Faith Works 7-24-21

Faith Works 7-24-21

Jeff Gill

When Jesus is enough

___

While this column has been intended from its outset to be aimed at anyone interested in how faith gives shape to our lives and actions, how "faith works," it's only honest for your columnist to admit he comes at this from a Christian perspective.

I believe the Christian witness is true, even if there may be particular points of application where other Christians and I do not entirely agree.

So I have been talking this summer about a concept that has more church context than everyday usage, with the word "stewardship." I can extend my context to Judeo-Christian in pulling in the Genesis witness to what God is up to in creation, and how both Jews and Christians — along with many others, to be sure — understand that we have not just been given this world to use and abuse, but to tend and care for: stewards of creation.

Some look at those same Biblical texts and put the weight a bit more towards dominion and domination than others of us would, but the context of having a divinely mandated responsibility for how we care for creation in whole and of its parts is pretty clear. We are stewards, caretakers for a time, of a lasting cosmos around us. Humans may have levels of thought and reason and responsibility that are different than those of ocelots and armadillos, but we're also part of the whole even as we're particularly obligated to care for the whole.

There are those who interpret that stewardship call on humanity to mean we should be vegetarians, others who say we should be sparing in our eating of meat, and some would just say stewardship means being mindful of what meat-eating says about our place in the larger plan. Like I said, there are divergences in application when we talk about stewardship. I heard a very useful sermon in seminary, as I prepared for parish ministry, entitled "Do shepherds eat mutton?" It's an interesting question to reflect on, not just about dinner entrees.

But my own Christian orientation takes me to a perspective I like to sum up, like that sermon title, a great deal of consideration in just a few words of reflection: Jesus is enough.

Saying "Jesus is enough" is a limiting principle that doesn't lend itself as well as I might like to a newspaper column. It works out in the living of it, by using the person and place of Jesus as a yardstick, a unit of measure, a ruler (in more ways than one!) for knowing where "enough" is.

But I think I can say to you all here that the starting point, for anyone, Christian or not, is to admit there are limits. Necessary and absolute limits. I am not eternal. I am not infinite. I am not everything. If I'm none of those things, then I have limits I need to respect.

Yes, there are human imposed limits on people that are wrong, even evil — discrimination, stereotypes, racism and bigotry, sexism and stigma — which we need to overcome at times. This, for me, is where Jesus comes in as a crowbar as well as a master key, but to say "I'm more than you think I am" is still not adding up to "therefore I am everything."

And where I believe faith is at odds with the spirit of our age: as a Christian, I find myself ruefully shaking my head at "I can do anything" let alone "I can have everything." I would argue that hunger for more, more, more can be traced back to a concept we shorthand as "sin." We can't have everything, and we shouldn't. Often wanting more is just a fig leaf for wanting it all, and I don't believe we can have that.

If in Jesus, through him, we have everything we need, then I don't need everything. And perhaps I can even find my way to knowing what is enough. And enough is usually a bit less than what I want.

How much is enough? Stay tuned: it's a long summer!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still working on knowing how much is enough. Tell him how you've got it figured out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-29-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-29-21

Jeff Gill

Layers of narrative at Munson Springs

___

For me, the discovery of a fluted point in relatively undisturbed subsoil is an event in our local prehistory that takes us back, both 10,000 years or more when it was left in the ground by Paleoindian hunters, and its find by archaeologists a year before I moved to Licking County.

Where the layers of history that make up the Munson Springs site intersect most directly with my own story was when in November of 1989 my trowel pinged off a unifacial scraper, a piece of flint not really diagnostic as to dating in itself, but found within centimeters of the previous season's fluted point…and of the same type flint, along with a scattering of flakes made from more of the same.

With that find, a lone fluted point became a toolkit assemblage of sorts, and possibly even a base camp for those ancient early hunters across these hills and valleys. Just a few weeks later, all of us from the Munson Springs dig became involved in the excavation and recovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, not directly related but of the same general era, with dating more precisely made there to 11,500 years before the present.

From that fluted point to the "settler" period of Granville history, the amazing thing about the area around the intersection of Newark-Granville Road and Cherry Valley Road is that we have in one place a meaningful indication in and on the land of every epoch. Paleoindian period stone tools, Archaic projectile points, Adena and Hopewell era mounds, late prehistoric Native American presence on the landscape, and then the arrival of the first Euro-American colonists.

At Galway Drive a marker reminds us of the first over-wintering settlers in 1801 from the East into Granville Township, Lillie and John Jones with their three children. The next year she bears their fourth child, dies a few weeks after, and the rest of the family departs: but nearby, just east of them, a quiet part of our pioneer story remains. Patrick Cunningham, born in Ireland, veteran of the Revolutionary war, thrice-widowed, had built his cabin just beyond the springs, where the Jones cabin was closer to the foot of the hill.

Cunningham helped bury Lillie Jones, and aided her extended family in moving her remains first to Newark after their establishment of a formal cemetery following 1802's plat of that town, then again after early Granville's leaders laid out the Old Colony Burying Ground. Before they did that, their main wagon train camped on the open land south of Munson Springs on November 16, 1805, the night before their entry into today's four corners and establishment of the village as we know it. Cunningham through those early years planted apple seedlings purchased from Johnny Appleseed on those south facing slopes, and an early account notes his orchards and cabin foundation could still be seen in 1889, though he had died in 1832. His son William fought in the War of 1812, dying of disease on his way home from the Ft. Meigs area and buried in the Old Franklinton Cemetery across the Scioto from Columbus in 1814.

By this time, Licking County has been marked off from Fairfield County, of which we were a part until 1808. From Smucker's 1876 history: "the County of Licking was organized with the following persons as its first Judicial and County Officers… Judge of Common Pleas Court, William Wilson; Associate Judges Alexander Holmes, Timothy Rose, & James Taylor; Clerk of Court Samuel Bancroft; Sheriff John Stadden, and Treasurer Elias Gilman…" (who promptly would go back into the village and build his house which stands just off of College St. today).

The account continues: "The first Court was held at the house of Levi Hays, four miles West of Newark and two miles east of Granville. There not being room in the house, the Grand Jury held its inquest under a tree…" directly across from Fackler's Garden Center today, and just down the hill from our historic Munson Springs. Our county's literal foundation begins at that historic intersection.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's convinced our history still speaks in this landscape, if we listen closely. Tell him what you've heard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-15-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-15-21

Jeff Gill

Munson Springs flows with local history

___

A tract of land north of the intersection of Newark-Granville Road and Cherry Valley Road is rich with history. We've seen new development nearby, but along with the Great Lawn of the Bryn Du Mansion, it's one of the last open stretches open for preservation on our village's eastern gateway, and there's reason to consider our doing so.

Full disclosure: I have been part of the discovery of this historical narrative, and I confess to some personal interest in how more people can become aware of what a hinge of history that intersection is, and can be. When I first moved to Licking County in August of 1989, I came with an archaeology degree in my background, and arrived just in time to attend a conference held by the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society (LCALS), with speakers from National Geographic, Ohio State's faculty, and scholars from around the country.

That event got me introduced to Paul Hooge, the founder and executive director of LCALS, which had been doing summer field seasons with different archaeology programs including Ohio State on what was known as the Murphy tract. Soon I'd end up on the board of LCALS, but it was for only a few weeks later I would be invited to come help with the last day of that field season, which was going to be some site clean-up and the grunt work of backfilling and closing down a site for the winter.

There was snow in the air and a chill already on the ground when I showed up, and Paul introduced me to someone who would become a lifelong friend, Brad Lepper. He and I were assigned to cleaning off the sides of a unit dug to one side of a trench through a mound near what was already being called the Munson Springs, named for the farmstead at the heart of the Murphy tract. The house and barns still stood where now is the Glen at Erinwood, just east of Jones Road on the north side of Newark-Granville Road.

In another year, the Murphys would close down our work, and begin their intended development; along with facilitating some truly important archaeological digs, they would help with preserving the historic 1810 Munson home, which was moved a half mile east and across the road to become the core of the new Welsh Hills School. But the Munson Springs site had been given another year of work because in the previous year's site closure, an excavator had found a fluted point in the side of the trench.

Fluted points are relatively rare, and almost never found "in situ," in the ground where last they were left. Often in Licking or Coshocton Counties they are found in plowed fields after rains, knocked about and not necessarily located where they were deposited. They date to the first human occupation of this are, 10-13,000 years ago, just as the last glaciers were retreating north. Paleoindian hunters sought out mastodons and mammoths, elk and caribou, and of course deer, using wood and stone tools, the flint projectile points on their spears carefully crafted with a characteristic fluting flake off the base.

There are less than a dozen "in situ" fluted point finds in Ohio: one was within today's village limits, at the Munson Springs site. But this is only the beginning of the story!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he finds scraping and sifting soil to be therapeutic under the right circumstances. Tell him how you relax at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-17-21

Faith Works 7-17-21

Jeff Gill

Everything's not fine, but not so bad either

___

For a few weeks, I've been asking some questions as a person of faith, with a worldview shaped by what church people call "Scripture and tradition," about whether or not things are as bad as you might think.

If you've been reading my reflections for any time at all, you know I have a running issue with the fact that, for many so-called opinion purveyors, worry and concern and anxiety and even fear are how they earn their income.

Nervous people don't change the channel. If you're shocked or provoked by "this weird trick" or what "you won't believe" you are more likely to click the link, turn the page, continue on into the story, read the second page of the three page mailer with a postage-paid return envelope. Getting people worked up into a state is how fundraisers and direct mail goobers and not a few media outlets pay the bills. So there is a huge bias towards bad news and dread invoking possibilities.

My long-time favorite example is how most people have been convinced by implication and innuendo that high school graduation rates have fallen over the last half century, when the opposite is the case. And the general case is made by quotations from antiquity on down, and by antiquity I mean written in cuneiform on clay tablets, about how the younger generation is ruder, more in a hurry, and less respectful of their elders than has ever been true. So we have a general tendency to believe these gloomy scenarios.

While I think education and opportunity and possibilities are better for more people today than at any point in U.S. history, I don't think we live in the Beloved Community promised for the end of the age. We're a long way from being as good and as happy as we could be, as I believe God wants us to be. And much of our misery is self-inflicted, which is why I hate seeing government and politics giving us more ways to make ourselves miserable. I can be convinced by many libertarian arguments, to be honest, but while I don't want to see many things made illegal, I dread the apparently inevitable advent of legal weed, online gambling, or even expanded access to fireworks let alone firearms. 

Where I think one's faith can be most helpful, and what faith communities can do when lobbying the legislature is of no avail, is to teach . . . truth. And while I get most of the email and other communications from interest groups that any minister sees, telling us how to define truth in terms of political issues and partisan candidacies, I reserve the right to define truth separately from the spirit of the age I live in, even when it's a sensibility I might agree with.

Truth, in scripture, is a simple matter of cause and effect, action and reaction. And I frame it less often than some might wish as morality as I do stewardship. Truth is that if I drop a hammer, it will land on my big toe. Yes, I've seen the video, there are exceptions: if I'm on the space station, if there's a really high wind, et cetera. But in general, Scripture & tradition are reliable as norms, and dropping a hammer means something's gonna land hard. So rather than tossing a hammer to one side, I set it down, with care, watching out for people and property.

Likewise, sex. Folks, we can talk this one to death but the reality is the spirit of our age spent decades trying to convince us all that if we could have more sex more freely we'd be happier. Forty years of pastoral counseling and I'm pretty clear that hypothesis has been disproven. The Bible teaches that sexual intimacy is fire, a flame that can spread easily and burn indiscriminately. It needs a hearth, a safe setting, a secure environment to be a blessing and not a bane.

Fireworks, sexuality, it's all a question of good stewardship to me as a preacher. There's little enough we can legislate or regulate if we don't have more individuals committed to the stewardship of the time and resources and gifts God has given us, to use with care what blesses us with the good of others in mind.

If there's anything wrong in our world today, it's not so much the lack of things as it is having more of a sense of enough. I hope to conclude with a word about "enoughness" next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if there's a good way to to know how much is enough, he'd be happy to hear it from you. Tell him how you set boundaries and practice stewardship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-10-21

Faith Works 7-10-21

Jeff Gill

What's wrong, and what's to be done?

___

Having committed some inexcusable and apparently, to some, unforgivable lapses of optimism recently, I'm willing — but only in the context of my prevailing hopefulness — to share a few of my less encouraging, more worrisomely concerned takes.

As a Christian, let alone a person with a calling to faith community leadership in preaching and ministry, my hope is in the cross. That means I have a peculiar relationship to hope at best. Call it pessimistic optimism, or optimistic pessimism either way. I believe things will work out for the good, but likely through a very painful and temporarily unpleasant pathway. Like, say, the cross.

In the cross of Christ I glory, which means I have my hope anchored in heaven and eternity, but I see how the way there means suffering and sacrifice along that Way. It's in the Book, it's part of the operating manual, it's what we've been told to expect.

And I trust in God to use our mistakes, our missteps, for a greater good. My theology unpacks it this way: that in each moment, God is working for our blessing, and in almost every moment, we fall short of making the best use of everything God has given us, so God is eternally and infinitely working on Plan B. There's a vast and majestic Plan A guiding the whole, but in any one moment or life span we are all called to be co-creators, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling as Paul says, and to trust grace in how we will mess that up and that Divine Providence is constantly sweeping up behind us.

So for what's wrong, let's start small. Fireworks. I think it's a horrible, terrible, no-good idea to (as the vendors all agree and are preparing for) double the amount of consumer fireworks going into private hands and in many cases blowing up in them. Someone said on Twitter last weekend that we should keep in our prayers those for whom this is the last day they'll have ten fingers; the news has told us about how even youth and wealth are no protection from amateurs using not-quite-high explosives in their backyards, with death the occasional result. Am I happy about legalizing fireworks use? No. Is this a problem for the church? Well, we preachers can talk about stewardship and the care and keeping of fingers, I guess, but in general, no.

Sports betting on your phone. Hey folks, I have spent now over a year shuttling back and forth to my home state of Indiana, where sports books are all competing like mad for your $5 bets and credit card numbers with access to notifications on your devices. My social media as soon as I'm over the border lights up with betting ads and posts, thanks to geographic ID, and it's . . . well, to me, it's nauseating. Not because I think gambling is a deep moral evil per se, but because all the claims of "they'll bet anyhow" and "Ohio is losing money to other states" and "it's recreational" are belied by the tiny notices of where to call to deal with addiction and gambling. It's going to be what it always is: a tax on ignorance, a burden on those already behind the 8 ball (I'm fine with pool, you see), and the most regressive form of paying for public costs we could come up with. I hate it, and ask my son how I feel about the word "hate."

Yes, churches fought gambling in Ohio for years; when the constitutional amendment workaround prevailed on the ballot, most have given up and caved in. I don't encourage churches to spend much time shouting at the tide on sports betting as state policy, but I can assure you preachers will mostly be warning their flocks: it's not good stewardship.

More worries? Sure. How about guns? I'm not taking a position here on the Second Amendment or pacifism, I'm just going to say it: there are too many guns out there. We have more firearms than people in the US, and too many idiots (let alone lawbreakers) can easily get ahold of a pistol when they're in a mood. Do I think guns are evil? Nope. But our (everybody, now) stewardship of what we've been given should ask why we're spending so much on overpowered weaponry we don't know how to handle.

Enough for now? Next week, come back and we can worry about sex. How's that for concern trolling?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he worries about plenty, thank you very much. Tell him about what you hope for at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 7-3-21

Faith Works 7-3-21

Jeff Gill

What if the Golden Age is today?

___

If some things are better today, am I writing off yesterday?

This is part of the question that previous columns have provoked, and I'm not ready to drop the subject yet.

When I suggested that "the good old days" were not great for everyone, I knew it would poke some sore spots. If you have good memories of how life in downtown Newark and around Licking County were, I have no interest whatsoever in taking them away, or even stomping on them before giving them back to you.

What I am interested in is the process of adding some depth to the picture, to look at angles not always in the center of the frame, and to see what the shadows can tell us.

In a pragmatic way, I love a series of books by William A. Frassanito about Gettysburg (where he lives) and Antietam and other Civil War battlefields, where he takes classic photography of the era, and uses the shadows and certainties of the older landscape to revisit and reassess what we can learn from visiting those places today. He uncovered some "arranging" and reframing that tells us today about parts of the story from then that were created, crafted, and in some cases just not true. Errol Morris has done much the same in documentary films and the pages of the New York Times.

There are shadows over Newark and Licking County in the century between 1880 & 1980 that, when looked at closely, reveal both detail within the darkness, and also some achievements worth noting that have been obscured. It's a package deal, in faith community life or civic affairs: you take the rain with the rainbow, the storm with the sunny day. If you try to make everything sunlight and warmth you end up with overexposed desert.

By the same token, we have quite a bit that's been done in recent years which I fear we miss out on appreciating as we might because of how we try to compare it to a Golden Age that maybe never was. Church life deals with this all the time: the idea that in the 1950s and 1960s everyone went to church, we all could keep our doors unlocked, and the stores all stayed closed on Sunday so we would all stay home and memorize Romans.

Do I think there's less Bible-by-heart work done today than formerly? Yeah, I think that's a fair point. I could also ask pastorally if we can be sure we were getting the outcomes we hoped for from making "memory verses" the heart of our youth programs. Mark Twain was writing caustically about the ways and means of memorization of scripture in 1876: go find a copy of "Tom Sawyer" and read it for yourself.

So last week I was asking out loud about education and industry, and whether or not we can't make a case for how we live in a Golden Age of sorts, with more high school graduates, more students with disabilities given both schooling and opportunities, and new paths into the workforce, than we've had in generations. What we've lost, and please believe me when I say I feel with you the lack of it, is a way for young people who don't want to keep on going into school buildings and sitting in classrooms to be able to make a way for themselves, towards a secure living and stable housing and a contented home life. The path into factory work and family living is not what it was.

We don't want to jam every high school graduate into a college program if that's not where they're called. But likewise, many more young people have paths forward other than factory work and hourly employment than was true a hundred or even fifty years ago. Our collective concern, and not a little pain, is that these opportunities come with a cost: the reality that many young adults leave to find those second and third steps into new possibilities, and go far away from where we raised them.

It's not to dismiss those losses, locally, that I'd like to first celebrate how much is, indeed, possible today for someone starting their adult lives. And to tip my hat to the recently semi-retired Conan O'Brien and his words: "If you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a bit more to say about discernment and vocation if you promise to come back next week. Tell him what you value from your work history at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 7-1-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-1-21

Jeff Gill

A letter from the past, today

___

Just before Memorial Day I wrote about a plaque up on the Denison campus that honored the relatively youthful death of an alumnus, Class of 1905, who died as a missionary in China just seven years later. What I could find quickly was fragmentary, and led me to note some general observations about the first days of fighting pandemics on a global scale.

Then I got a message on Facebook, followed by a letter in my mailbox. John A. Cherney, "cheerful, brave, unselfish," left a wife and son at his death in Kuling, who returned to America. And his grandson wrote me a lovely note, even as I learned I've known Cherney's great-granddaughter for many years!

Chris Cherney, grandson of the missionary who barely knew his own son, tells me that the family has four generations of Denison graduates now, plus the memorialized missionary had a brother who graduated out of Granville, and together they're honored with the "Edward J. and John A. Cherney Scholarship Fund" for students of the college.

The infant son mentioned in the scrap of information I had found was Paul Russell Cherney, who not only graduated from his father's Alma Mater himself, but went on to serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and as a social work graduate of Case Western in the Cleveland area went on to communicate a sense of mission and service inherited from his father to his son in turn. That impulse, Chris notes, led him to earn an advanced degree in social work from Columbia and serve in mission fields of his own, of a more secular sort.

And the great-granddaughter of John Cherney works at Denison, is part of the Granville Education Foundation, and has two daughters of her own who are both in higher education (and one a classmate of my son's). Quite a history of service and commitment and education!

Chris Cherney was also kind enough to include some pages from a volume about Baptist missions which not only give me the order of worship for his memorial service, on May 19, 1912 at First Baptist Church of Cleveland, but show a picture of the young man I'd often tried to envision. And yes, I think I see a bit of his great-granddaughter there.

Just a few years out of Denison, Reverend John A. Cherney had learned Chinese with enough proficiency to preach to local residents in their own language. On his death, these lines of eulogy add to the bronze plaque in Doane that he "had a genius for friendships. He was loved by those who knew him. He had a winsomeness which could not be thwarted. It was reported of him at Granville that among the students of his generation, there had not been a greater power for goodness."

This is a big part of why I enjoy writing this column: to have the opportunity of introducing us to each other, around the village, and across the generations. It's been good to get to know John Cherney a bit better, and his descendants.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; in 1905 all his ancestors on both sides were praying for rain and walking behind plows. Tell him what your family history has taught you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-26-21

Faith Works 6-26-21

Jeff Gill

Changes for the better all around

___

What is better?

This is a question I was asked after last week's column, and one I'm delighted to answer.

Now, in keeping with my observations from before, I'll note again I only arrived here in 1989, but I got to Licking County, Ohio as soon as I could! And I have access to bits and pieces of the historical record back through earlier decades, but those are often bloodless and cold pieces of data, which might miss out on lived experience.

I do wish I'd gotten here soon enough to see the railroad roundhouse for myself, just east of downtown. I'm sorry never to have seen four (or was it five?) theaters letting out at night around Courthouse Square all at once, or smoke billowing from the tall stack at the Wehrle Stove Works off Union Street; it would have been cool to visit the aluminum plant south of town to see them making structural members for the Goodyear F2G-1 "Super Corsair" but in 1945 I probably would have been shot as a spy if I didn't have a job there.

So I know there were many good things happening in Newark and around our county in earlier days. My challenge was about making too easy a leap into presuming if the parts we knew were good, then the times were good. If life was good for a few, and not for the many, there's a theological, let alone a practical argument against calling that situation "the good life." Are there elements and pieces and parts of the way of life our community knew back in previous eras worth preserving? Certainly, and from the archival and interpretive work of The Works as a museum, let alone the ministries of many area churches, we have plenty of energy and interest in conserving much that has been and still is good.

What's not worse? Or better yet, what is better today? I am glad you asked. As Newark City Schools work to get their graduation rate up over 90% and keep it there, did you know that this is significantly higher than the same statistic would have been any time after World War II? It's true, but so many get the impression that grad rates are down from partisan rhetoric. In fact, we simply used to accept dropping out much more easily as part of life, and didn't expect school districts to see much more than 50% of the number of students who started first grade cross a platform for a high school diploma.

And in fact Newark has long been a leader in special education for students with a variety of disabilities, physical and developmental, but the truth is we only required all U.S. school districts to educate students with physical and mental disabilities after 1975, with many programs only getting fully engaged from 1990. We can and should be proud of Eleanor Weiant and those around here who began education for children with disabilities in 1952, and got a dedicated school built for that in 1967, but it was sadly a choice, one that many districts didn't make until required to, and not that many years ago. Today, such education is a norm and incredibly helpful for both persons with disabilities and their families.

We have lost factories, much of the manufacturing base that built our area; places like the Heisey Glass factory closed in 1957, and many more factories in the Seventies and Eighties shut down or drastically trimmed workforces. What we have today, though, is not just a service economy expansion, but a vibrant region for employment, advancement, and innovation.

The Newark-Heath-Licking County Port Authority is an engine of economic vitality that I'm always amazed people don't know more about. Centering on the former Newark Air Force Base in Heath, it's now a series of plants and factories and warehouses where food stuffs are made, materials are shaped, and products shipped around the world, with many excellent jobs for both tradespeople and college grads alike.

Denison University and The Ohio State University's Newark Campus are utterly different than they were in student makeup and course offerings back when I first moved here. They reflect our entire community and the whole nation in ways we can be proud of; Central Ohio Technical College has four campuses in our immediate area and they are opportunity factories in their own right.

There's more about what's right in our community and our country I'd love to tell you about next week.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; if he could have anything back, it might just be The Jimmy Dean Show on Thursday nights after Mom got home from choir practice. Tell him what you value from the past at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-19-21

Faith Works 6-19-21

Jeff Gill

On reconsidering the good old days

___

When I first came to Newark, for an interview in the summer of 1989, I was put up for the night at what's now the Doubletree.

I arrived for a first stage evening meeting and then was taken to the hotel where I'd be picked up the next morning for more face-to-face discussion of what, obviously, ended up becoming an offer to come from Indiana to Ohio.

That evening, though, I was still hungry, and walked out in the late evening twilight and took a stroll around Courthouse Square. I was impressed by the 1876 building at the center, but . . . yeah. If you remember downtown thirty-two years ago, it was not calculated to impress, definitely not on a weeknight evening. I went, inevitably, to Wendy's, an anchor of the square for many years.

Now I know more of the history of the square, and have ghost memories of things I never knew, but in reading and repetition have become a part of my impressions when I go places in Licking County. I've heard about dinners after church at the Hotel Warden, seen some of the mirrors and woodwork from the dining room preserved after it was torn down in 1959 by Robbins Hunter, Jr., now part of his octagonal study added behind the Avery-Downer House in Granville. The Warden had some 90 years of history on the square, but Wendy's is now pushing past half that. Someday, it too will be a "remember when?"

And downtown Newark has much more going on than it did when I first mulled over moving here on my fateful first lap around the square. I passed the decaying Midland, empty and looking like it, let alone the faceless Auditorium Theatre building already doomed. We still have some empty storefronts, but trust me there were many more back in '89. The talk at Wendy's was about the just opened, brand new . . . jail, just a few blocks east across the bridge. (I had no idea how much time I'd spend inside there, soon and very soon.)

More recently, as I've been pleased to join a number of social media platform discussions of Newark and Licking County history, I've noticed a number of comments made about "the good old days." It's hard to challenge the wistfulness of views from 1950 or 1960 of a bustling downtown square, parking all full and every storefront gleaming with lights and business, and folks reminiscing about coming to one of our four Park Places to find almost all their shopping needs filled.

Yet as both a parish preacher and quondam historian, I am stuck having at the very least a personal hesitation in hearing "the good old days" about back then. And a certain call to preach, ethically and theologically, weighs on me, because I know some things from the records and from years now of quiet conversation, about what was behind the bustle and the apparent prosperity and supposed normality of "the good old days."

Bernard Kerik was police commissioner in New York City when 9-11 struck now twenty years ago; he had already been at work recovering some of his painful family history when those tumultuous events happened, and out of his role, a book contract quickly put those researches on display. His mother died in Newark, Ohio in 1964, and you can find a copy of "The Lost Son" to read the painful details of her death. And the circumstances bely a simple reading of downtown Newark in those days as "good old" times.

"Why emphasize the negative?" is a question people like me get asked when we just bring these matters up. Prostitution isn't new in human history; poverty and exclusion and even racism have a long narrative behind them. But the reason some of these stories get pulled back into public view is because it's very hard to build a strong building on weak foundations (there's a parable about this). Unacknowledged history can come back to bite you in odd, subterranean ways.

We are in fact still not far, historically and socially speaking, from when people of color felt at risk downtown after sundown. When prostitution was common and fairly public; when persons of a different sexual orientation knew they could be beaten and abused without having any recourse to the law. When women's roles were tightly constrained at best. The days were good for a narrowly defined number of people.

So we talk about both past triumphs and also tragedies because we are trying to create good days for more people than we used to. For as close to everyone as we possibly can. We still have a ways to go, but we've come a long way, even just since 1989.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been proud to help recover and restore both history and architecture in our community since he moved here. Tell him what stories you think we need to reclaim at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-12-21

Faith Works 6-12-21

Jeff Gill

Settings and medium and messages

___

If you work with churches and camps you are excited about the opportunity to bring youth together again. There are still some cautions and guidelines to keep in mind, especially with children under 12 still unvaccinated, but CDC recommendations give us ways to do outdoor programming we lost last summer.

The need for some care and changing how we used to do things, though, still presents an ongoing challenge, for kids's activities and for summer church in general, whether you call it VBS or something else, in a church basement or out in a park or even on a street corner.

My big personal involvement for many years has been with Cub Scouts, and Cub Day Camp in particular. Last summer, of course, we had to call the whole thing off. As restrictions shifted, we did a Cub-o-ree last fall which tried to make up for what we'd missed, but it was a one-day weekend thing, smaller and certainly more constrained.

Are we "back to normal"? No, and that's a long story. But many things have changed in the last two years, and this summer is going to be different, for organizational and structural reasons, even as the refrain sings on and on like a camp song: "let's get back to normal!" We are doing some things differently, and holding onto other aspects of the Cub day camp experience. 

I look back over this past year, and think about how we've handled the small group meetings, what Cubs call "dens" and even some larger local groups, or "packs" when they got together. As a resource person in the county, I've learned how to do programs for young kids in some very different ways than I ever had, and truth be told, I'd gotten pretty good (I thought) at doing my thing when invited to present at a den or pack meeting.

But do teaching and hands-on learning in a parking lot? On a video conference with some kids visible and others just a name or initials on their square? I've been in church basements with everyone masked and numbers small and spaced out; I've done a bigger group than I've ever done outside of day camp through my computer camera while never leaving my house.

Teachers and preachers and managers and so many of you are thinking "yeah, tell me about it." Understood, but what I'm still wrestling with is what we've learned and how we apply it moving forward. Through last August, I was still preaching & teaching weekly, using FM transmitters and video cameras and uploading services and studies. Since then, I've been a consumer more than provider, but the school and Scouts side of teaching and learning still have engaged me. In all these spheres, I think we have in common this: we can't "go back to normal." Can we?

"The medium is the message" is Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase from his 1964 book "Understanding Media." This Canadian communications scholar and analyst was warning us nearly 60 years ago that the means we use to communicate may be doing most of the communicating for us, despite what we think we're trying to say. Or as Neil Postman observed in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death," the technological tools we use shape and constrain very closely the content they intend to convey.

Which brings us to technology and video and streaming tools in the church, this summer and on into the rest of 2021, assuming everything epidemiological keeps looking better and better. And they very likely will.

There is an incredible amount of pressure, which from some angles looks like a majority, to drop most if not all of the adaptations we've learned and "get back to normal." And I'm acutely aware that in educational circles, we've all realized that with the best will in the world on both sides of the camera, remote learning is in most cases a distant second best. It works, but not as well as the classroom. Remote counseling, though, seems to be much better "now" compared to in-person "later." Video medical consults? Truth is they were becoming common before COVID. We are getting better at how to use them, and when.

And meetings? C'mon. Very few planning and evaluation gatherings are improved by having everyone drive and sit and be in a room together when they can be a 30 minute video conference.

The task before us is to pick and choose wisely. Our need to get together in worship, for learning, in fellowship, shouldn't displace the new opportunities we've mastered in how to save time, add new perspectives, and increase access through virtual options. What to do about those who retreat into virtuality is a separate discussion.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready to spend less time online, but not to just go back to lots of long evenings in the car. Tell him what meetings you won't miss attending at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter. 

Notes from my Knapsack 6-17-21

Notes from my Knapsack 6-17-21

Jeff Gill

The obscure joys of doing nothing

___

Friends, if you read my last column about John Cherney and his memorial plaque at Denison, I am delighted to share that while he died in 1912 in China, he did leave behind a daughter as well as a widow, and they have connections back to Our Fayre Village!

When I have additional information I can share, I promise to continue this story. While it contains tragedy, sorrow does not define it. More to come . . .

The Manchurian plague of 1911 & 1912 was what got me thinking, and as we watch our vaccination rate climb past 50% and case rates drop below 50 per 100,000 and so on, I'm still thinking.

But sometimes, I just go out on the back patio and don't think. I just sit, and watch the clouds boil up, the birds fly over, and the cottonwood leaves flutter in the lightest of breezes. Call it killing time if you want; my own need for a break was after tugging a great deal of weedy stuff out of the cracks between the bricks, so that my back and fingers were sore and I just wanted to relax a bit. The clouds, the crows and buzzards, the ripples in the green were just means to an end, and that end was relaxation and restoration.

Until. I looked down at the arm of the Adirondack chair I was sitting in, a proper deep dark green, and saw a speck of red scurry along it. Huh, I thought vaguely. Nice contrast, tiny red against forest green plank. And then, focused on the insect as I was, my frame of reference brought down from cumulonimbus and treetop level and size, I see clearly there's not one red speck.

There's two. No, three. Wait, dozens. All over the arm rest, the seat, and . . . yep, one on me. I leapt up, brushing gently.

Previous experience reminds me that these are simple, harmless clover mites. They don't bite, don't spread disease, but when you smash them, they leave a red trace that's very hard to clean out of cloth or off of walls. And they are all over the patio, that being a lovely place for them this time of year, the lawn nearby for food and the cracks ideal for laying eggs for the next generation of clover mites.

I walked back towards the house, checking around onto my backside and down my legs; a distant observer would have assumed I was doing a strange version of upright yoga or something. My goal was simply to avoid bringing clover mites indoors and adding them to our internal ecosystem. What I didn't want to do was smash any.

This is the time of year when it's worth remembering that for most insects, most of the time, less is more. Don't swat, don't swing, don't panic. Especially don't panic. A cicada flies into your face? Don't freak out, especially if you're driving. A bee passes near? Don't flail at an inoffensive creature which doesn't want to bite you, anyhow. Even wasps and later on, yellow jackets are best dealt with by not dealing with them. Prevention, maybe, with open sweet drink containers and so on, but swatting them ends poorly for everyone.

Summer is a good time to figure out who else is sharing this ecosystem with us, and how we best live together. Smashing things often just makes a mess for you, in more ways than one.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he does smash mosquitos. It's all about discernment. Tell him how you live with what bugs you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 6-5-21

Faith Works 6-5-21

Jeff Gill

Things that go by pretty fast

___

In a month, we will have parades again and celebrations and in some locations, fireworks.

If you're one of those feeling frustrated and snarky about anything this summer that's not happening, because it was called off months ago, I hope you'll reconsider, or at least be kind.

Those of us who have put together big public events are all too aware of what it takes to assemble people, programs, and PA systems in the out-of-doors or in borrowed spaces, and even when you control the venue, if you have to book musical talent and arrange seating, et cetera, you are acutely aware of both the long time frames in advance involved, and the ongoing calculations around how much money is spent, or invested, or committed, or whatever you want to call it, well before you know who is showing up. Wedding receptions are as close as most people get to this particular calculus, and there's a general assumption around them that you are not going to break even.

This is why in many cases events for May and June and July were called off back in March and April: too much uncertainty means excessive expense potential, and most non-profits can't risk as much as some fathers of brides spend, let alone larger sums.

Add in the fact that we didn't know where vaccinations would be back in March when some major decisions had to be made, and contracts signed, and yes, I suspect a few persons and organizations wish now they had taken a risk back then, but you know what they say: Hindsight is 2021. (No, not a typo.)

My own question about where we are and how things should proceed is tied to the fact that we're still looking at over half of the county unvaccinated. That might be by choice or out of necessity, but it means when I'm in places with groups together I keep thinking about those numbers, and what I can or should do for others. As for me and my house, we are vaccinated, as are the elderly folk I have some responsibilities to and for, but I'm willing to be masked if that helps affirm protecting that 60% or so still unprotected (see I Corinthians 8 for more on this subject). I don't need a mask, but do I need to be wearing one simply to support or encourage those who should be wearing them to do so?

I've had a few conversations in person and online about this, and frankly I'm uncomfortable with how quickly most people say "well, that's their choice." It is, but I'm not sure how well informed a choice it is, if so. If half of adults are really making that decision, I'm pragmatist enough to respect it, while wondering about what the broader outcomes are going to be. Will more choose to get vaccinated this summer? I sincerely hope so. "Only" a couple deaths a week seems to me, in light of what we've all been saying about suicide and overdoses, a steep price to casually concede is what our community has to pay, just so we can assemble and interact as if nothing has changed.

For a variety of reasons, including the ripple of COVID mortality, I've been thinking a great deal about how we regard the preciousness of life and the worth of our time over this past year. And in these next few weeks, fireworks will start to echo through the evening skies.

Sparklers are for me even more a part of a family Fourth of July than the big stuff. Nowadays fireworks are set off for all sorts of occasions, but I only see sparklers out right around Independence Day. My dad would buy a box every year, and the four of us would each get two or maybe three.

Fireworks go boom, but a sparkler is of longer duration (and probably why they have some risk involved and what makes parents watch so closely). Yet not forever, not for very long. And once the sparklers were done, so was the Fourth.

You would write your name in fire, turn circles, hear the roaring whoosh as you swung (carefully) your sparkler through the darkness. And you'd watch as the sparkler burned down the heavy wire stem to the end of the silvery leaden chemicals. It lasted only so long, and even a child tries to make the most of it. A child hears often "be careful," but they also want to wave them around. It's a joyful balancing act, in fire and light against the darkness.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's keeping some masks in the car, just in case. Tell him how we can protect and care for one another at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.