Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-19

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-19

Jeff Gill

 

Going back, looking forward

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Faith Works 4-13-19

Faith Works 4-13-19

Jeff Gill

 

Silence is more precious than gold

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Faith Works 4-6-19

Faith Works 4-6-19

Jeff Gill

 

Walks like church, quacks like church?

___

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Traditional has become almost counter-cultural!

 

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

 

Faith Works 3-30-19

Warning: this is NOT for this Saturday, but for next, since I'll be out of town early next week.

Faith Works 3-30-19

Jeff Gill

 

DeChurchification, continued

___

 

Last week I mentioned the strongly developing trend to have weddings anywhere but in a church setting, and funerals increasingly having no religious context (if a memorial service happens at all).

 

For generations, getting married was when people "came back" to church. A young adult might skip Sunday services for a stretch, but then a wedding and babies would bring you back.

 

Delayed age of first marriage, and later childbearing, have all increased the gap, and contributed to many churches losing not just their teens but their twenty-somethings and beyond. A three or four year gap in regular worship participation became more like a decade, and that's a long time to be away.

 

I bring this up because historically I think you can find back in the Fifties and the Twenties and even into the 1800s where people bemoaned how often older youth and young adults would not maintain their faith community connections. But they did tend to come back, and I think the wedding day and infant baptisms or baby dedications were a big part of that.

 

It's not that we've stopped doing something that once worked in many mainstream religious traditions, as much as we're still relying on a mechanism for retrieval that's broken, and maybe in the short term unrepairable.

 

Meanwhile, the most significant numbers for young adult participation in worship are found in contemporary style settings, which to many older Christians doesn't look much like "church."

 

To which many younger believers say "exactly."

 

Again, I'm not saying my awkward phrase of de-churchification describes something entirely bad. But for any church looking forward, it's an aspect of the cultural landscape we all have to take into account. Another way of putting it is that "church culture" is no longer closely allied to the general culture, and if we're going to teach our faith and practices to our children and youth, we're going to have to do it better, sooner, and more clearly on our own terms.

 

Is that going to be through Sunday school or Vacation Bible School or church camp? I'm less sure than I used to be of those old wineskins being able to hold the new vintage. Like many preachers, I'm pressed by long-time church goers to pour new wine into them, and then folks are distressed when (Luke 5:37) they burst and end up holding nothing.

 

The new wineskins won't look right at first. They won't look like church. They're already being put into use, and we're often overlooking them because they don't look like what we're used to.

 

They're life groups and phone apps and podcasts; they're blog posts and mission trips and hands-on ministry. They're messages in worship, whether on a Sunday morning, evening, or Tuesday night, that aren't as much a lecture as they are guided discussions.

 

Just like the "flipped classroom" model where teaching is viewed on devices during the learner's own schedule, but the group meeting is where homework is done, so is the direction of Christian formation. Not movies in church basements (or filmstrips in darkened classrooms, remember those?) and then a workbook at home, but video lessons you watch on your own time and then the blanks get filled in when the group gets together – in person or online.

 

And part of me suspects that even at these examples, which may sound ridiculously out of step with historic traditions and practices as it is, may be rooted in yesterday's technological models, and that the immediate future might look even stranger than this. But rows of chairs and students all reading out of the same paper curriculum with a single teacher sitting up front: that's not coming back. And maybe isn't as timeless as we think.

 

But what about weddings and funerals and those life events we think of as central to our church fabric? Well, in the same way, they aren't as essential to the vitality of church communities as we might think. Until after World War II, in most of our religious traditions, weddings were in the parsonage at most, often in the bride's home. Not a church thing. Funerals? There's a reason we have the term "funeral home" because they rose up to replace the long time practice of laying out a body and having the wake in the deceased's own home.

 

What churches DO have to attend to are marriages, not weddings; to the practice of dying well, not reclaiming funerals; to Christian formation, not just traditional education. There's church, and then there's faithfulness, and maybe we shouldn't confuse the two.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's not happy about dechurchification, but he's thinking it's not all bad, either. Throw him more examples at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-28-19

Notes from my Knapsack 3-28-19

Jeff Gill

 

Spring is flowing through the county

___

 

While reading an absolutely delightful blog post by a fellow named Gerry in Liverpool (and if you don't understand how that can happen, you probably don't spend much time on the internet, and good for you), which you can find at gerryco23.wordpress.com, I found the inspiration for my last column and this one.

 

He cites another author speaking of the London suburbs while trying to prise apart the landscape of his Liverpudlian surroundings. Specifically, Gerry quotes:

 

"As Gillian Tisdall remarks in The Fields Beneath, her wonderful study of the landforms that lie concealed beneath her own London suburb of Kentish Town, 'the town is simply disguised countryside':

 

Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood.  Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes […] Garden walls follow the line of old hedgerows; the very street patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords. […]

 

From this, it is only a short step of the imagination to envisage the onetime fields being still there, with their grass and buttercups and even the footprints of cows, merely hidden beneath modern concrete and asphalt – as if you had simply to lift up a paving stone in order to reveal it."

 

So a quote within a quote, but a reality all around us in Granville. I work in Newark, and much of the same sort of thing is going on there, as well. Water will out, you might say, as the rain falls, the spring floods rise, and it all has to go somewhere. We channel and guide and re-route, but we can't make it run uphill (without pumps, anyhow) and it will always tend to seek out the path of least resistance.

 

Which has had me fascinated for years by Log Pond Run, a name that itself evokes some interesting questions of our Ohio narrative and a landscape formed by both nature and history.

 

Log Pond Run actually starts north of the village, just off of Route 661 southeast of Cambria Mill Road and what you might still call North Street that far north of Granville. In your car heading that way you might catch a glimpse of a small pond to your right, the land dropping away to the left and the right, a break in watersheds.

 

It meanders down to the area behind Goosepond, one name of Newark's former northern marshes more broadly called "the log pond," and down behind the mega Kroger and then east under 21^st Street, meandering through post-war neighborhoods, and then down past Moull Street and into older, oddly angled streets. It cuts across under Mt. Vernon Road, past the cabin where Edward Roye was born in 1815, and below Elmwood Avenue, named for the stately home of Israel Dille built in 1837 but now ironically facing Hudson Avenue.

 

Then no more than a littered ditch it creeps around the southern edge of the Owens Corning fiberglas plant and enters the North Fork just above the renewed totem pole at Truck One.

 

Log Pond Run is easy to ignore today, but its course has shaped streets and infrastructure still prominent in today's city. Smaller streams have had their impact on Granville, as well.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's got a few more cricks and runs to tell you about. Mention a stream that's caught your attention to him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.