Notes From My Knapsack 10-1-06
Jeff Gill

Here’s a Frightening Statistic

"Statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics." True words about lying numbers, indeed.
An internet company says they’re "the fastest growing." Are they lying? Well, not quite: if you go from 5,000 users to 10,000 users, you’re growing at a 100% rate; if you go from 3,000,000 to 3,500,000, your growth rate is just over 15%, but I’m thinking you want to stick with number two, lacking other data.
The Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts are beginning their popcorn sales this weekend around central Ohio – their version of the Girl Scouts’ famous cookie sales. Parents ask: "Is it safe for my child to sell this door-to-door?"
A fair question, and hard to answer. The official stance of Scouting is that no one should sell alone, but with a buddy, and there should be an adult shadowing them from a nearby car or sidewalk.
In the late 1960’s and 70’s, I sold popcorn and football chocolate up hill and down dale, with the one family rule "you can’t sell on Sunday." No one went with me; if my folks’ protective side showed at all in the process, it was in "what time will you get home?" after which, my name, complete with full middle name, would be shouted from the back porch. Loudly.
I really wanted to be home when I said I would.
But was I in danger? The statistics are hard to interpret. Is there more child molestation reported and in the courts? Yes, but people are less willing today to settle for going down the street, beating up a stranger and telling them they had a week to leave the area, and going home to tell the child involved: "We will never speak of this again."
So you can say the statistics are up, but is the actual frequency on the rise? It depends on who you ask. If you ask me, out of years of pastoral counseling (not to mention Scouting), I think we had about as many people with pedophilia disorder fifty years ago (and more) than we do today, but there’s no way to prove any of us right or wrong on that supposition.
So are we over-reacting today? I really don’t think so. Where I grew up, we had the whole "never lock doors, keys in the ignition, kids play outside until the street lights go on" mindset, but looking back . . .
There were stories of kids who disappeared back then, and women who came home to find someone took their purse off the counter, and cars taken on "joyrides." We just got less comfortable with allowing that opportunity.
I remember vividly riding, next to my dad, standing with my feet planted on the bench seat of the Ford Galaxy, hands on the dashboard. If I did that with the Little Guy today (well, now he’s too big anyhow), I’d be pulled over and arrested for criminal stupidity.
So was my dad wrong? Not in 1966 he wasn’t. but we have car seats and shoulder restraints (my grandmother hated those when they came in, and she was the most cautious member of our entire family) and bike helmets now.
Nothing bad ever happened to me when I walked the streets selling Scout popcorn, but I can remember some really odd characters who left me feeling the creeps as I backed away from the porch. A bit more vulnerability on my part, a little more opportunity on their part, and who knows?
There are some problem today that we face more honestly, and that can’t ever be a bad thing. The buddy system was a good idea at swim time, and now we know it’s a good idea out on the sales trail, too.
What we don’t want to do is let a new sense of precaution and prevention give us a false sense of threat and danger all around. Avoid scary situations and give yourself a margin for safety (like a buddy), and you can still find the world is generally a welcoming, wonderful place.
And I close these thoughts with a salute to Susan Verkest, who died very unexpectedly last week. She was passionate about seeing the Newark area look honestly at the problems we do have, but taking meaningful action so children and families can enjoy a community that really is basically safe and fun.
Godspeed, Susan.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what your youth activity is selling through knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-30-06
Jeff Gill

From a Different Angle

"Days of Awe" is the traditional Jewish term for the ten days we are in right now.
Between last week’s Rosh Hashanah, the "head of the year" 5767, and tomorrow’s eve of Yom Kippur, the "day of atonement," these are special days.
The idea is that the gates of heaven are open wide, prayers are particularly welcome, especially those to make up for our faults of the year behind us as the books of heaven are closed. Then the great, solemn observance in synagogue of Yom Kippur seals the year now past, and sets us on the path of righteousness for the year ahead.
In this part of the country, you don’t have to be a mensch to know that something is special about these days, which are indeed touched with awe and wonder.
Everyone notices the color and swirl of falling leaves, but there’s a practical side to all our enlivened sightseeing. In the heart of summer, the sun is high and bright, overlighting the scenery; when winter comes, the sun squats down on the horizon, with grey and barren treetrunks squeezing long, angular, awkward shadows out of the sky.
Autumn is an angle of the sun somewhere in between, making the "golden hour" after sunrise and before dusk shine all the brighter. Add to that astronomical fact the meteorology of this time of year, when the balance between warm air masses and cold surges from the north clutter the sky with cloud formations like no other time of year, and our eyes and minds and hearts are engaged even when we’re not looking. "Days of Awe."
While Judaism offers this up as a special season of repentance, in Islam we’re well into the month of Ramadan, the sliver of new moon announcing 28 days of fasting by day and feasting in the evening, helping to focus the believer’s heart on submission to the will of God, in Arabic, Allah. With family and at Friday prayers, the Moslem believer is turned to God in a disciplined way for these four weeks.
Out in Oklahoma, an evangelical Christian pastor of a large, free-church style congregation has started a website. Called "www.mysecret.tv," Life Church decided to give modern young seekers a chance to confess their sins in the format they know best – on-line, and in anonymity. The response has startled even the folks who started it, with tens of thousands from far beyond Edmond, OK (where Life Church is based) clicking in and logging on and typing up their regrets and new intentions.
Of course, a TV reporter had to gin up a controversy, announcing breathlessly that "the Catholic Church is opposed to this." Nope. It just isn’t how they do confession, and even the evangelical folks with Life Church insist they’ve never seen the website as an end in itself, but a step towards opening the door. Kind of like having "Days of Awe," to remind people that the gates of heaven are always open.
In Catholic Christianity, they hold that confessing your sins doesn’t get much done for you, with you, or in you until someone outside yourself assures you that "your sins are forgiven." Pointing you towards steps to not return down that road of regret is part of the package, too. Oppose? They just want to show you a better way.
This is a good time of year in many ways, for many people, to reassess most of their lives. Something’s in the air that, more than January 1, tends us all to a review of the last year, of our decisions, of our future and what it holds. Your faith tradition probably has some tools to help with that, and it never hurts to try them out on a little interior renovation project.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your tradition’s renewal practices at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-23-06
Jeff Gill

A Lively Night Among the Dead

Next Friday evening, Sept. 29 at 6:00 pm, drop by one of Licking County’s great historic documents, artistic achievements, and path-breaking social innovations.
That would be Cedar Hill Cemetery, out Rt. 79 going north on Newark’s edge.
Founded here just after 1850, the national "rural cemetery" movement began less than twenty years before with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, the absolute epicenter of art and culture for America in those days. The idea of an idyllic, attractive setting for meditation and strolling among the monuments and mausoleums of the departed gave birth to parks in cities like Central Park in New York, the national park movement, and pretty much all of what we now call landscape architecture.
Our local story nicely echoes the national account. Newark had a cemetery just west of downtown, past Fourth St. north of Main. The city grew and the burials were relocated to Sixth St., where the Licking County Historical Society now has a home, our hosts for next Friday.
Only a mound marks this spot, which received committals from around 1812 to 1850. Once again, the growing city meant it was time to move the necropolis, and longtime civic leader Israel Dille, who had promoted the development of Courthouse Square as a "botanical garden," can be seen maneuvering to press Newark to try something grand.
Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore: all had tried the arcadian experiment. Sculpted grounds along with stately sculpture in a secluded, peaceful spot were a rest from the bustle of the newly industrialized cities, and a tonic for reflection and prayer. Could Newark create such a spot, and get the citizenry behind it as a central, civic cemetery?
Well, Israel Dille had helped create our modern courthouse area, our first arboretum, and the pioneer public school board, so this was but a small challenge. Going bankrupt trying to bring the first railroads through town did keep him from investing personally in the project, but his likely role is confirmed by the fact that he was given the largest lot at the top of the highest spot on Cedar Hill.
If you’ve been there, and don’t recall a large, imposing Dille marker, don’t worry. You’re not going blind. He has no stone, no inscription.
Would you like to know why? Come join us on Friday where your faithful scrivener will portray . . . oh, you’d figured that out already, hadn’t you?
The Licking County Historical Society asks visitors to arrive at the Gothic Chapel inside the gates at 6:00 pm, where a brief talk will precede a hike (dress accordingly!) to meet a few of the permanent residents, dramatically portrayed, near their places of repose. Guests are asked to contribute $5.00, and society members are free; you may call 345-4898 for more info.
We promise you’ll leave knowing a bit more about life and faith and death and more, and we also promise . . . that you’ll get to leave!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; share your tales of memorials and cemeteries to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-24-06
Jeff Gill

Nothing Can Compare To a Teacher

Adjusting for inflation is a tricky question, especially over long periods of time. Fluctuations in the value of currency, the money supply, and commodity values mean that there is no one percentage per annum you can tidily apply.
People who write historical fiction, and journalists of many sorts use a web site you can go fiddle with yourself, at "www.westegg.com/inflation." See what you think.
I bring up this web site because I used it for an interesting comparison recently, checking a dollar amount from 150 years ago and more and asking what that sum would be in today’s dollars. The result was a surprise even when I expected it.
My comments last week brought some email chiding me for supporting our "unbearable" taxes in Ohio today, and commenting that teachers in the public school system are very highly paid – the implication being, overpaid.
As to the first point, may I point back (and my mom always said that was rude, but oh well) that the oft cited "Ohio has the third worst tax climate" is from a foundation that, aside from opposition to pretty much any tax whatsoever as far as I can tell from their website (look at the fine print on Blackwell’s ads to find it), has made a qualitative claim sound quantitative.
In other words, they did a survey asking businesses how they felt about how sales taxes were collected, and Ohio firms think they have to remit more often than other states, and we were the third most complained about. Are we the third most taxed state? Nope, not even close; we’re about in the middle by most measures.
Medicaid and other growing governmental obligations cannot grow much more as a percent of the state budget, and I hope Ted Strickland has the vertebrae to address that concern. We shouldn’t pay much more as a percent of our total income in taxes than we do. This household, the Lovely Wife tells me, is pushing 35% when you add local, property, state, sales, and federal income taxes together and divide by our gross income.
But this household will still vote for the Licking Park District levy because we need to nail down some green space purchases while we still can, and Rich Niccum and the gang with LPD does miracles on a miniscule budget, and I trust them to use the levy proceeds the way they promise.
As for teacher salary, if you’ve read me over the years, you know my next point. I grabbed the records for our first official school board, Newark City Schools (God bless Israel Dille!), and looked at their early years.
First, may I point out a regular gripe this scribe throws out: we educate many more, much more, of our total population of children than we used to. There were throwaway kids in the so-called "good ol’ days," and there aren’t any more. That creates certain challenges, and they cost money those challenges do, but don’t tell me we should go back to educating the easy half of all children.
In 1855, they estimated that Newark had 1,000 kids. They were very pleased that they had 820 enrolled, and that 540 of them made it to class any given day. That’s nearly a one-half attendance average. Yep, good ol’ days.
Too far back? In1865, 1,400 kids counted in the district, but still only 1,178 on the books, and a mere 629 average in class each day. 1875? 2,927 souls about, but only 1,563 names on the register, and 1,037 was an average day in the classroom. And1880 took Newark to 3,379 youth noted in the census, but 1,812 checked into the school system and 1,213 made it to school most days. That’s getting close to only a third in school.
In each of those years, the number of weeks in session were comparable to today, the class size was only a bit larger at 30 . . . and remember, only the more biddable third were sitting there.
But here’s the remarkable fact. If you plug the average teacher salary for1849 of $2,057 into the westegg.com/inflation calculator webpage – it gives you the result of $43,887.14 in 2005 dollars.
That’s right: the average teacher salary back when we started doing state mandated public schooling in Ohio is basically the same today. If you keep comparing through 1900, we actually are paying our teachers less in 2005 than we paid them then, and that’s to educate over 94% (the state mandated minimum attendance average).
And that’s why we have so many adults even now in Licking County without a high school degree. I’m glad we’re trying to give a basic education to everyone today, but we just can’t punish teachers and administrators for not getting that task done on less money. It just doesn’t add up.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he obviously has a thing for teachers and rangers, which is probably why he married someone who’s been both. Counter his statistics with a data dump to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-16-06
Jeff Gill

Starting With Now

So you have some questions.
Your faith isn’t what you think it should be (or what you think others think you should think), and you don’t know where to start, or where to go.
Maybe you’ve bought a book – someone’s purchasing the bazillions of self-help, personal affirmation, "seeking the truth through more fiber in your diet" kind of books that clog the book stores and pile on the remainder tables at the door two weeks after they come out.
Didn’t do much for you, did it?
Actually, most of us don’t finish them anyhow, so maybe they could help. But a book on the nightstand or a stack of them on the side table in the living room only works for some. A relatively few some, in fact.
What you need to do is go to church.
Right, right, someone is already thinking of emailing me to say "your way ain’t my way, fella, so don’t go pushing me into your church." So let me rephrase just a bit.
Get out of the house, and go somewhere and be there with other people who have some of the same concerns, questions, and hopes. It might be an AA meeting, could be a small support group, it could be in a building with a cross on the steeple or not.
I will affirm my personal beliefs this far without qualification: I do believe that you can start just about anywhere, because if you are sincerely seeking a truth beyond your self and are open to God’s call, you will end up in the right place. It may not be where you first went, but you will get there. Christians call that "discernment," and it is available to anyone, but some are better at it ("gifted") than others.
But if you just stay inside your own head, you will start to hear the echoes answering back to you. If you just use the entire weekend to pursue personal preferences, whether golf, flea markets, or TV, the questions will remain and nibble at you.
Get out into a church – because that’s what most of you in Licking County are likely to do – and you will find strange traditions that no one can explain to you because they don’t even know they have them, like when to stand and sit. You will find aggravating people (kind of like you) and folks who have some pretty amazing ways of looking at world (kind of like you) and some who want to be part of something of lasting meaning (very much like you). They will not always sing songs you like, or have the exact activities you hoped would lead you to a clearer picture of the world and your place in it.
OK.
So if you can’t find a sense of place there after a few weeks, quietly move on. If you find yourself doing that three times in a year, stop and ask yourself, or ask someone you respect, how you are making yourself uncomfortable, but this is America. You can go wherever you want to worship.
And once you get settled in, speak up and listen closely. Ask questions, share your perspective, invite others to tell you their story and pay attention.
This is the time of year most places of worship of all sorts see the most visitors who are looking for a home for their faith. More visitors at Christmas or Easter don’t often mean they’re there to think about getting involved, although that can happen.
But Fall and school starting up and the days getting shorter is the season when people all around you start to think "should I be attending to my soul as well as I do my cholesterol?"
Churches of all sorts should be aware of that, as well. How do you welcome visitors? Not just when they come through the door, but when they come down the steps to the basement or go back into the ed building or whathaveyou. Is the whole fellowship attuned to the challenging work of welcoming new attenders into the life of the community?
The leaves are turning, and hearts are turning toward home in many ways. Watch the faces around you with the same interest you turn to the changing colors of nature.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him how you found a faith and fellowship to support it at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-17-06
Jeff Gill

Get the Wideblade Shovels Out

Every election season there are certain constants.
Fall color, which is coming out on tree tops and forest edges, in soybean fields going yellow north to south, is also showing in yard signs for candidates and issues. Their red, white, and blue motifs, or focus group tested swirls of more exotic colors, clash a bit with the sweetgum leaves turning a more muted rainbow, but they are a sign of the times.
Another indicator is the BS output factor going on setting "high" from all kinds of candidates, state and local.
Writing for the papers, one is expected to avoid using the words "lie" or "lying," so any of us who try to scribble down something for print have to dance around words like prevarication, unsubstantiated, patently untrue, and so on.
Our Ohio governor’s race is pushing my good will to the absolute limit. Frankly, Ted Strickland has hardly said a word to make me want to vote for him, but he can rest easy on my account. Ken Blackwell has done a masterful job of making me want to crawl over ground glass lit on fire with kerosene to vote against him. No, I’m not holding back.
First we get the TEL amendment, which aside from any other dishonest statements made about how it will impact local government, Blackwell has made a sudden post-primary about-face and says, with Emily Litella, "Never mind."
But this utterly disingenuous education funding plan makes my blood boil, or at least causes a neck vein to throb. Aside from the demonization of administrators – and aren’t we all getting pretty tired of this one? – his plan will pass no additional dollars to the budgets of local school districts, but he’s skating on the thinnest ice of truth when he claims it will.
Like so many state funding of education tricks (see entry under "lottery dollars, no net gain from"), he proposes to give with one hand and take away with the other.
Because, you see, and trust me, Mr. Blackwell knows this quite well, the money he’s not giving to what his campaign calls administration, so he can give "more" (coff, hack, arrrgh) to the classroom, is required by both state and federal to be spent. It includes special education and special needs programs that delivers or provides education to kids we didn’t used to even try to teach. All those dollars that are spent on aides and health care support and special instructors and program support: the Blackwell plan calls "adminsitration."
There’s more like that, but you get the idea. And if we are required to offer this – which is a great thing, by the way, as opposed to warehousing the disabled and handicapped – and the state is "giving" us those dollars for the classroom (as they define it) only, where do the missing dollars come from?
Need I tell you?
So if this benighted plan were to be implemented, there would just be that much more pressure on passing local levies at higher millage. Which is their point. Make the funding process so byzantine and opaque, and on purpose (why do we have to pass 5.99 mills to get 1.7? It takes a powerpoint and thirty minutes to explain, but it’s all mandated by state law), so local voters get mad at their school boards and, here they are again in the bucket, the administrators.
And Blackwell isn’t even the worst of it. We’re treated to yet another round of skillfully misdirectional ads about "Ohio Learn and Earn," with the tagline "A lot of good will come of this." My Aunt Sadie. This is effort number 27 from the gaming industry (did you hear the words "slot machines" in their ad, at a lower sound volume and in a rush of words, otherwise carefully stated) to con us into giving them, well, OK, we’ll settle for 70% of the profits this time. But you poor saps get 30% for yer kids scholarships, so vote already!
No good will come of this, and when they trot out the line that sulky horse racing folk are really small family farmers who need our support in their tourism related business, I want to gag.
Am I making endorsements here? Sadly, there isn’t much to endorse in Ohio politics right now. But I can see what could actually be worse than the status quo, and that’s what we’re looking at this November.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he isn’t too happy about state-supported lotteries, either. Argue with him and make your points at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 9-9-06
Jeff Gill

Sept. 9 – 2006, or 2001?

Five years later, and what is different?
For those who have been to Iraq or Afghanistan, and especially for those who have had those they love go and not return, much has changed. For the rest of us, I wonder. I really do.
A few weeks ago, five years ago, I was driving back from my last church camp responsibility of the summer, and listening to the one station that I could get on that stretch of road. The host was talking, on and on and on, about Chandra Levy and the congressman suspected in her disappearance. As I wondered if he had absolutely nothing else to talk about, he went on to discuss the dating travails of either Jenniston or Jlo or Beyond-saying. I forget.
At any rate, it was a beautiful day, and Columbus area stations began to come in with music I liked. Then I got home, and shuffled through a pile of papers and magazines, most of which had cover stories on shark attacks. "Could You Be At Risk?" shouted the headlines, and I hope I wasn’t too casual about the miseries of others when thinking, "not in Licking County, I’ll bet."
Last night, this year, a host on cable TV sternly asked me, in regard to stingray barbs, "Could you be at risk?"
George Barna is a leading pollster in the Christian community, having worked for years on market research for a little bizness called Disney. He did a specific survey which was announced last week, telling many of us what we already knew. "9-11 had no appreciable impact on faith for Americans."
I was wrong five years ago. I really thought that we would see a new seriousness, a healthy seriousness in this land, and in churches, about our calling to respond to crisis today with timeless teaching, our need to promote better understanding of a complex world and where a simple faith can change it.
Yes, I thought it would get a few more people to church, too, not that any pastor saw that as a good or God-sent thing, but a situation that God could craft good out from. What pretty much every church I know saw was two weeks of attendance spike, and then a soft "whooshing" sound as the bubble deflated.
Barna’s data says that was nationwide, the two week up-down thing. If it promoted any further reflection on why God would allow evil acts to play out on the earthly stage, or what my role in confronting anger and destructive vengeance would be, it doesn’t show up in the polling data. Apparently some individual responses, like Pat Tillman or Oliver Stone, were the exception and not the rule.
And no one has to tell you about the pictures of Baby Suri, do they?
When the planes hit, I was in a meeting, at a church, working on a co-operative ministry project. When I first heard what was going on, I was in my car on Rt. 16 heading to a meeting with the chaplain at Denison. After we got together, and huddled around a TV with many others, and watched the first tower collapse, we hurried to a gathering of clergy where we began to plan what a prayer service for that evening would look like. Then I left them to their details, and drove back to my (then) church and opened the doors, where people began showing up looking for a place to pray within minutes.
That night, hundreds showed up from five or six churches and some from none, but we prayed and reflected together on what God asked of us in a situation like this. Most of us left still rattled and worried, but a bit more hopeful.
Looking back, at lest for me, the church as a whole and my faith was doing what it should have been about on 9-11, in 2001.
Maybe we didn’t need much to change from five years ago, looking back on that night, so much as we needed something to grow. A wider vision, and a more solid hope based on a broader community. We still need that to happen, and we still can be part of that growth.
And we don’t need Hollywood baby pictures, unless they’re your grandkids. Then you can just show them to me in person, and not on TV. They grow up fast, don’t they?

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

Notes From My Knapsack 9-10-06
Jeff Gill

In a Missing Shadow

Five years on. Hard to believe, in so many ways. Anyone over the age of 10 recalls that day, the experience of watching TV, talking to neighbors, going to church that night as houses of worship and clergy all over threw open the doors and put together a service of prayer and searching.

Searching for . . . well, answers, understanding, sense: about the motives of the action (still not really understood), the roots of the effort (rarely discussed, even now), the nature of God and the place of evil (resolution still pending).

Looking back, I think about a group of young men, gathered around a charismatic, shadowy leader, who mustered anger. Anger at the presence of foreigners in their land, at exploitation of natural resources and the spectre of privilege in the wealth of these alien interlopers, coalesced around a resentment at their strange religion, making inroads through their homeland.

Even with the out of scale hostility, all this can make a measure of sense, until it erupts in senseless slaughter of men, women, and even children; worse when you look closely at their ideology’s activity in their own lands and realize how many of their own people they have killed.

You know this kind of cruelty and rage must be faced, named, and not allowed to spread, but observe with unease how the swift, massive multinational effort to put down this movement generates a new and different level of resentment that has the capacity to spread far beyond the grievances of the original brutal terrorists.

Which is my way of describing the Boxer Rebellion, an uprising a hundred years before 9-11 slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

The "Righteous Harmony Society" had a martial arts element to their group exercises that led to the English nickname "Boxers." In Peking, China, by 1899, diplomats, businessfolk, and missionaries saw the Boxers grow, but labeled them as a threat more to the Imperial House of China than to themselves.

They were tragically wrong.

The Boxers would have happily flown planes into buildings in London or Berlin or New York, if there were planes then, or if they could have even imagined the other side of the world. Instead, they seized and decapitated all the westerners they could, children included, and did their worst to Chinese Christians and any others who associated with the buyers and sellers from across the ocean.

Eight nations, America, England, Germany, Russia, and Japan among them, joined forces to invade and rescue the occupants of western embassies, including many who had taken refuge there other than diplomats. This multinational effort, in hindsight, needed a United Nations, taking a long time to co-ordinate simple processes to get to where they were going. Individual contingents went off on their own national agendas – German soldiers first gained the nickname "Huns" from their British cousins for their treatment of innocent civilians as instructed by the Kaiser.

The Boxers were crushed, some executed, and China returned (briefly) to Imperial control. Popular distaste for the government’s involvement with foreign powers led to civil wars for decades, only ending with Chairman Mao. Russian adventurism and Japanese expansionism, fueled by the Boxer events, set the stage for the Russo-Japanese War, the prelude to the disastrous symphony of 1914 to 1945.

What we are of necessity doing in response to 9-11 has many potentially unnecessary outcomes. National choices today are directly shaping future events ten, twenty, even fifty years and more down the path. Do we know what kind of world we are trying to create? How are the actions we take now forming those future possibilities?

It can take a while to get perspective on such questions, but time doesn’t always give the clearest point of view. In recent years, Oberlin College to our north has had a problem on graduation day. Since 1903, a Memorial Arch has stood near the center of campus, remembering 19 alumni and their children who were killed by the Boxers, missionaries trained at that school. The commencement procession marches through the arch and colonnade on their way to their diplomas.

The problem is that a number of today’s students have decided that they cannot walk through this arch, out of disagreement with Christian evangelism or American imperialism or a lack of mention of Chinese victims on the plaques. So they break from the procession and run around the wings of the Memorial Arch, rejoining their fellows on the other side.

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

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

Faith Works 9-2-06
Jeff Gill

Free Exercise of Religion, and Freedom of the Press

The page you’re reading right now represents an interesting intersection of two elements in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
That’s it, that’s the First Amendment, so often cited piecemeal or selectively.
My thought is that this statement is meant as a whole, one entire thought expressed in 45 words.
These words were written almost 220 years ago. Just 35 years after that, Benjamin Briggs founded the newspaper we still call the "Newark Advocate." (We don’t know if they pronounced it "Ad-vo-kate" or "Ad-vuh-kit" back then.)
For 185 years, people have both expressed their sentiments through the pages of this paper, and expressed their frustration with the opinions expressed by others in this paper. Hill’s 1881 history of Licking County recounts the ire of Granville citizens over slights they perceived coming from the county seat in the early days of the paper, and records:
"Shortly after a number of subscribers took produce of various kinds to Newark to pay their subscriptions and stop the paper. Briggs published in his next issue an article in regard to the matter, attempting to ridicule the people, and there the matter ended; but the Advocate, after that time, never had much circulation there while he conducted it."
Sereno Wright began "The Wanderer" in response, but that paper lasted only a couple years, and irregularly at that.
But it wasn’t closed by government action or any other reason than that it couldn’t pay the bills. Meanwhile, one way or another (maybe he took the produce to the farmer’s market and cashed it in), Mr. Briggs kept the paper going. He sold it in later life, having served in Congress and other public offices, and the community institution many still call "The Aggravate" has passed through many hands, now owned by the Gannett Corporation and with a significant internet presence.
Likewise our churches are free to thrive, or close, independent of any legal pressure or support. Times change, and many of the houses of worship lovingly depicted in 1800’s histories are both closed and forgotten. Newark’s "New Jerusalem Church" once had a vital congregation and many civic officials in her pews, and by 1890 their building site was a brewery.
Freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. Both are freedoms to close up shop as well as to open new branches, a marketplace of ideas seeking support from the public. A.J. Liebling famously noted that "freedom of the press is limited to those that own one," but the internet has made it possible for all sort of purveyors of news and information to provide their service and seek compensation in new and unexpected ways, even without a printing press and all that messy ink in the basement.
Freedom of religion is expressed both by those choosing to opt out of joining a church altogether, and by the right to open up a church in one’s living room or nearby storefront. Licking County has her share of both.
I appreciate the opportunity this newspaper gives to engage freedom of expression and freedom of religion on this page and in my column, and I really can’t express how engaging it is, for me personally, to try to communicate the breadth of how those freedoms are lived out around our area.
185 years later, I think Benj. Briggs would approve, and offer me a tomato, only slightly bruised.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has plenty of tomatoes. Exercise your freedom of expression by writing him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 9-3-06
Jeff Gill

Pestofest 2006 Draws To a Close

Three basil plants on the Gill acreage (OK, maybe 50 square feet) are still pushing out the foliage, but the stalk is getting woody and the lower leaves yellow.
The cicadas are in the thirtieth day of their infernal racket, which may be the sound of romantic murmurings by Julio to certain female insects, but sounds to me like the singing of Hasselhoff. Folk wisdom sayeth forty-five days after the cicada chorus begins, the first frost wins, so we’re two days from our initial morning dusting of white.
I could eat pesto and tear up basil leaves over food all year long (except raisin bran), but they are a taste of late summer at heart, with the season cheating pleasure of some pesto from the freezer in October.
My colleague Trish elsewhere in these pages said, last week, that her pesto recipe uses walnuts. I’m gonna have to try that; we both know the canonical ingredient is pine nuts, which can be found nowadays in this area, but before that became common I got into the habit of making it with almonds. I even used macadamia nuts once when I was out of almonds and didn’t know it until I had started food processing the leaves of basil, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice.
She also recommends adding parmesan cheese to frozen pesto only after you thaw, which makes sense. Probably would keep it less clumpy, which doesn’t bother me much, but helps in serving.
Trish has well-explained recipes in her column, which I can never do, because, well, here’s why. Another seasonal favorite of mine is a Tuscan salad, which I make this way: take a bunch of onions from the garden, and some big handfuls of basil, including the budding tops of nested crowns which are where the plant gets its name ("basilea," or kingdom in Greek). Chop ‘em up, and then find some tomatoes from friends who don’t live in a deer browsing zone and chop them up. Mince a few cloves of garlic, and toss it all up with them and a few dashes of balsamic vinegar. Take a big hunk of mozarella cheese and cube it up, toss in not long before serving. Serves lots.
You can see why I don’t write a recipe column.
What I do like to write and talk and even preach about is the value of eating food you raised, even in modest amounts, or at least food grown locally, or at least making sure of putting some emphasis on eating seasonally.
There’s a fine line, and one I probably cross, between tooting your own horn and letting people know "hey, this is food I grew or was grown by people I know down the road." There was a study done recently looking at some average Iowa families and their dinner tables. Turns out that while they were primarily eating food that could be grown and raised in their county, let alone their state, they were actually consuming mostly food from California, Oregon, and other countries.
Start with the fuel costs (and pollution) of getting that food down the highway to them, add chemicals and processes needed to ship foodstuffs that kind of distance and under those pressures of packaging – oh, and the environmental cost of packaging – and don’t forget the health aspects of all that plus the still studied issue of what eating food out of your own ecosystem does for you, and it looks crazy, doesn’t it?
When I’ve defended Wal-Mart in the past (and I will again, probably), what I’m thinking we should be concerned about is the model that creates illusory, or at least very short-term cost savings. Cheap energy makes it look like radishes from Ecuador cost less, but that simply isn’t true in a global sense. Beef from five states away and even sweet corn from the other side of the Mississippi is costing the global system somewhere, even when we think we’re getting a deal.
So promoting the concept of eating locally is important to me. I’m not a fundamentalist in religion, politics, or the environment, so I’m not a vegetarian and I don’t throw a fit (in front of company) over fisheries degradation when swordfish is served. It just makes sense to grab the local gusto or pesto when it comes by, and if more people did a bit more of that some more of the time, we’d live more lightly on this lovely planet filled with so much food and so many hungry people.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s a bit of a gardener, too. Send recipes or rants to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-26-06
Jeff Gill

A Spirituality Made Of Flint

Ching . . . ching . . . ching . . . plink.
Ching . . . ching . . . ching . . . ching . . . tangk!
Multiply times dozens, if you can hear what I just described, and you have the soundscape of Flint Ridge State Memorial next weekend, Sept. 1 through 3, for the annual Flint Ridge Knap-In.
Flint knapping is the process of chipping at a flint nodule until you have a projectile point, an arrowhead or spear point, ready to join a shaft of wood with raw sinew wrappings drying to a tight tough grip. A few feathers, or fletchings, to give stability through flight to the target, and you have a dart or spear to throw by hand or with throwing stick.
Our modern term for throwing stick is adapted from modern South American indigenous language, an "atl atl," or "fish shaped stick." This simple tool allows a flint-tipped spear to fly farther with more impact.
The key, though, is flint, found in a limited number of spots in Ohio, but nowhere else with as much color and contrast as right here in Licking County.
Flint Ridge Flint is a type of flint known by geologists and archaeologists all over North America. Just as resources from all over the continent are found in graves and sites from 2000 years ago in central Ohio, like copper from northern Michigan, shells from the Gulf Coast, and obsidian from the Yellowstone area of Wyoming, so is Flint Ridge flint found in those areas.
But with this one, odd, attention grabbing qualification. Flint Ridge flint, with rainbow of colors from bubble gum to root beer to translucent, is found in remarkably small amount in those places, especially compared to the amount of distant material found in central Ohio.
Mica, a mineral from the Carolina mountains, has been found in bushel basket loads in burials around Licking County from 2000 years ago, a period known archaeologically as "Hopewell," but Flint Ridge flint is seen in the archaeological record in barely handfuls from the same area.
This would seem to mean one of two possible interpretations: that Flint Ridge flint, full of color and variety, was greatly valuable like unto diamonds, or it was a token, with symbolic meaning as a pilgrim’s souvenir. Or both.
Those who have learned today the ancient skill of knapping flint have said that the act of shaping a useful tool, a knife or projectile point, from flint is a process of near hypnotic repetition, rhythm, and finally beauty. The aesthetic aspect of crafting a vitally useful tool from Flint Ridge flint is tangible, as well as visual.
It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to wonder that the work of making everyday implements from our local, uniquely vivid flint, took the makers to a very special mental and even spiritual state.
Add to that the stories I have heard from modern day Native American peoples about Flint Ridge: that this high plateau is up where the rainbow of the sky touches the precious stone of the earth, and brings earth and sky together in a spectrum of colors from violet to red and all nature in between, joining the ground and the heavens in this unique mineral. You feel the special nature of this place in those stories and with the stones themselves.
Go out US 40 and turn north at Brownsville, or east on US 16 and turn south on Brownsville Road to Flint Ridge State Memorial, where a modest parking fee gives access to this rhythmic music of knapping and shaping, the revelation of the earth’s colors and the display of atl-atl throwers making skillful use of the heavenly mineral on a speartip.
Is there a spiritual element to these Licking County materials? Look, listen, and participate, and you tell me.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he also regularly guides school groups around Flint Ridge State Memorial. Offer your perspective on the spiritual elements of everyday life to knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-27-06
Jeff Gill

90 Years of Wonder and Awe

Park rangers in "Smokey Bear" hats and grey shirts, with a gold name badge glinting under a broad smile. I hope one of them is part of your summer memories from 2006.
August 25, 1906 was the legal birthdate of the National Park Service. The Lovely Wife once wore that uniform, and some of the best memories of our marriage are associated with national parks and our ranger friends, some still in that proud service. When you hear rangers joke about being paid in sunsets and scenery, they aren’t joking (sadly), but they do consider themselves well paid in that category, if no other.
Ohio has NPS units 60 miles south of us, in Chillicothe at Hopewell Culture (formerly Mound City) National Park, and 100 miles northeast with Cuyahoga Valley National Park which I wrote about earlier this summer. Head west on US 30 towards Chicago and you are five or six hours from Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where I grew up as the park took shape since it began in 1966. (This weekend I manage to get halfway to 90 myself, so I’m a bit older than the Dunes as a national park.)
From urban monuments like Independence Hall in Philadelphia to the vastness of the Arches in Utah, the National Park Service interprets and protects important cultural and natural sites of many different types. "Interpreter" is the term NPS uses along with many state and metro park systems for the skill and art of presenting a site to the general public. Park rangers and naturalists, as interpreters, have major challenges to face in their work, starting with our American predilection to not want to get out of our cars.
The fellow considered the founder of interpretation as a discipline that can be taught and shared is Freeman Tilden, whose book "Interpreting Our Heritage," is still the common text for rangers and any sort of resource interpreter, now 50 years after his work.
That book is still in print, but a number of his other works are now only available on-line or through used bookstores; Tilden knew that not all the cultural and historic landmarks of the nation were in federal hands and also wrote eloquently and passionately about preservation and interpretation of state and local sites.
His book "The State Parks: Their Meaning in American Life," written in 1962, gives chapter 12 to Ohio, and is almost entirely about the Newark Earthworks. This experienced traveler around the desert southwest, the Atlantic coast, and Colonial historic sites quotes Squier and Davis from their 1848 work for the Smithsonian approvingly:
"…In entering the ancient avenues for the first time, the visitor does not fail to experience a sense of awe such as he might feel in passing the portals of an Egyptian temple, or in gazing upon the silent ruins of Petra of the desert."
Since the citizens of Newark and Licking County chose by voting to approve a bond issue to purchase the Octagon and Observatory Circle more than 25 years before the nation saw fit to establish a national park service, we can only stand in awe of our more immediate ancestors as well for their foresight. We may not have a national park in Licking County, but we are connected to the great tradition of interpretation and preservation that began in the United States and is now a global priority not a hundred years after the first national park program was adopted here.
If you have any vacation pictures with friendly rangers in the scene, or memories of monuments and landscapes that speak to your spirit, this is a good weekend to pull them out and look them over, with a thankful thought to Freeman Tilden, Stephen Mather, and everyone who has accepted a paycheck largely made up of sunsets so they could help interpret and protect our nation’s real treasures.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he also volunteers for the Ohio Historical Society and Licking Park District to interpret their sites around our county. Tell him your story through knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-19-06
Jeff Gill

Let Us Break Bread Together

Thanksgiving is perhaps the high holy day of American civil religion, shared by most whatever their faith tradition.
It is a meal, usually shared among family and close friends, with certain rituals and traditions tied to how you set, select, and eat the meal.
There is a sort of tie to Passover, the great feast of Judaism, which is itself a home based observance. Certain dishes and dishware, words said even in secular households, and a meal with meaning going back over 3,000 years.
A meal, not too removed from the basics of people coming together to share some food, is central to the work of faith for almost every tradition likely to read "Faith Works." Native American spirituality holds to the holy in every mealtime, with many traditional peoples setting aside a small "offering" of the first spoonful out of each dish. Many pagan and neo-pagan observant folk pour out a libation onto the soil before eating themselves.
Buddhism has traditions of offerings on their altars where food, usually rice or mealcakes, are placed; Shinto, Japan’s tradition of honoring ancestors, places such offerings on home altars and take full dinners on certain occasions to gravesites.
So can a picnic be holy? Well, most religious people would want to ask first about intention, and where that intention is aimed (or to Whom), and many perspectives would want to see what is getting done – what effects result from the intention.
But I just want to say "Sure it can." Any time people come together to share food is a chance for something greater than one’s own concerns and interests to break through, and that’s an opening for the holy, or at least the Wholly Other.
Eating a burger in your car listening to channel 437 on your satellite radio: it would take direct divine intervention, I think, to break through our tendency to self-absorption then. A picnic, though, forces one to take others into consideration from setting up the table to sharing the last piece of pie. Nature must be faced, at least to fastening tablecloths against stray breezes, and accepted with equanimity (think ants). The fading sunlight reminds us of the passing of time, and the inevitable laughter and play of children all around calls us to hope in the future.
Can a picnic be holy? More than most of our commonplace acts, and with a little good intention and positive results (meeting neighbors, taking up a bit of excess for food pantries, putting ourselves second), the power of a simple grace and sitting down together is hard to stop.
Even after school starts, there is still enough room in our shrinking evenings and cooler weekends for some picnic opportunity to break into the everyday. Grab a chance when you get one!
Of tailgating, we will not speak.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he does not, in fact, think green bean casserole is a sacrament. Share a picnic prayer with him at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Notes From My Knapsack 8-20-06
Jeff Gill

Where Do They Come From?

One question on many minds right now is "where do they come from?"
The news of Hezbollah in Lebanon firing unaimed missiles by the thousands, and British born Arabs who embrace a suicidal, authoritarian dream of a world cleansed of some groups, and others (mainly women) firmly under total control, all raise concern over the source of such anger and militancy.
Not to take such developments casually, but their appearance is the historic norm, not an aberration of a particular time or place. Rome was assaulted by Visigoths and Vandals, conquered by Ostrogoths and savaged by Huns, all semi-nomadic groups who came together around authoritarian leaders and a violent dream of conquest.
A thousand years ago, early Islam was tormented by the Assassins, an odd sect or movement that believed killing Moslem caliphs could improve society more to their liking. Both Arab rulers and Crusader kings were harassed by the followers of Hasan-ibn Sabbah, the proverbial "Old Man of the Mountain," and they were active through the 14 th century or so.
Which is about when the records show the rise of a cult in India called "Thugee" by some, root word for our thug today. Killing for Kali, they were both roadside bandits and religious fanatics, who had a new renaissance under British occupation. The Raj tried to break up Thugee in the 1800’s, with limited success, and I’m told some isolated districts are still haunted by these mystical highwaymen.
In Europe, the anarchist movement wove in and out of early Marxism, with Mikhail Bakunin saying around 1850 that "the passion for destruction is a creative passion." Honored by many terrorist groups today, Bakunism was integral to much of the Bolshevik spirit in Russia, nationalist assassins (that word again) who brought on World War I, and the Black Hand societies of Italy which gave great impetus to the modern Mafia, itself a strange mix of superstition and religion and greed. Transnational and violent, how many cops have you heard say "if they put the time and energy into legal business that they do breaking the law, they’d be richer than they are as crooks." But the Mafia mindset calls darkness to darkness.
Enough? It just seems that every continent, faith group, and era has it’s own Sheikh-ul-Jibaal, an old man of the mountains who offers dark visions, a wild unfettered life, and a sense of unearned superiority. That kind of storyteller draws a crowd as well, and a twisted community forms, and can endure.
The question for society and civilization is not "where do they come from," as interesting as the consideration can be. They come from a dark corner of the human heart that apparently is always there.
Our challenge is this: do we want to survive? Do we know what it is about our way of life that is worth preserving, what price will we pay to maintain it, and what means can we use to protect civil society that does not itself undermine what we defend?
For Israel, for societies of the Western Anglosphere, the discussion is very much engaged and worth having, as to how we will protect and build up our values in the face of those who would destroy them. Lines will continue to be drawn more sharply as to what is beyond where civilization may go, what is proportionate, what is just, what is honorable, and bombs rarely can meet any of those standards for any side.
Too easy to skip over, though, is the first question: do we want to survive? Is the nihilistic dream of Bakunin infecting us, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to see it all fall apart and start from some mythical state of nature? The darndest people have said words of that sort in my earshot over the last few weeks, and leave me (nearly) speechless. Do we want to survive, or do we go from an impatience with silly gas guzzling sidewalk showboats to a vague wish for social destruction just to clear the roadway? Do we want to hold onto civil liberties, or get so weary of defending them we desire a survivalist compound in the hills living by barter?
Of course, this debate has even more immediacy for the residents of Kiryat Shmona and Safed.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; offer your defense or rejection of western society to knapsack77@gmail.com (and yes, I know the Gandhi quote, thank you!).

Faith Works 8-12-06
Jeff Gill

What’s a Supply Preacher?

I still get the question "what’s a supply preacher" often enough, both from people who’ve known me for years and complete strangers, that it seems worth discussing again.
Some of the confusion is from a category that is nowadays pretty common, if misunderstood. An "interim minister" is now a category of clergy who are often, but by no means always, near or past retirement, who have been trained for intentional interim ministry.
As the label implies, not that long ago interims were sort of accidental: church officials looked around for someone not doing anything else who could serve a church for a short period while they were looking for a new full-time pastoral leader. The nearest recently retired person would usually do.
More recently folks have seen that there is a special skill set for diving into a congregation, setting a new tone after the departure of a parish pastor, or pulpit minister, or whatever you call the settled clergy of your tradition. This skill set can, to a degree, be taught, and intentional interim programs for training are common now all across the US.
All of this, of course, means nothing in traditions like Catholicism or Methodism, where the old pastor leaves and the new one is sent, usually without a gap a’tall. But even there, certain clergy with special gifts are often identified and even trained to be those sent in after a period of major change or disruption.
So we’re talking mainly about churches that largely or in part hire their own clergy, which is the common practice for Licking County churches. Some of the denominations represented here actually recommend or even require a certain period of interim leadership after a long pastorate. The idea is to prevent another kind of "unintentional interim," the poor pastor who moves to a town following a long-standing predecessor, and lasts but a few years (or less) as the church sorts through the transitional issues from a long settled style to another.
This can be up to a two year contract for an interim, and often calls for the interim to move to an apartment in the area for part of each week. Anyhow, I don’t plan to do that! God bless those who chose to take on such a challenge.
Some folks actually prefer the short-term nature of interim work, and like regularly moving and seeing many new communities. That still suits more retirees than younger clergy, but there are an increasing number of people who actually start out as intentional interims and stay in that calling, though there is nowhere near enough of them nationwide.
That’s what a supply preacher isn’t, but what then are they? Well, think substitute teacher. They are credentialled and able to step in on short notice to do all that a teacher does for a day or a week, and turn it right back over to the same person.
What I knew going into this, was that there was a need for someone to do spot coverage during a vacation or a conference or even sudden family issues, and that’s what I’ve gotten to do. What I didn’t realize, as our family situation made this a good choice for all of us right now, is what a fulfilling ministry it would be, giving clergy a big thing not to worry about when they try to take a week off. Nothing discourages future leave time than a truly awful worship service for the home crowd when you’re away.
Add to that the opportunity to step in and help focus prayerful thought on subjects you then walk away from at service’s end, making it not be about you, but what you said, and supply preaching is quite uniquely rewarding.
Plus, I’ve gotten to see some sacred spaces in nine congregations, five counties, Sundays and weekdays, among multiple denominations, that I would never have seen let alone led worship in otherwise.
That’s what supply preaching is, and now that school starts in a few weeks, my busy season is ending. Let me know if the increased attention to this column helps or hurts!

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

Notes From My Knapsack 8-13-06
Jeff Gill

Colors of Panic, or Spectrum of Silliness?

Surely it is not just me. I don’t even know what the Homeland Security threat level is right now, but I suspect it is best when green or something of the sort. Probably mauve or puce today.
No, those aren’t the colors of emergency and warning I’m puzzled about, but the little sequence and significance of light green, dark green, yellow, red, pink, white.
Those are, of course, the stages of rain intensity on weather radar, and even the Little Guy knows their import. I’ve been looking at these colors at least since cable and The Weather Channel entered our lives, which co-incidentally coincided with a point in my life when I was walking a mile-plus to work (and across a long bridge over a river at that).
What I know about weather radar can be put in…well, about anything small, because I know nothing about reflected radio waves other than the colors. But I have extensive personal direct experience, as do many of us, in watching our network local or national cable radar picture, and then walking out and spending a stretch under those pictures.
What I’ve known for years, I thought, was this: light speckled green meant rain that may not even hit the ground, solid light green mist or light rain, dark green pavement wetting precipitation, red hard rain, and yellow on up torrents with the stray flying poodle coming out of the sky.
Now, here’s my question. Did everyone decide this spring to shift the settings down one full notch on the color bar? Is the sensitivity switch set on high? Did the fiddling from the unmistakable winter hysteria-mongering stick, and carry over into warm weather?
Because apparently, scattered green is always dry pavement (verga or somesuch), light green usually ditto, dark solid green is still often pitter-pats and mostly dots on the concrete, with steady rain not showing up until you have red on the screen, which was formerly cats n’ dogs territory.
This is certainly not a major issue, but it is a sudden and significant shift in my mind. Those tints and the expectations we carry with them have held steady for a very long time, and they all (from my vantage) have made a sudden, distinct jump to overstating the obvious. What happened?
Did a station manager somewhere get cranky because the radar didn’t look cool enough often enough, and said "can’t you guys tweak this thing up a bit?" I have been noticing for the last couple years a tendency to cover yesterday’s storms well past their sell-by date ("here’s where the storm yesterday went a hundred miles away") or pump up tomorrow’s ("our projected track takes it along this possible course") to the exclusion of telling us much about the next 24 hours, unless there’s a colorful blob in the offing right now. The end result is that there’s always some yellow and red to point at excitedly.
Or if there’s nothing from the last two days or coming in three, we’re likely to get all wound up about the heat index. Enough on that for now.
The fact of the matter is that information is losing out to agitation on many fronts, and I just didn’t expect that trend to extend to the radar picture. Fear sells better than security and confidence, and anger trumps happiness in the marketplace. If you’re worried about rain, you’re a potential customer, and the world always needs more customers. So tweaked it must be, and I’ll just keep mowing the lawn right through green patches of radar, without a dot on the pavement.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; offer your radar views at knapsack77@gmail.com.

Faith Works 8-05-06
Jeff Gill

When Church and Community Meet

Ann Munro Kennedy needs no further praise from the likes of this scribe; her works are written on hearts across this community and far beyond, with indelible ink. She changed lives both with her outward actions and inner decisions. If you did not know her, you might think you are the poorer for it, but most of us who knew her are aware of just how much she quietly and persistently enriched many who never met her, by how much better a place Licking County is to live because of what she’s done.
There’s more that can be said, has been said, will still be told, but the heart of our celebration in the midst of grief was a few Sundays back at a funeral service in her church, First Presbyterian in Granville.
Rev. Karen Chakoian led a wonderful memorial service with gospel music sung, hymns shared by all, and words offered by both pastor and family.
There is an art to the large, public funeral that cannot be taught in seminary, and must be learned, usually in a certain measure of terror, in the process of doing. Some of us have done enough of these that the raw edge of anxiety is a bit less, and the ease is not from it getting easier, but from the experience of how truly healing and helpful such events are for the wider community.
Don’t get me wrong: every funeral service is of major importance to the family and "loved ones" involved, and any pastor or lay leader worth their salt feels a sense of awe and anxiety about presiding over an occasion of such significance even to just half a dozen people. Truly.
But there are certain times when you know that this particular funeral is not just about large numbers present (some families can muster a big crowd even for crosspatch old Uncle Ebenezer), or about so-called big names in town (who can surprise you with how few turn out to mourn their passing). It is when you know you are part of laying to rest a person who lived at the intersection of so many paths through the vital regions of a place, and that many who walk those paths will wend their way into this particular funeral, whatever their faith or lack thereof.
That sort of funeral becomes, for good or ill, a significant moment for that family, that church, and that community (village, city, county, region, profession, all of which were communities represented in Ann’s homegoing). What is said, how presented, the sense and feel of the occasion, will echo in those communities of relationship for a long time to come.
When you try to take such a moment and turn it into your own direction, it can be worse than awkward (I think of the pastor who was part of the Reagan funeral: oy.); when you try to capitalize on such a moment for a cause or purpose, no matter how well intended, it can go very badly for all concerned.
But getting out of the way, letting the life speak of the deceased in the light of eternity, and allowing this to be a worship service even more than a memorial, but because we are remembering together what we know shouldn’t be forgotten . . . that craft can’t be taught, but we can learn together from such an occasion.
Thanks to Rev. Chakoian for providing such a moment with Ann Munro Kennedy’s funeral, and we will remember.

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

Faith Works 7-29-06
Jeff Gill

To a Faraway Place in Heartfelt Prayer

Damascus is a city I have long hoped to visit, but doubt if I ever will.
Many years ago, from a ridge in the Golan, I looked over the plain where Saul so famously rode, and heard our guide say that the hazy buildings ten miles to our northeast were the southwestern suburbs of Damascus.
That view may have to suit me for some years to come. The results of the last few weeks’ bombardment is further instability and tension in a very nervous, if historic corner of this troubled world.
In Damascus Paul came to his defining faith and was nurtured in an early Christian community near what is still "the street called straight." Straight Street, the central artery of the city, has seen Suleiman the Magnificent and Saladin the Great and Lawrence of Arabia all march its length.
The original "bazaar" is found near the heart of this most ancient of cities, almost as old as Jericho and Ur, and sites of import to Islam and Mohammed’s history are found there, near to Mecca’s significance.
And to the west of Damascus is Mount Hermon, whose snowy heights, far above the source of the Jordan River, cool by sight if not in degrees the parched plains below. Stretching north are more mountains, whose western slopes once produced tall, straight cedars, the cedars of Lebanon which made possible the wide roof of the Jerusalem Temple built by Hiram of Tyre for King Solomon. They would have been cut, and hauled by oxen across the Bekaa Valley to Tyre, sailed south along the Mediterranean coast, and landed at Joppa (near modern Tel-Aviv) to make the long way up into the Judean hills.
Those ships would have passed Haifa, just below the Mount Carmel headland, where high-up caves once harbored Elijah and later monks known as Carmelites. From Tyre to Haifa is about the same distance as from Columbus to Newark, and on to Gratiot to match Joppa.
Christian, Jew, or Moslem, it is painful to see the familiar names and journeys from holy writings punctuated by rockets, missiles, and bombs, by killing and burning and demolition.
Your columnist is broadly speaking pro-Israel, and John Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, broadly speaking, has tended pro-Palestinian. Our respective senses of what problem started when and who is responsible for next steps in that region are usually widely divergent.
His prayer, though, recently offered at a church event and made available on-line, speaks very pastorally to all of us, and in this moment I want to thank him by offering that prayer to you all:

A Prayer for the Middle East at a Time of War

You did not make us, O God, to die in bomb craters or to huddle through the night in basement shelters. You made us to play under olive trees and cedars and to sleep soundly with animal toys and gentle lovers.
Lord, have mercy.
You did not make us, O God, to hold hostages for barter or to rain deadly fury on innocent children and beautiful coast lands. You made us, O God, to welcome strangers and to cherish all creation.
Christ, have mercy.
You did not make us, O God, to oppress in the name of security or to kill in the name of justice. You made us, O God, to find security in justice and to risk life in the name of peace.
Lord, have mercy.
While leaders in Tel Aviv and Damascus, Tehran, Washington, and southern Lebanon pander to ancient fears, claim the mantle of righteous victim, and pursue their little empires in the name of gods of their own devising, the people of Lebanon and northern Israel are made captive to fear, true victims whose only advocate is You.
Save us from self-justifying histories and from moral equations that excuse our folly. Search our hearts for our own complicity. Spare us from pious prayers that neglect the prophet's angry cry. Let us speak a resounding "no" to this warring madness and thus unmake our ways of death, so that we may be made more and more into your image.
Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison. Kyrie eleison.

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

Notes From My Knapsack 7-30-06
Jeff Gill

Malletheads, Unite!

If Jimmy Buffet fans are "Parrotheads," then could polo fans be called "malletheads"?
Each Sunday afternoon through September, the sport of kings and the king of sports, as polo players would have you believe, is played in front of the Bryn Du Mansion on Newrk-Granville Road.
Despite the horsey implication of wealth and cost, admission is free, and some fairly average people play the sport. I can’t say normal people, since Bernie Brush is one of them, but many Licking County residents spend more on their hunting dogs than it costs to maintain a horse or two.
Your columnist doesn’t get up on top of animals bigger than he is, but it is fun to watch – did I mention it’s free?
Adding to the fun in a few weeks is a little "value-added" experience that you can spend a bit of money on and help a great local cause. Sunday, August 13 from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm the Licking County Coalition for Housing will set up a "professional" croquet area up by the mansion, and for $50 a person, $75 a couple, Bake-n-Brew is setting up a buffet and wine tasting to go with one of our last summer afternoons. Why croquet?
In part, because croquet is a spin-off of polo for those of us who don’t get up on animals larger than we are. The balls were originally old polo balls, and the mallets broken polo mallets (and they break often enough to keep up the supply).
Add a few horseshoe gates and the other end of the broken stick for a wicket, and you have ur-croquet. The game has evolved, and a croquet professional is part of the afternoon, who will show us how to (I suspect) put backspin on our cross court shots and jump balls to get around a sticky wicket.
The beverage set-up is a cash bar (hey, it is a fundraiser), but admission to the event does not include mandatory white clothing, so dress for the outdoor relaxation of it all before school starts nine or ten days later for most of us. Call LCCH 349-1921 during weekday business hours to reserve tickets, or go online at www.lcchousing.org.
As this catches on, Shani Smith and I imagine theme foursomes playing cutthroat, full-contact croquet; or at least with the costumes competing while the field of play is more peaceful. Whether you want to wear Edwardian whites or Bermuda shorts, just plan to wander by the Bryn Du Mansion on Aug. 13 and help more modest housing stay open and available to those who need it in Licking County.
And the polo alone is still free from the Newark-Granville Road entrance!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him your croquet balls, bouquets, or brickbats at knapsack77@gmail.com (note new email!).

Faith Works 7-22-06
Jeff Gill

A Trip To the South (Not Far!)

After our last two weeks looking at our Licking County religious history, we can’t forget Perry County.
Aside from giving us Dave Lehman, our area’s pioneer church heritage ties directly into some places of worship just over the border.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church south of Somerset is the first Catholic parish in all of Ohio, with the first mass said by Bishop Fenwick in 1818. The current building is perhaps the oldest structure still in use as a regular service location for the county, dating to 1864. I may well be wrong about that, as Perry County has many buildings and congregations directly preceding and leading to Licking County establishments, but St. Joseph’s deserves and will get her own treatment in this space someday soon.
What we just marked as a bicentennial for a Perry County house of worship is the 1806 founding of Zion Church, along Rt. 13 south of Thornville. I’m sure I’m not the only one to find it ironic that after passing Zion Road exits for what seems half a dozen times between Thornport to the hill where today’s Zion UCC stands, you turn on High Point Road, east where the Backwoods Festival crowds turn west.
Founded as a union church for both German Reformed and Lutheran congregations, the Reformed branch joined under the E&R wing with the Congregational Church 50 years ago to help found the United Church of Christ. Zion Church still honors German roots, Reformed liturgy of the Mercersburg tradition, Lutheran Pietism and Congregational thoughtfulness in her life today, led by Dr. Herb Hicks.
Former Newark area pastors Dick Hurdiss, Dave Mitchell, and Bob Settlage have all preached there in recent years, and your scribe even fills in for Pastor Hicks these days.
The technical date for their 200th anniversary was a few weeks back, but they will celebrate as a congregation in mid-September. Before that happy event, they look forward to the arrival and installation of Perry County’s most recent state historical marker, telling the tale of the oldest church in those parts.
With thanks to David Smith, the congregation historian, here’s the text soon to be seen in gold and brown by High Point Road off Rt. 13:

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ZION REFORMED CHURCH

Zion (Ribel’s) Church was built on this site in 1808. The log structure was located in the Zion Ridge Cemetery, adjacent to the first school in Thorn Township. The congregation of Zion Reformed Church is the oldest in Perry County still in existence. The church was officially organized in 1806 when the German Reformed and Lutheran congregations joined together in building the first church in Perry County. They purchased this land on June 30, 1806, and shared the building, alternating Sundays, until 1911. In 1803, Reverend Johannes Christian Koenig (John King) became the first minister to settle in Perry County and became the founding minister for the German Reformed congregation. In 1805, Reverend Wilhelm Georg Forster (William Foster) was the first Lutheran minister to settle in Perry County and was the founding minister for the Lutherans. The present Zion Reformed Church was built across the street from the original church in 1910.

* * *

Congrats to everyone at Zion Church on their high historic hill, and we’ll stay tuned for the big celebration in September.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; spin your historic narratives to him through disciple@voyager.net.