Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-19

Notes from my Knapsack 5-2-19

Jeff Gill

 

Laurels among the lilacs and redbuds

___

 

Granville is, indeed, the kind of town where if a local is featured in "The New Yorker" word gets around fast.

 

If you don't subscribe, you'll still hear about it sooner or later from someone. Even in a newspaper column!

 

David Baker not only got a review but an illustration in the April 8 edition; he's had his poetry published in that august platform before. You can see his recognizable image foregrounded against what the article will tell you are a couple of our much bemoaned, often hunted, rarely appreciated Granville deer.

 

A Denison professor since 1984, he's written about the natural side of living in our village, of traveling about its margins, and how our lives and hearts can be in tune with the music to be heard all around us, even when we live off key.

 

Reading this appreciation of our local bard got me to thinking. We do have a long tradition of literary excellence in Our Fayre Village, from David back through Minnie Hite Moody at Tannery Hill, past Charles Browne White the sage of Mount Parnassus, beyond even Ellen Hayes and Edgar J. Goodspeed and Mary Hartwell Catherwood.

 

If you don't know who those folk are, shame on me. I'll keep writing about them, and Jacob Little, too.

 

But for our working writers, of which we have many, I would offer my appreciation, and a thought. Should we have a Granville poet laureate?

 

Spring is a good time for poetry; this might be a good year, with a new performing arts center being completed at Denison on Broadway, and as public discourse is redacted and inflected and impacted by partisan debate, for us to have a little more poetry in our lives.

 

Maybe Dr. Baker is busy, perhaps there are other candidates. And no doubt some will say public time and resources could be better used for infrastructure or services. But I wonder if a poet laureate for Granville might be just what we need.

 

It's an honor, of course, but laurels are a sign of victory. That's why a crown of them was given to a winner, to someone outstanding in a particular event or contest. To say that there are words or outcomes that speak to a particular moment in an exceedingly successful way. Dave Lucas is our current Ohio poet laureate, who was himself mentored by Ohio's own Rita Dove who was the United States poet laureate; our current national "poet laureate consultant in poetry" is Tracy K. Smith.

 

It would be no real insight for me to nominate David Baker for our first village poet laureate – the challenge would be to pick the second one. The first, though, would be a step in the right direction. We are community that values education, which has near its heart both a College Hill and a Mount Parnassus, after all. The Muses themselves would call on us to crown with laurel an exemplar in expression, a poet laureate.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him your suggestions for various laurels at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-20-19

Faith Works 4-20-19

Jeff Gill

 

Recall the burning bush

___

 

The churches I grew up in are gone.

 

My home church, where I was baptized, where I first preached, was condemned and torn down; my mother's church where I attended many times each year, to where I often had my name in the Sunday School class book, burned down a few years back.

 

The campus ministry and its physical plant, where I met my wife as we both served as student ministers, and where we were married, is a business incubator for the university still across the street.

 

My seminary church, where I served as a student associate and briefly as associate pastor, burned down a year and a half into my time there on Christmas Day, late that evening. We renovated the education wing, worshiped there after a pilgrim period, and they rebuilt after I moved on; that congregation had another quarter century of solid ministry on that corner, but has since closed and given the property to a new church start of a different tradition.

 

And the church where I first went from there, after ordination, my first full time calling in ministry, is where I am again now as senior pastor; the building is still what it was when I first came to town in 1989, but then and now we're still haunted by stories of the fire that destroyed our downtown location, still a gap between the Telephone Building and Masonic Temple on Fourth St., in 1946 . . . just a few days after Christmas that year. The congregation was a pilgrim people, much of that time in the Newark High School gymnasium still standing behind the Avalon Apartments, off of Fifth St., for four years until they built the emphatically fireproof building we're in now.

 

So I don't think a curse follows me for church buildings, and Central Christian would be hard to burn down even on purpose, but we understand about fires, and changes, and transitions.

 

I don't mean to be in any way flippant about the tragedy of a historic building being gutted by fire. Notre-Dame de Paris will be rebuilt, and the historic fact of the matter is that it has been effectively rebuilt in many ways a number of times since its 1163 foundation. There may have been timbers in the roof trusses that went back that far (and farther, since they were 300 and 400 year old trees when cut in the 1100s for construction purposes), and it's a glory that the 1200s era rose windows were preserved intact so far.

 

But the U.S.S. Constitution, the Navy's pride, "Old Ironsides" of the War of 1812, still afloat in Boston Harbor: she's got maybe 10% of her original material in the keel and members from the bow to the stern. The ropes and sails of course have been replaced many times, and masts as well, plus a timber here, a bulwark there, and next thing you know . . . . who knows?

 

And they say the human body turns over its material, our "stuff" as it were, every seven years or so. Yet most of us have memories and a sense of continuity that go back a decade and more, don't we?

 

It is something ineffable, that breath of life, the Hebrew "ru'ach,"  our spirit or even the soul if you will, that makes us who we are. There's something of that in a building, a place, a presence of the community that is not reliant on any one arrangement of molecules.

 

When Moses encountered the living God in Exodus, he saw this divine presence as a bush that burned, but was not consumed. It's as if the basic reality of life and living is in the hands of something or Someone other than just the matter and energy at work in a visible, practical sense.

 

Notre-Dame will be rebuilt. Again. Churches will be filled on Easter morning. (Again!) And Christ is risen, again and again. Until we understand and come to a full realization that we, too, are made to be risen creatures, burning with a holy fire but not consumed by this world's flames.

 

May the joy of Easter be known in Paris, and in your life.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's going to be up early for the sunrise tomorrow! Tell him where you see new life ablaze at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-19

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-19

Jeff Gill

 

Going back, looking forward

___

 

Weeding in my flower beds is a useful exercise both for the look of the landscaping, and for the good of my body, maybe even my soul.

 

You can't be detached or disinterested and do a good job weeding. You have to be on your hands and knees, up close and personal, and your fingers generally need to dig into the soil.

 

Yeah, there are tools. Every year there are ads for products that you can use standing up, on a long handle, letting you weed or till or poke at the earth from your lofty five or six feet elevation. And they generally don't work other than in a transitory, surface level fashion. You gotta get the roots, and to do that you gotta get down.

 

From which vantage point you see things differently, of course. The ground now inches from your face, and the world around you when you look up, pause and take a breath. Even the cool of April allows a gardener to work up a sweat if they are pulling and cutting and hauling.

 

For a moment, weeding around a sturdy stand of daffodils, I looked up just a bit, glancing away from sprouting dandelion sprays of toothed leaves flat on the ground, and looked into the heart of those spring flowers.

 

Perhaps it's because I'd recently spent three days on retreat in a place where I sat often in an old stone cathedral, but there right in front of me was a glowing hallway of green pillars, a space defined within the cluster of daffodil stems, the soil level, the verdant uprights all around a shadowed but well lit space, the glow from above filtered through the yellow blossoms.

 

That space within was both small – perhaps six inches high and about that in diameter, but it felt in a rush like a vast space for a tiny occupant. It's a feeling not unusual for a child, kneeling on the sidewalk looking at an ant in a crack, strolling like a city dweller between the buildings, or if you're poking at a stone or log and when it rolls over, seeing the complex community of bugs and worms and beetles suddenly in motion, and you can almost glimpse what that looks like the other way round, with you as the giant, but the scurrying occupants of underneath the normal sized ones.

 

I saw myself, for a moment, standing in that span of half a foot, but marveling at looking up into the golden light above, and surrounded by vibrant green pillars all around me. For that moment, I could project myself into that reality, not quite virtual, but not what I actually am, either.

 

And then I went back to weeding. That's what grown-ups do, after all. But the moment has stuck with me.

 

No matter our age, if you get out into nature, if you look at small details, if you can change your frame of reference, you can go almost anywhere. To the edge of an event horizon and back, into the background of an ancient oil painting among the cast of characters, down into burrows in the ground or up the bark of a tree.

 

Children do this easily if we let them. If you're older, it takes a little more attention, but it's worth the effort. Because it changes how you see the work ahead, and the work has to get done.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's still got more weeding to do. Tell him about something small that made a big change in perspective at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-13-19

Faith Works 4-13-19

Jeff Gill

 

Silence is more precious than gold

___

 

When I first came to Newark thirty years ago, I was asked to participate in some ecumenical programs on behalf of our church, and in going to meetings I made a friend. Father Thomas Shonebarger was the priest at Blessed Sacrament, an active clergymember in our community, and promoter of much that could be shared in common among Christians.

 

He and I ended up having many conversations that ran far beyond our meetings at the Old Landmark Restaurant, now a parking lot off courthouse square, but where they had the best French Onion Soup I'll eat this side of heaven.

 

Father Tom became a mentor in ministry to me, and for the whole working group he was our theological grounding. He'd suggest each year in Lent that we should spend some time "contemplating our mortality." That phrase has stuck with me. "Contemplating our mortality."

 

He also told me about his seven years as a monk, where he discerned his calling to the priesthood, and back into the parish. We talked about parish ministry and he shared from his experience and wisdom; I should note that he was 57 when I left here for West Virginia, the age I am now. And he encouraged me to visit his monastic home, the abbey where he had been a brother, and from which he became a parish priest -- Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. His novice master was Thomas Merton, and when Merton died in 1968 in Thailand, Father Tom was one of his pallbearers, one of his last acts as a member of the community before leaving it to rejoin the Diocese of Columbus. But he kept in touch, and said he thought I would enjoy visiting there.

 

Three times I came to Gethsemani as a day visitor, and finally, 26 years later, I went back to stay for three precious days. I visited Merton's grave, remembered Father Tom in my prayers -- he died in 2012 at the age of 75 -- and kept the pattern of the monks for the time that I had from Monday evening to Thursday morning. Which included getting up each morning at 3 am for the first of seven services each day (which isn't so bad when you remember they go to bed at 8 pm), and the practice of silence.

 

I've done silent retreats before, but usually at the Loretto Motherhouse 12 miles to the east.  For me, it was a long-standing goal to spend at least a few days and nights at Gethsemani; if you have never heard of Thomas Merton, not to worry, but his life and legacy loom large on the American religious landscape even fifty years after his death, and his connections to central Ohio, Licking & Muskingum Counties, are a sermon in themselves.

 

What I found at Gethsemani, though, was unexpected. I discovered the Psalms.

 

As I said, they start early, those Trappist monks do, and seven times a day plus the Eucharist (what you might know of as Mass) gives you many opportunities to sing and chant or just listen to psalms read or shared together.

 

At Gethsemani Abbey, they go through all 150 psalms every two weeks, and more really, as quite a few get repeated for certain occasions. But ever since the first French Trappist monks arrived in December of 1848 they have prayed the psalms daily, and observed one form or another of a cycle that takes the community through the entirety of the Book of Psalms again and again. You see the words on the page, you hear the tuneless music of the chanted psalm, and you listen to your own voice and those of others softly singing around you.

 

On a weekday you become a part of a psalm or two at 3:15 am Vigils, 5:45 am Lauds, 6:15 am Eucharist, 7:30 am Terce, 12:15 pm Sext, 2:15 pm None, 5:30 pm Vespers, and 7:30 pm Compline. The names of the monastic hours comes from Latin and represent the rough approximation of time the medieval world found good enough: such as three hours after dawn, six, nine, and vespers for evening. Up with the vigil in the middle of the night for most of the world, and lauding the sunrise, and "Compline" simply means completed.

 

They sing them still, even after I've come home, whether we're paying attention to them or not. And somehow their faithfulness to the psalms keeps them alive for me in a new way now that I'm back here, words of faith and songs of hope, in a cycle that only God can bring to completion.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; yes, he was silent for three days! Tell him how long you think you could keep your peace at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.    

Faith Works 4-6-19

Faith Works 4-6-19

Jeff Gill

 

Walks like church, quacks like church?

___

 

After talking for a couple of weeks about "dechurchification" in our culture more generally, about weddings and funerals and a weekly schedule for families and individually, I want to look under the hood. Under the steeple, if you will.

 

A parishioner came to me last week and told me I'd never believe what they had experienced going to worship with a relative recently. And went on to describe what is still known as "contemporary" Christian worship, even though it's been around for nearly half a century now.

 

Contemporary is usually put up against "traditional," which may or may not be laid alongside "liturgical," a style of worship with much tradition behind it, and generally follows a set order of worship, often a bulletin or program or missal, and generally quite a bit of history, as well.

 

Recently, I went on a three day silent retreat down at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, just south of Bardstown. Some in my circles, being mostly Protestant, asked me why I'd go to a Catholic establishment for a retreat. What the questions got me to thinking about it that, for younger folks like my own son, the distance between the ancient order of worship followed by the Trappist monks of Gethsemani and our Sunday service at my own congregation seems shorter than between our regular worship outline and the style of contemporary praise and worship he's used to.

 

Contemporary worship uses contemporary music, or what's called CCM for "contemporary Christian music" and has entire segments of radio station formats and satellite radio channels devoted to this genre. And a Christian church following a contemporary format usually opens with a music set of three to five songs, for which much of the congregation stands and sings along. After that, or woven between the songs, comes prayer, an offering is taken where not everyone participates because most give electronically, and then a sermon is shared making full use of the screens on which you'd just gotten done reading the song lyrics from – there are no hymnals. (Or announcements. Or often bulletins. If there are, it's more of a newsletter of upcoming events than an outline of the day's service.)

 

And they tend to be about ninety minutes long. The sermons are closer to 40 minutes than twenty, and the end of the service may have one last song from the praise team, or more often CCM recordings are played as people depart.

 

As I said, I recently had a member of my own church express their amazement that anyone worships like this. But I also had another member tell me about an encounter when in conversation the concepts of "choir" or "anthem" or "hymns" had to be explained to a perfectly intelligent and thoughtful modern individual. For life-long churchgoers in a traditional or liturgical tradition, our assumptions that a) most people today worship in generally the way we do, and b) even those who don't go to church are familiar with our traditional pattern of prayer and praise are rapidly being broken down.

 

Today, liturgical worship is an acquired taste. It's not the mainstream anymore. And that's not saying it won't survive, doesn't have a relevance, or shouldn't continue – but it does mean that those of us used to and using an order of worship have to be ready to explain what we do, justify in certain ways why we do it the way we do, and communicate to often a resistant and confused visitor why doing prayer and praise this way has value. For generations, we could assume a visitor would at least think on first encounter "well, yeah" but in fact many enter our buildings and go "what the . . ."

 

Trends are moving towards windowless spaces oriented for CCM music set-ups and screens for almost entirely a visual experience rather than a print explanation in the hand. Traditional worship spaces struggle in many cases to accommodate these expectations; some resist them directly. I hope to share more about my time with the monks in preparation for Easter this year, and with them, I think there's a place for holding onto tradition . . . but it is not going to be the expectation or assumption of many in the foreseeable future.

 

Traditional has become almost counter-cultural!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he actually was silent for three days, truth. Tell him how long you think you could do silence at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.