Pacific theater of operations, the fall and winter of 1944 brought no easy confidence that the sharpest or the best would necessarily make it home. Many good men had fallen from the sky or been swallowed by hedgerows in Europe, and the vastness of the Pacific had consumed so much, so many already. They wanted to be home for Christmas, but feared that it would only be in the dreams of their loved ones.

Hispanic and other ethnic groups have already taken their shots at Burns and PBS for not emphasizing their own role in the conflict. I don’t want to get in that line, but I’m nagged at by the feeling that the place of faith in the motivations of Soldiers and Sailors and Marines, and how church and communion kept the home front connected, has not gotten much consideration.

You could even say that church groups had a role to play in how little they did to prevent “The War,” even that Mainline Protestants have some accountability in their eagerness to embrace warfare in World War I, the harshness they encouraged at Versailles, and the stage setting they helped provide for Hitler, both in Germany or around the world.

You could say that, but then you’d still be affirming that organized religion has an important role in public life, so we don’t even hear about the shortcomings.

Nor do we get much of the picture of when tens of thousands of volunteers, through a network of co-operating churches, fed and offered a smile to soldiers on trains crossing the country. In Kansas, in Illinois, in Dennison, Ohio, people of faith looked for ways to embody love in a time of war.

Chaplains served with honor, and without weapons, in every major ground and sea action of the war, giving the citizen combatants a place to wrestle with hard questions and harder realities of what they had done in their nation’s service. Mass on aircraft carriers, hymn sings in marble quarries, Yom Kippur observances under pine trees – all these are indelible images of the war from many veteran’s reminiscences.

The lack of such a perspective doesn’t take too much away from Ken Burns, but it does leave an interesting gap for someone to fill; we’d best not wait too much longer for that story, either.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your story of “The War” at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-30-07
Jeff Gill

“The War” Comes Just In Time

My new computer came, some months ago, with a feature for managing photos and presenting them.
It includes a button whose label made me laugh. The caption says “Ken Burns Effect.”

I was amazed to hear that, with the rollout last week and next of Ken Burns’ next PBS feature “The War” on World War II, that his landmark “The Civil War” is now seventeen years in the past.

That program still feels like the breath of fresh air that it was in the popular understanding of the crucial events of 1861-1865 to this nation, but has worn so well, from the music, that included Licking County’s own Kenny Sidle, to tales like Sullivan Ballou’s final letter to his wife.

So seventeen years it is. In the same way, the events of World War II, which don’t seem any further away from me now then they did when I was a kid, are now surely further off.

1969 put the end of “The War” a quarter-century behind us, while I was just a child. Almost forty more years gone by, and those veterans who seemed so old then were younger than Vietnam vets are today, yet the survivors carry – many, maybe most, or so it seems to me – a bounce and vitality that makes their age of eighty or ninety-plus not seem quite the point.

Yet the hard fact is that we lose a thousand of the remaining witnesses to World War II now everyday, and that pace will not last long. It was that urgency which made Ken Burns retract his promise, seventeen years ago, to never try to tell the story of a war again, hearing Bob Dole and others speak in the planning for the now completed World War II Memorial in Washington DC. Burns and his team at Florentine Films set out across the country to find, ultimately, four towns (two towns and two cities, really) to frame his story of the war which, like nothing since the Civil War, touched “every home on every street in every community in America.” Which it did.

So what hath Burns wrought? I’ve only seen five hours of the fifteen that will be the whole (it continues on public television through this week, with a Sunday recap of the entirety in a block, and the inevitable DVD release). Some will no doubt dislike the fact that Burns does not call this “The Good War,” a title taken from Studs Terkel that is not a capsule summary of his point, anyhow; nor does he call this the “Greatest Generation,” a term Tom Brokaw may have copyrighted.

But Burns also wrestles with the moral dilemma of the necessity of this war, and does not lapse into trite foreshadowings of later wars less necessary from some points of view. He relentlessly hones in on the fact that war, no matter what the cause, takes a toll that is beyond understanding, but he wants us to try.

Oddly, if I had to sum up Ken Burns’ style, it wouldn’t be the characteristic pan and scan effect adding motion to still photos, or even his ruthless honesty. It is “restraint.”

So often there’s a scene, or a quote from an interview, or a fact that could, justifiably, bear further comment. The choice, over and over, is to hold back the “creative” input, and simply let the pause hang, the image burn, the statement stand.
A dog in a front yard, which turns out to be a house where a young man soon will enlist (as the Ken Burns effect pulls back, fluidly with an embrace of the viewer), can faintly heard to bark. Just a little louder, and it would have been corny; just a potentially cheesy, a whoosh from a passing car, brought to life in black and white with a swivel of the camera.

Then a soldier speaks of what it meant to watch friends die, and says his piece simply, without tears or elaboration. He stops and looks at his invisible interviewer, just over our right shoulder, and the camera holds. We think, and open a space for reflection.

“The War” is worth our time, as we think together as a nation in the coming election season about when, and how, and why a war is ever worth our time, our treasure, our blood. That space is hard to find, and Ken Burns both creates it, and makes us feel that we can safely occupy it for as long as we need to come to a calmer conclusion than we would in heated, harried, compressed debate.

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

Notes From My Knapsack 9-23-07
Jeff Gill

Hebron has seen a fair number of parades down Main Street over the years, with the breadth of the old National Road opening up a broad canvas for scenes of celebration.

Mostly, the celebrations have been baseball related, and involved bands and fire trucks and team members waving while cheerleaders leap and shout.

More somber are the Memorial Day occasions, with many of the same participants, but more subdued, from the Legion hall to the cemetery.

A new tradition may be at hand, with a parade from east to west, starting at the new Kroger parking lot, past the honored dead, into the village, and on through the historic crossroads to where Doc Walter’s office once was, and back to Refugee Road and a final turn into Evans Park.

The Hebron Business Association is organizing a Homecoming Parade this year, Thursday, Sept. 27, commencing at 7:00 pm with the autumnal sun casting long, low rays through the fields ready for harvest and shining on the faces of the band members and Grand Marshals.

Yes, they’ve got a Grand Marshal – actually, a whole raft of ‘em. The newly established “Lakewood Hall of Fame” has a first class of honorees, and confirmed to date for the parade are Ila Mason, Donna Braig, and of course the recently retired Doc Walters.

The parade will end at Evans Park on Refugee Road, on the northwest corner of the village, and a pep rally complete with bonfire will gather ‘round the Lakewood Lancer Marching Band, and led by the Lakewood Cheerleaders (Go, team, fight!).

Beth Walters with Crossroads of Hebron Floral is putting together a grand procession for this parade and Homecoming salute, and you don’t have to be from the Lakewood Schools to enjoy the spectacle and get caught up in the excitement.

This could be an ideal launch for the Fall celebration season, with the Buckeye Lake Fire Prevention parade on Oct. 7 at 1:00 pm down Walnut from Pizza Cottage, the Fairfield County Fair the week of Oct. 7, and the Circleville Pumpkin Show Oct. 17-20 (and Devine Farms on US 40 rocking out the pumpkin-ness all month).

Not to mention a few football games on Friday nights!

Apparently, there are some football games on Saturday, too. I’ve enjoyed some Denison football, which I still argue is the best value in central Ohio, and $2 hot dogs that are worth it (soft pretzels, though, you gotta bring soft pretzels back).

On the whole BigTen Network kerfuffle, I think there’s an assumption made here that could really backfire. Someone, say at an Ohio State, looks out over the 5 am crowd filling the tailgate lots, sees the sea of Scarlet & Gray ™ and thinks – everyone wants a piece of this, no matter what the price.

In the game of chicken with the cable companies, who had better not plead poverty or whine about price gouging (see entry Houses, Glass), both sides seem to think that in the end, we’ll pay a bunch extra to see all the games the Buckeyes play.
Not to be disrespectful of the religion of others, but they may not be that popular.

I’ve been out to stores and on the roads and even in non-sports bar restaurants during fairly major games (no, not Michigan or bowls, c’mon), and life has been going on without let up. No tumbleweeds down Main Street, no crickets in the big box stores, but shiny, happy people going about their business without regard to a football and young men in silver helmets.

Could they put the BigTen Network on premium, and have many fewer people end up caring? Is part of the appeal of “Buckeye Nation” the fact that it was an “everyman” (and some women) kind of experience, and you might have to check three or four different channels, but down in the basement workshop or up in the family room you could have the game on while, gosh, doing other things.

If it has to cost a bunch, however delivered or offered or extorted, I think a significant chunk of central Ohio will slowly, steadily, move on to other pastimes and interests for their Saturday afternoons.

The NFL tried a stunt like this, and found that people just shrugged, didn’t order up the “Obsessive Football Fanatic Channel” in the numbers they thought, and just changed channels to NASCAR. Could this happen to Ohio State?

Me, I’ll be enjoying the fall air this Saturday afternoon. Hope the Bucks win, but I’ll be content with checking the score on-line in the evening, after lighting a nice warm fire.

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

Faith Works 9-22-07
Jeff Gill

The Pornification of Nearly Everything [this is somewhat a part II, with part I just below - jbg]

Thanks to some trends in modern culture and education, my son will likely not learn in school about the Greek and Roman pantheon, gods and goddesses whose antics helped the ancients make sense of geography and natural phenomena, including the fertility deity Priapus.

On the other hand, he knows what the diagnosis of priapism is, symptom by symptom.

You could say the fault is mine and the Lovely Wife for allowing TV in the living room: guilty as charged, your honors.
Why are these ads for medical enhancement of private moments so pervasive?

Through the summer, I did a great deal of driving. Around Licking County, the “contemporary Christian music” formatted radio stations come to us from Columbus and Zanesville, so from Flint Ridge to the Hartford Fair, I can always find CCM music or the radio.

Sometimes, weaving across the Midwest, neither NPR nor CCM stations could be found, and so I’d leave on whatever mild pop music I last found while waiting to drive into a new broadcast radius.

What jumped out at me, after having listened to so much CCM, where all the songs are rooted in the transformative power of a relationship with God, was the philosophical basis of the songs on pop radio.

Yes, they have a philosophical basis.

Some say CCM is too simplistic, too repetitive; I was saddened to hear that Tony Campolo had run down CCM in worship settings while preaching up at Lakeside this summer, accusing CCM of a “7-11” approach: “seven words repeated eleven times, or maybe vice versa.” Ha, ha, ha, Tony. Cute.

But what I heard with mind-numbing repetition and unimaginative sameness in the most middle-of-the-road, adult contemporary pop music, let alone more youth-culture oriented and harder edged pop, was that sex saves.

No? You don’t think so? Go listen to some, and you tell me. The point, over and over and over, was that the moment of physical encounter, the coming together of a relationship, would change everything, transform your life, and make everything new.

When the Bible says things like that, we call it “apocalyptic literature” and usually find it in Daniel and Revelation and chapters of Matthew and I Corinthians. “Behold, I make all things new” says Jesus as the Christ of God, and when seas melt and the heavens roll up like a scroll, we see end of the world imagery as a sign for how God’s power breaks eternity into time.

Virtually all pop music talks about how everything will change, nothing will look the same, and mysterious transformations echo out from the point where . . .

Hmmm. Can’t really be more specific in a family paper, but you’ve heard enough of the music of our era to know where we’re going in that sermon.

If I owe nothing else to CCM (and as a tool for reaching out to the marginal and unchurched today, I think Christians owe quite a bit to this genre), I’m thankful for how immersion in it helped me hear more clearly what my native culture is saying.

Our culture somehow has gotten the idea that a romantic, erotic relationship can change everything, and really, it mainly seems to preach that sex alone is transformative, no matter who you’re with. Again, if you think I exaggerate, go listen to some after reading this, and you tell me.

At the most extreme, pop music is specifically sexual; even in the most mellow and benign forms, the message is still generally that “doing it” will melt oceans, unroll the skies, and fireworks are the least of the explosions that will ensue.

And you know what? Tell people something often enough, and a fair number will start to believe it. We are surrounded by the wreckage of lives lived trying to find inner transformation and control over an unreliable world by, ah, “doing it” with whomever will help them reach that worldly sacrament.

And it doesn’t work.

Faith communities, particularly Christianity, get a bum rap for being against sex. Speaking for Christianity, which is the faith community that makes sense of my life, we ain’t agin’ it. Not at all. No more than we’re against fire. Fire, sex, they’re good, sure.

Fire is good in a fireplace. Fire between the joists, working its way between the walls to consume the entire structure, is bad. Right?

Sex in a marriage is good. Right? Sure. But sex up in the rafters or under the siding means the entire building is compromised, and likely to fall.

Sex is not going to fix your world, or solve your problems, even when you’re married. What we need to preach and teach and surely live out by example in our communities of faith is that like fire in a fireplace, sex in a marriage makes a house a home, can give light to relationships gathered all about, and can really cook.

But sex without the right setting is like a kid running around with matches lighting curtains on fire to see what happens.
Simple distinctions, which need explaining from the outside in, and the inside out. We gotta preach it, tell it, and live it.

Are you with me, or are you listening to the radio?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher; contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-15-07
Jeff Gill

The Pornification Of Just About Everything

If Britney Spears is news, I’m a network anchorman.

And my name is not Ron Burgundy.

If you watched the increasingly misnamed “morning news” programs last Monday, you were treated to seemingly endless footage of Ms. Spears, mother of two, pop star “musician,” on a stage at an award show, surrounded by skilled, professional, fully-clothed dancers.

Ms. Spears was none of the above.

Most disturbing in some ways was the way the commentary focused on how she is apparently considered “fat.” Look, I saw way more of her than I really want to, and I can say with assurance that for a woman with two kids, one born just months ago, obesity is the least of her worries. She looked more fit and in shape, from a purely physical angle, than eleven of the next ten people I’ll see down at the mall.

I was, and am, a little mystified by the general lack of comment on how she was clearly in a daze, stumbling around the stage, barely knowing the words to the song she was not even close to lip-synching.

She danced badly, you say? No, she looked like a captive in a kidnapping video, doing what her captors were making her do at gunpoint, with too little sleep and maybe some pharmaceutical enhancement.

Forget the fat, which wasn’t there. She was wearing underwear with some sequins justifying the label “clothing,” and she was vaguely simulating a stripper routine, alternating with what my high school principal called inappropriate contact with a dozen different guys (all of whom had to be thinking “eight years of lessons and a knee operation and I’m getting union scale, while this stumbling girl is . . .”).

And it was on every morning show, except for Nickelodeon, which is starting to look downright wholesome.

So clearly putting on weight is the one unforgiveable sin in American culture? That can’t be the point, if look down the sidewalk in any Licking County community is any guide. That, or we’re all unrepentant sinners – hmmmm. . . .

But I think the talk about fat was being used to hide from another issue, which is what dieticians and counselors tell us is what real fat is often about.

Britney Spears was acting out, all too well, the role of a stripper, a prostitute, a porn star. If there was one person, just one person in her life who cared about her as a person at all, they would have looked at her and said “fire me, cut my pay, delete me from your cell phone, but honey, you are in no condition to go out on a stage in front of your peers and a global TV audience, not even to read a cue card.”

But strip club owners, pimps, and pornographers tell their often drugged and intoxicated employees “C’mon, you can do it, just toss back another shot of this and get going.”

The numbers tell the story: Americans are consuming porn at incredible rates, and not just on-line. X-rated movies are said to do more business than the mainstream studios, and that’s the money they admit to, keeping in mind that no one disputes that the involvement of criminal figures in the porn industry is extensive. Print formats and pay-per-view XXX are booming at the same time, with in-room movies so lucrative even the J.W. Marriott company, a very “family values” based company in the past, from their Mormon heritage, feels they have to offer that “service.” (Industry reported average viewing time of in-room movies? Seven minutes, which means weary travelers are usually paying a buck or three a minute for the “service.”)

For a growing segment of the audience, a dazed and confused nearly nude woman constitutes entertainment, or the prelude to it. So why would we have much to say about Ms. Spears other than “sheesh, she’s put on, what? Five pounds? Maybe seven?”

Porn is so mainstream that “stripper-chic” is not a joke term, but a fashion label.

Underlying all this is the American mindset that stripping and prostitution and porn are “victimless crimes.” Yep, there’s those quote marks again.

Friends, I’ve spoken to more prostitutes than most of you, albeit in prison visiting areas and chapels. But don’t let anyone kid you about “victimless.” You just saw another victim of this evil system on stage if you saw TV last Monday (or watched the event, I guess, on Sunday).

She stood there, lost, without a friend, trying to move her body to please us, her audience. Libertarians and feminists and family should be her friends, and they apparently could care less.

Only people of faith, I fear, can see this for what it is: a crime, a tragedy, and a call to candor. Porn wounds and scars and kills, starting with women used and abused by men at every step in the process. It doesn’t need to be banned, it needs to go broke. It should be unprofitable and non-viable and utterly despised.

Some ideas next week; stay tuned.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher; contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-16-07
Jeff Gill

Looking For an Apple

Some local orchards have signs up saying “Due to frost, there will be no apples this fall.”

The frost they speak of was back in April.

That’s how growing things works – a frost in the spring leaves you apple-free in the fall, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Our current mindset balks at such an idea. Of course we can do something about it! We can order up a load of apples from New Zealand and dump ‘em in the produce department to pick through, and throw out the culls a week later (with the good Lord alone knowing how many were pitched earlier in the process for lack of cosmetic appeal).

True, the April frost will not cut into our stock of pie filling and applesauce and stuff for bobbing after come Hallowe’en. We will have our apples . . . this year. Probably the next, too.

Meanwhile, apples from New York state will go to Iowa and West Virginia apples will go to Minnesota, and we’ll see Galas and Golden Delicious (ick, personal opinion) with little stickers for Ecuador and down where people stand upside down on the earth.

Does this not seem a bit odd to you? And as energy prices increase, will the silliness become outright irrationality?
If the market has the wisdom I think it is capable of when driven to common sense, usually by price increases, we will see a bit less of perishable foodstuff from across the International Date Line in years to come.

Others will joke “Global warming, huh? Then we should have longer growing seasons in Ohio, not less. Sign me up for a leased landyacht, paid for out of my home equity loan.”

For the record, it’s “global climate change.” The trends, as measured and hypothesized by climate scientists, mean more rainfall some places and less others; reduced snow pack and glacial growth in the Rockies may be part of colder springs, but warmer falls.

If the world mean temperature is going up due to greenhouse gases, or sunspots; if increased particulate matter in the atmosphere is reflecting sunlight back into space to cool other stretches of the planet; if the Great Lakes don’t freeze over anymore during the winter (and they haven’t) – then down-wind of the lakes we may see more snow as a result of the mis-labeled “global warming.”

But there are aspects of what’s going on with temperatures, current and historic, and how we measure that which I grant are not as well understood as some with political agendas would like to say.

To be perfectly candid, I’m much more worried about aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination, and oceanic dead zones. Those are fearfully measurable, and the numbers aren’t good. From numbers to concrete phenomena . . . did you know that there is something, slowly spinning around in the northern Pacific Ocean called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” which is the size of Texas? Oceanic scientists call it, ironically, “the world’s largest landfill.” Precise measurements were last taken six years ago, but it’s estimated that the ratio of plastic to living organisms in that water is 10-to-1 by now, or more.

Plastic breaks down on exposure to light, over time, but only into smaller pieces, still floating, very tiny. All those disposable water bottles you saw spinning through an eddy in the creek the other day? There’s a good chance that their fragmentary little selves could add someday to that continent of consumed consumer-ness floating in the Pacific.

That’s in seawater; our own freshwater right here in Licking County is steadily under suspicion, with septic fields and agricultural runoff pushing the entire county closer and closer to across the board sewer and water treatment systems just to preserve drinking water here in Ohio.

Go to Las Vegas, let alone Los Angeles, and figure out where the water for golf courses and green lawns is coming from. Did you know that the Colorado River, the watercourse what carved the Grand Canyon, essentially stops parts of the year, never making it to the Gulf of California? (That was a big hint.)

We’ll figure out what to do about all this short of major disaster. We’ve reduced the hole in the ozone layer with a ban on certain aerosols, and we may well outlaw Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty transplants as a ground cover in parts of the country. But we’ll need water, fresh, drinkable water, no matter what, and as oil becomes pricier, the means to desalinate and purify water resources will need to change. Grey-water management will not be a specialist term and rain barrels will go from history lesson to everyday housekeeping.

Somehow, just becoming aware of our own local ecosystem seems to be an important part of whatever those changes will be, as you and I are either a conscious, or an unconscious part of being the change. Cheap apples from New Zealand don’t really plug a hole in a local economy, they just fill up a line in a recipe.

Whatever we’re gonna be doing with the oil and gasoline we still have available in another generation, it isn’t going to be that. However it is we get pure water in another generation, we’re not going to be using an apple skin and cargo ship as the delivery method of choice.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he reads that passage about “dominion over the earth” as a two-way proposition. Contact him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

The earlier, evocative shots of the dining room at "The MIlk Pail" restaurant in East Dundee, IL, were the prelude to visiting this place as a kid with my brother(s):

OK, so this guy looks like the zombie snowman ninja of your nightmares, but in a friendly way:


...and the gate into the true magic kingdom of my childhood:

I can't quite explain why this is important, but it is. Suffice it to say this restaurant, "The Milk Pail," was where the Gill kids' great-aunts, Chloa and Georgia, took us before we entered the wonderland that was "Santa's Village." Between the Walnut Room at Marshall Field's in downtown Chicago, and "The Milk Pail," my idea of what classy eating out was got shaped by the experience of those two restaurants and "the aunts," cloth napkins and paying at the table and everything else -- those two places still color my view of every non-fast-food dining experience i have.

Starting this year, "Santa's Village" in East Dundee is no more, but "The Milk Pail" goes on -- a bit remodeled and the grounds not so parklike (room for more parking, no doubt), but the green fake leather chairs and the milk pail light fixtures and the veranda room all ring up a huge batch o' memory-to-go:

Notes From My Knapsack 9-9-07
Jeff Gill

Autumn Skies and a Chill

There’s been talk around the cracker barrel at the general store about fall, and what we’re in for.

The dry stretches of the summer, and leaves curling early, with swaths of yellow already in the canopy, lead many everyday naturalists to expect a swift season.

Will the leaves turn bright colors, or just go to brown, tan, and saffron? Will they give us a few weeks of glowing arches overhead, or just a turn and drop in the same few days?

Along with such speculation comes the scrying of the wooly-bears. I continue in my own bafflement over whether the brown stripe wide means more snow, or narrow brown with more black calls for the harder winter.

But the first wooly worm I’ve seen was grey-black from end to end. Which must mean either no snow at all, or buy stock in towing companies now, since the skies will open.

The team from “up north” felt a chill early, and for those who want to know, the Appalachian State campus is in Boone, NC. Nice place. Good school. Who knew they had so many fans in central Ohio?

The family had the pleasure of hearing repeated cheers for the Mountaineers of Boone (not to be confused with the WV ‘Eers) while watching a remarkable football game in Piper Stadium on Deeds Field at Denison University.

Actually, the game was fairly unremarkable, other than one magnificent runback on a kickoff for the Big Red. They did lose, while playing hard right down to the final whistle.

What that team did accomplish was the 1,000th football game for Denison. This is their 118th season of college football. By my math, that means since 1888 they’ve been playing downs, even if T-formation and face masks are a fairly new development by that measure.

1,000 games. The upstart program west of us, in Columbus, only began in 1890, and is just up to . . . OK, 1141games, but that’s because Ohio State keeps playing after Thanksgiving every year, when all scholar-athletes know it’s time to start studying for finals.

I wish I had some pictures of my dad playing football in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, with a leather helmet and no face mask. Apparently they didn’t have many photographers roaming the sidelines in Anita, Iowa back then, so I just have his stories and a few clippings from the Atlantic, IA paper about his single-wing exploits and defensive derring-do (yep, played both ways).

He’s too polite to point out I’m a much better football player in the pictures my family has than I ever was on the field, with full mask and shoulder pads, forearm shiver at the ready. What I can do is sound as if I’m older than I am, because I played on Indiana’s last single-wing team. There was in my hometown a legendary coach who was still winning championships into the 70’s with the long snap and strongside sweeps by the tailback, led by a blocking back and fullback. When Coach Stokes retired, the entire county football establishment swung over to T-formations and Wishbones, and the era of the quarterback began belatedly for them.

Now the cost of equipment and liability insurance has pushed football, even with high tech helmets and orthopedic cleats, into a bit of a corner, and the Little Guy plays soccer with nary a look at football. Mom and Grandma are quite candidly relieved, and Great-grandma looks down from Heaven with a happy sign as well, I’m told. My dad’s blown-out knee and enough tales of two-a-days from me haven’t made the ladies of the family nostalgic for the grand old days of every lad trying out for the team, pushing the village fire truck up and down hills in August.

Many thanks to the players and families who keep alive fall football, the trainers and coaches who keep the players safer than they’ve ever been, and all the chain holders and concession stand workers and ticket takers who make sure that one autumn ritual is still available to us all, even if fewer of us are playing.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he was a tackle and guard on a number of valiantly losing teams through his football career. Tell him your sports story at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-8-07
Jeff Gill

Children Lost, and Found

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” said historian L.P. Hartley.

A story came out of Chicago recently that got me thinking about that strange land where tourists can’t readily travel.

Some folks of Greek ancestry did a little research into an odd corner of their Orthodox cemetery, and found that there were 160 unmarked graves, dating back to before 1935, with 22 buried in 1918 from the global influenza pandemic of that year.
And they were all children.

In looking for the causes for so many unmarked graves, laid to rest mostly before the Depression, the record keepers confronted some forgotten realities of an era just before our own. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1926 the number of children who died within the first year of life was 73 out of 1,000. That same figure today is less than 7 of 1,000 born.

Economics and cultural differences among Greek immigrants play a role, no doubt, but can you imagine the difference it would make in a neighborhood, around a church, for parents in general, if ten times as many small children died?

Just after reading that story, I heard a sermon preached about Methodist heritage, where the congregation was reminded that John Wesley’s mother Susanna was the 24th of 25th children, and that John and Charles were among 19 born to Susanna and her husband Samuel. Only ten of those 19 survived to adulthood, and no one is quite sure how many in the generation before, but likely half or less of the 25 lived.

How must that atmosphere have affected parenting? What does a mortality rate of 50%, and in those quantities, do to your sense of childhood?

Morbid enough?

Ah, but it gets worse. The superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park, John Latschar, recently revisited a speech he gave in 1995, considering whether, in Lincoln’s words, “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

He observed that, nearing the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks (as we approach the sixth), comparing the impact of the Civil War and 9-11 was both sobering, and instructive.

If you look at the numbers as a percentage of the American population, the death toll on the Gettysburg battlefield was the same as twenty-one September 11’s. For the Civil War as a whole, to compare today using population percentages, you would see 37.3 million in military service, and 6 million deaths. As a comparative percentage of the American population, there were 42 Civil War battles that were equal to or greater than the impact of 9-11 in casualties.

Imagine a Sept. 11 every month, for four years. Latschar says “One cannot even begin to comprehend how the nation could cope with such a horrific and prolonged struggle today.”

With the toll in Iraq creeping steadily toward 4,000 deaths, and tens of thousands more wounded (and that simply the American toll of this combat), we count our soldiers dear and grieve even the losses of those who oppose us. We have recalibrated our sensibility and adjusted our willingness to express our feelings over death, whether among children or combat troops.

There is, I think, no disputing that we are better off as a society for losing the indifference that we either once had, or learned to put on. What we have trouble making sense of is both the stoicism of generations past -- and sometimes still with us -- and what to do with the strong emotion evoked by sorrow and tragedy and loss.

Turning our personal grief inward and just plugging along we now see as something less than healthy. Pouring emotions of the moment all over public view doesn’t seem to bring much healing or resolution, either. How do we remember, and honor, and grieve, and learn from senseless tragedy?

Public rituals that make memory tangible can help weave frayed strands of community back together. Shared acts of commitment give a place and location to general feelings of helplessness, and places expression in a setting of communication, not just tirade.

Today we have candlelight vigils and peace rallies on street corners, ribbons on trees and roadside crosses. Pickup truck window clings and yes, even tattoos exist to give voice to sorrow that otherwise might find a more destructive outlet.

Grief and sorrow may not look quite how they once did, but from Antigone to Rizpah (see 2 Samuel 21:10), our enduring human reaction to death is to cherish and honor the dead as a way of showing what we value in life.

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