Notes from my Knapsack 8-6-20

Notes from my Knapsack 8-6-20

Jeff Gill

 

It's really just not fair

___

Normally, he said, starting a paragraph the way too many are beginning these days, I would be preparing to help open the Hartford Fair with an ecumenical worship service Sunday morning, as the sun rises over the Natural Resources pavilion, and with sheep and goats singing out nearby.

 

Nope. Not this year! The least of many losses. More significantly, I won't be eating a corn dog or pulled pork sandwich or fair ice cream barn cone this year. Oh, and I'm resigning my job as a parish minister that Sunday.

 

Yeah, it's been a weird year in many ways. No, I am NOT old enough to retire, and I hope that's not actually what I'm doing . . . though if this all goes on long enough, that's what it will turn out to have been. But my wife and I have roots here in Granville, but each a parent in Indiana, both of whom are quite intent on staying there (hey, it's a nice state in many ways, we're both from there) but each of whom has needs. As people who are moving into the upper end of elderly, their needs require a certain amount of direct support, and I'm going to become a more active part of that plan.

 

We aren't moving, but we do need to be very careful about our social contacts with the general public as we are primary social contacts with our parents. To be blunt, we don't want to transmit coronavirus to them. So going to the fair, or leading a crowd of relative strangers in song, then driving to Indianapolis to help tend to business with a 91 year old who's fine, just fine, thank you very much, and when are you coming next? Nope, that's not going to work.

 

And my resignation is less to do with the complications of church life as it does with the needs and expectations of ministry, which takes me regularly into settings where, even as the congregation itself couldn't be more flexible and careful, I end up in the middle of groups of . . . well, relative strangers who in many cases are not interested in either masks or social distancing. It's not fair, either to me, or to the church I serve, but the fact of being out and around means having to be in contact with people who reject coronavirus precautions, which means I need to leave my job. I am fortunate that I have that flexibility at this juncture in my life, and a great deal of sorrow for those who have the same concerns in their lives, but can't do what I'm doing to protect the people I love.

 

It's not fair, but as my son has heard all through his growing up years, the fair is in Croton, and it's not August . . . except here it is August, and the Harford Fair is on, but I'm not going. Which doesn't seem fair. What I can do is look forward to the day when I can go back, and maybe even sing a hymn, and eat a Trojan Burger. Not at the same time, though.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he will need to change that tag line in a couple of weeks. Tell him about changes you've had to make during coronatimes at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 8-1-20

Faith Works 8-1-20

Jeff Gill

 

Don't make any major decisions

___

When you have a major loss in your life, people always say, and rightly so, "don't make any major decisions."

 

The logic is that when you've been under great stress, grief, or exertion, you are less mentally and spiritually ready to make tough choices than you would be with some time and rest and renewal behind you. It's kind of the emotional version of "don't shop while you're hungry." Who knows what you'll buy at the grocery store if you haven't eaten for a while, right?

 

Except the problem is always that this is exactly when we all have to make major decisions, when it's already been a hard stretch of road. This is why you've read here before my exhortations to make your end of life plans now, not just so you don't have to in a difficult context, but so those who love you don't have to wonder the day after you're gone "what did they want us to do, anyhow?"

 

It's so often one of the worst days in many people's lives when they have to make choices about things no one wants to think about. You can buffer or cushion that impact, but you can't take the burden away entirely. The main thing is to not make it heavier and harder.

 

I'd already brought this up about "the Hidalgo Effect" and understanding that your reaction times, your peripheral vision, your self-assessment is measurably worse when you've been under stress. (This is how two good drivers got into a wreck on the way to picking up their father's ashes.) You have to make allowances for not entirely being yourself. And under the pressures of COVID-19, we all need to give ourselves and each other a little slack.

 

All of which is why I wish I weren't having to make a major vocational choice right now, and where I'm at least looking for helpful lessons to pass along to the rest of you. Mostly, I'm just shaking my head at the ironies of our time and circumstance. But as it turns out, a week from tomorrow I preach my last sermon for the congregation I serve . . . from the front steps of the church porch to a parking lot full of cars, whose occupants are invisible behind the glare of the rising 10:30 am sun. I had not yet given my last sermon much thought, and if I had, it wasn't about how I'd preach through a low power FM signal to a congregation sitting in their vehicles, running the air conditioning to survive even an abbreviated service in the summer sun.

 

Wild stuff, eh? But my situation is simply that I need to refocus to help with family matters, intensified by coronavirus but this would have had to have been the case even if we weren't on state health department restrictions. My wife and I each have a surviving parent who has needs, and both of them happen to be in Indiana with no intention of moving. Neither do we, and my wife is continuing in her work here in Ohio while doing some virtual commuting, but soon I will be doing more of the back-and-forth. Since our parents are both up into the high risk zone as elderly persons, we need to be extra cautious about our social contacts, masks or otherwise. (By the way, all the questions you're thinking of that start "have you thought about…" can be answered "yes.")

 

So I have resigned as a pulpit minister, while resisting the term "retiring." And my "last sermons" I really hope will not be preached this Sunday or next, but it's hard to know for sure. How long will this virus still be a threat to older, more vulnerable people? For how many years will we need to do the particular kind of support we're gearing up for right now? As the song says, "God only knows." Perhaps I'll preach again, supply or interim or something else, but for now, my ministry is to my family.

 

It has been a good ministry in the church I serve, since May of 2012. I had more of a twelve to fifteen year plan when we started out, but between spasmodic dysphonia and global pandemic and joining the sandwich generation of starting to care for parents just as you stop caring for children, to use the archaic phrase: "man proposes but God disposes." It's not the best time to step down, for me or the church, but when is?

 

Newark Central has plans and leadership moving forward to take them onwards into God's plan for the church, and I'll be around here as long as the Advocate has space on the Faith page, in pixels or on paper. Because this is home, friends!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he will need to change that tag line in a couple of weeks. Tell him about changes you've had to make during coronatimes at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

 

Faith Works 7-25-20

Faith Works 7-25-20

Jeff Gill

 

The Hidalgo Effect

___

A week and a half after my father died in south Texas, I drove in a rental van with his ashes and a load of Mom's belongings north to Indiana.

 

It was the second half of March, and as I drove out of the Rio Grande Valley the Midwest already had stay-at-home orders being imposed, but that place had one reported case of coronavirus. Now they have tens of thousands, and they're looking at their first county shut-down of all but essential businesses.

 

We're all weary of the numbers, and the categories, and the reports, and how to deal with the implications of what may or might or likely will happen. The mask debate is, in my opinion, a more visible and specific argument about the whole general question of what we can do, what we should do, and what we must do. Even if it's going to a restaurant and ordering off the menu, let alone sending our children to school.

 

A couple of pastoral notes here: first, this too shall pass. It will not be forever. Some changes will endure – I think we will look at seasonal flu differently, and some of the sanitation and disinfecting procedures will stay with us, perhaps because we always should have done them during the heart of that six month annual stretch.

 

But between microbiology and evolution and treatment improvements, let alone vaccines, this will effectively end. Maybe in a year or so, maybe longer (but I don't think that long), but it will be over. So take a deep breath, and let's face the immediate issues without hyperventilating over "this will be with us forever!" I'm sure they felt that way about cholera and tuberculosis and polio, and those were horrible and culture changing infectious agents, but they were not forever. This won't be, either.

 

And speaking of TB sanitariums and public health orders: this is not new. Not at all. We've been here before. America has been extremely fortunate that we last dealt with something like this in 1919; concerns were accurately raised, but never really fully developed, about Swine flu and H1N1 and SARS and Ebola, because they never really took off here, for a variety of reasons. This virus did, and we have to deal with it. We actually are, fairly well, considering, and we will have to be vigilant in new ways, because it's probably not going to be another century before we have to do this again.

 

What we all, churches and communities and leaders and clergy have to be ready to do, is minister to the very real trauma we have all experienced. Saying we all have PTSD might be a bit of a reach, but any trauma has stresses in the post-period. And make no mistake, this has been a social trauma which will trip us up in unexpected ways.

 

I've told people dealing with grief about this reality for many years: you will find the loss, and your mourning, to pop up in odd ways at strange moments, and seriously – it messes with your short term memory, and your reaction times. Be ready for that, be kind to yourself, and be careful. Take care not to make major decisions (HA! many say rightly, because how do you not make major decisions right after a death?), and be a little extra careful. It will take weeks, maybe months, for things to steady on for you, and that's okay.

 

So many people have heard me say this. And I said it to my sister, as we stood in the sun by the side of the road in Hidalgo, Texas. I mentioned at the start I drove back to Indiana a rental van. My parents had a van in Pharr, Texas where they wintered, but . . . we wrecked it. My sister and I were out on a list of errands, having flown down to be with Mom and take care of business for her. He had now been dead five days, and we both had adjusted to waking up to this reality. We were fine, talking about things we normally did, laughing and joking, giddy even, and . . . BAM. An awkward merge, a speeding vehicle, and boom, the van was a steaming total wreck. (Did I mention our next stop was to pick up the ashes? Yeah.)

 

Short term memory, reaction times, skewed perceptions. After a loss, following great stress, there's a price to be paid. PTSD? Dunno. Maybe we could call it "the Hidalgo Effect." But I think once this is all behind us, we're all going to have a little of it ahead of us to get over. And we will need then, as we need now, to be kind to one another, as well as to love one another.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's working through his Hidalgo Effects by writing. Tell him how you deal with stress and trauma at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-23-20

Notes from my Knapsack 7-23-20

Jeff Gill

 

Ants, roots, and time

___

 

Many of you reading this have been where I am now. My father died in March, and we're working on a much delayed, extremely limited memorial service this month, over in Indiana where I'm from.

 

He died in Texas, and of course he was cremated; I drove his ashes back as my sister flew my mother home from where they had been used to spending almost half the year, down on the Rio Grande. Mom's with my sister and her family, and up nearer Chicago where we all grew up, we have a house.

 

This is the house my three siblings were brought back to from the hospital; I came to that town six weeks old, and my earliest memory is being not even three years old, and visiting the construction site where my dad worked weekends building that home.

 

So all six of us have had since 1963 to fill the house, and the addition Dad built some years later after the youngest was born, with stuff. And now we get to sort and sift and recycle and pitch that stuff. Mom is situated where she neither needs nor can have much more stuff than we brought back from Texas (and there was some hasty sifting and sacking down there), so this is it. We need to sell the house to give Mom some options moving forward, as well. She can't live on her own in it without Dad, and it's just too far from any of the four of us to make that work in any case.

 

I've been back three times so far, with the fourth ahead for Dad's memorial. I sit on the front stoop, and watch the sun set and the streetlight down on the corner come on, the time honored signal to be home. The front walk since 1963 curves from the front door to the intersection of the sidewalk and driveway, down a modest slope.

 

At the midpoint of that arc, there's a slab that's not quite true, and a patch of grass to the right that's a bit thin. For nearly sixty years, my dad fought a losing battle with ants. I think he used some of the insecticides you'd expect, but it was never a major issue, and he tended to try to low key his chemical use. He wasn't averse to them, but in this as in many things he was a moderate. But last summer he bemoaned to me as we stood on the front porch, leaving for what would be my next-to-last visit with him in residence, that the ants kept coming back, and their colony was slowly but steadily moving that cement panel in the sidewalk.

 

Ants live a few years at most, many only weeks. Dad was 85 at his passing, and had outlived many individual ants; the dang colony, though, was ticking along nicely. They'll be the next owner's problem. Dad also worried about the maples we'd planted years after moving in, and how their roots were infiltrating annually the drainpipes. He worried correctly, and now my sister and I are conferring on how we've moved from usual quick fix to needing to trench across the yard and replace the pipe entirely. Which might go right through that recurrent ant colony.

 

I watch the ants with less worry than my dad did, and think about the root problem with a level of resignation. The streetlight has come on, and it's time to go home. But it isn't here anymore.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's sorting out many things these days. Tell him how you keep your priorities sorted out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-18-20

Faith Works 7-18-20

Jeff Gill

 

To everything there is a season, and a time

___

Next Saturday, I will be helping conduct my father's memorial service in Indiana. Like so many people, it's been over four months since his passing, and there's a strange quality to the processes of grief and mourning and so-called closure in these stuttering and stammering steps through the valley of the shadow of death.

 

In fact, before coronavirus upended everyone's applecarts, this stately sequence was already getting interrupted and spread out. The increasing prevalence of cremation, and less of a sense of sacred time and liturgical guidelines in many traditions, and the fact of fewer households having a church connection in the first place, has led to dramatic changes that preceded and will only intensify after the times we are now in.

 

As a serving parish minister, there was a rhythm to how it once was. At least for a couple of generations, you got "the call." Aunt Sadie died. Perhaps you expected it, maybe it was a complete surprise; Sadie might be at the hospital, or at home, but before smartphones and texting she would probably be at the funeral parlor before you even heard.

 

As a pastor, you'd find out who was where, what presence was needed, and as you discussed their immediate needs, in the back of your head you'd begin a series of calculations: today is Tuesday, meet with the funeral director on Wednesday, obituary appears in the paper Thursday, calling Friday and funeral Saturday. The sequence was inexorable, but consistent. Maybe an extra day, depending on the time of day when the passing and "the call" was made (late in the day pushes things back one more), possibly two but even that was unusual. Sundays were never a day for a memorial service, period. No one asked, and both churches and funeral homes didn't offer. And even Saturday services were rare.

 

Smash cut to the present. While some church traditions have firm (and I would add understandable) rules about no services on Sundays, for most of us it's just a tradition . . . and funeral homes are not against it at all. Many cemeteries have an extra charge for weekend committals, but families can work around that with a Sunday service and a private committal on Monday on the way out of town.

 

And in fact, with cremation now rocketing up past 70% with no sign of slowing, there's really no pressure. Unless you want a viewing, which many no longer request, it's quite common for cremation to happen almost immediately, and the services to be held . . . later. And the placing of the remains even later.

 

So not only is the old pattern broken, it's spread out. There's caring for the loved ones immediately after the shock of death, no matter how expected. Then there's the arrangements, which are now commonly a swift cremation but the formal meetings and signatures and payments that go with that. Weeks, even months later, the service, and committal weeks or months after that. A quick sequence of three or four days is now, for immediate family and for the ministry leaders involved, a complicated schedule that stretches across a season, or a year.

 

Dad died in Texas over four months ago. Cremation was pretty much obligatory (you don't want to know what it costs today to ship remains cross country), and before I got there, of necessity. I drove his ashes and a vanload north while my sister flew our mother home. And while yes, it's coronavirus shaped, our multi-month arc is not and will not be unusual. And yes, we're doing a Saturday service because that's ideal for other family traveling, not that as many will be able to come as might have been in other times. But clergy and funeral directors quietly converse about what we do as almost everyone starts to want Saturdays . . . there's only 52 of those!

 

And committal? Honestly, it will probably wait until a later day, and different circumstances. Mom and Dad have a plot and a plan and that plan isn't quite completed yet.

 

In all of this we have a former pattern of grief and support and recovery that's shattered and swept away, and frankly as a pastor myself, I can't yet make sense of it. We congregations and clergy need to rethink how we do many things, and the grieving process is one of them. I'm taking notes, of a sort, as I work out my own.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's sorting out many things these days. Tell him how you keep your priorities sorted out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.