Notes from my Knapsack 9-12-19

Notes from my Knapsack 9-12-19

Jeff Gill

 

Hi, I'm a failure!

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Recently an event was held in our area, aimed at reaching out to students and families on the subject of achievement and stress.

 

Which is why I'd like to talk about failure.

 

I am honored to know John Ball, the convener, and some of his cohorts; those Granville High School grads who are now seniors in college this year are of particular interest to me. Those young adults have grown up and achieved for years in my sphere of observation, and when proud Blue Aces and some friends from up on Denison's hill get together to say "high school and college have been really, really stressful," I know exactly what they're talking about.

 

Pressures to succeed and excel and not just aspire but to attain – oh, they're real. Not just an internal sense of drive, but many external reminders that this is what's expected of them. Which is hard, especially when there's something else out there that can happen. Like failure.

 

But we don't talk about failure. "Failure is not an option" isn't just a mantra for the space program. Failure is for the memory hole, it's not spoken of, either as a possibility in the future, or as an actual occurrence in the past. Except, stuff happens.

 

So here goes: I have failed. Oh, no, not small stuff, either. Some big ones. I know, yet I get to write a column for the Granville Sentinel? All the better that I share some of them with you.

 

I was thinking law school was where I should go, and I got it into my head that pursing that path by way of the United States Marine Corps made sense for me, and so I enlisted, and began a journey towards that goal. In candidate school (officer basic), I slipped on the obstacle course, turned my knee around backwards, and was given a lovely cot in a grim silent building for a few weeks to think about my future plans.

 

When a jovial sergeant (they do exist!) said to me as I was ready to be "separated" that maybe my destiny was elsewhere, I agreed, and we signed the papers. I got an honorable discharge from the USMC, and I was and am proud that I volunteered to serve, but I've never felt comfortable being called a veteran, because I really wasn't. I served, and I failed, and home I went. It was a learning experience in many useful ways.

 

Years later I was talking to a friend about his time in the Navy, much more substantive than my own service, and on hearing my story, he smiled sheepishly and told me he went up for SEAL training not once, but twice, and washed out both times. "I don't think I've ever told anyone about this." We agreed, however, that given the failure rate, if you know one SEAL, odds are you know three or four people who tried, and failed to make it into the program. But you don't know, because we don't talk about it.

 

I went into a technical field, and my first truly grown-up job I was poorly trained for a week, and the first night on my own, I erased an entire county's voting records (this is forty years ago elsewhere, relax). I was fired the next day, fairly or not. I did learn, however, never to settle for less than the training I know I'll need, even if I'm assured "it doesn't matter."

 

I've learned much from failure. You almost certainly know people who didn't get into the programs they hoped for, got jilted by suitors or dumped by friends, or just plain couldn't do what they wanted to be able to do, whether a backflip on a balance beam or a chord change on the guitar. We ALL have failed, some more spectacularly than others.

 

Maybe what would help the pressure felt by our youth around trying to succeed is hearing more from us older adults about our failures. Some of them are actually pretty funny stories, too.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's got failures he hasn't even gotten around to remembering yet. Tell him one of yours at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 9-7-19

Faith Works 9-7-19

Jeff Gill

 

Ways to worship, not worshiping ways

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If you follow a liturgical calendar in the Christian church, we have Holy Cross Day and Ember Days ahead; if you are part of a more informal tradition, it's the time even contemporary worship leaders start thinking about Christmas season ahead.

 

I grew up in a middle-of-the-road congregation where the preaching minister and the choir robed, but the word liturgy was mostly unknown. The bulletin may not have come down from heaven, but it was prepared by the pastor and the church secretary and the organist, and that was close enough.

 

Like many Protestants, I assumed the order and music of our worship service was pretty much what everyone did. As I got older and visited Catholic and Orthodox churches, I realized how differently some worshiped, but I would notice those points of contact, if not exact parallels – the Lord's Prayer with its minor variations, the Gloria sung to different tunes, but those words echoing out of scripture, the place of an altar or table at the center of the area where people moved around during the service.

 

We sang at camp songs that were different from what we had in church, and some parsons would let the kids sing them, once, gently, before returning the service to hymnbooks and four part harmonies out of the choir loft. In youth group we might think out loud about how much fun it would be, why it might even be good to sing more of those camp songs in Sunday services someday . . . but how would you get a guitar into church without people freaking out?

 

During college, my now-wife and I plus some friends from our campus ministry went out to an outdoor music venue and heard Randy Stonehill play Christian rock music, which seemed so, well, rebellious. Others there had heard Larry Norman and Keith Green perform, and we listened to albums by Amy Grant and Michael Card, but for personal enjoyment, maybe even spiritual growth, but in church?

 

We offered up a service called the "Saturday Something" which was a chance to have communion, at 10:47 pm (so we'd be done by the time Saturday Night Live started), and those of us from a tradition that allowed non-clergy to preside at communion came together to not just lead at the table, but to experiment with different tables, in different parts of the church building, in the basement, up in the balcony, once up in the bell tower (that was crowded, but fascinating). It was a college Christian service, but for formal worship on Sunday we put on ties and dresses, a few bold souls wearing t-shirts or slacks.

 

Jump forward nearly four decades, and there may be more in worship on any given weekend with contemporary music than are singing from hymnals. Informal spaces, or at least what my grandmother (or mother!) would call an informal space, are where many services are held. Screens are common, four-part harmony in the pews uncommon, and pews themselves less so.

 

The idea of a set, formal, pre-planned liturgy laid out to order our shared worship experience is still a big part of what it means to be a church in many quarters. For some, the central experience of communion can't happen without that protective embrace; others highlight the sermon more than communion, but also circumscribe tightly who can preach that word on a Sunday.

 

But for more and more, these artificial constraints (as they can get called here and there) are strange and unfamiliar and even off-putting. Songs from the last few years are played, the words on overhead screens drawing in more singers whether they know the music or not; standing or sitting, dressed down or casualed up, worshipers gain a personal sense of excitement and involvement through the singing around them, the prayers offered between and after the songs, and then the quick transition into preaching that can last thirty minutes or longer. This is, to many, familiar, and what's new and different is having a prayer book or printed missal for worship.

 

This minister doesn't think it's at all useful to call one mode or the other right, or even better. There's plenty of evidence that contemporary worship is more effective for inviting, reaching, and changing hearts among the unchurched; lots of practitioners of traditional worship with a liturgical bent would present their case for how their model is more effective in building up discipleship.

 

One model for worship is more popular today; the other has centuries of experience behind it. I think neither will completely displace the other, but it will be interesting to watch how these trends play out over the next few decades.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's led worship in both styles. Tell him (nicely) what you value about your experience of worship at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 8-31-19

Faith Works 8-31-19

Jeff Gill

 

Labor and the life of faith

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Labor Day weekend is upon us, the end of summer and the start, in many ways, of the fall.

 

It's a time to take a day off, even though many of us don't, and is meant to honor the role of workers in our economy, and has been used to celebrate the work of labor unions in our national history.

 

Grover Cleveland started it in 1894, but the observance has roots back in American Federation of Labor celebrations years earlier; today's AFL-CIO is a labor federation, a group of unions still working together today.

 

There was an even earlier push to honor workers on May Day, May 1, but that was associated with anarchists and communism, and some argue the development of Labor Day at the start of September was to avoid that connection.

 

This is where churches and faith communities and unions have their own awkward history. It would make sense that a cause intended to bring people together for their common good and mutual support would resonate with Christian congregations, but the concern that socialism and unionism were two sides of the same coin made many churches avoid open support of unions and union causes.

 

Washington Gladden, a Congregational minister in Columbus in the 1880s through the 1900s, may be better known to you as the author of the hymn "O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee" but he was also an early advocate of the labor movement. As a member of Columbus city council, he advocated for public ownership of utilities such as water and sewer services.

 

Doesn't sound that radical, does it? But it did then. The early Labor Day parades and marches in Gladden's day called for wild and crazy stuff like the eight hour work day, paid vacation (usually asking for two whole weeks), and stopping child labor in factories.

 

And they were denounced as anarchists and socialists and communists for calling on the public to support such things. Churches found themselves split in some cases over whether to support or affirm union organizing, and agendas like the eight hour day, paid vacation, no child labor program of the early 1900s.

 

The Catholic Church has historically been more sympathetic and openly supportive of labor unions, perhaps because of their association with immigrant groups and struggling workers more generally. Because of this, during the period of Ku Klux Klan control of Newark city government in the early 1920s, their leadership called for barring Catholics from serving in public works, police, and fire as supporting "radical socialist organization," which was mostly unsuccessful and partly led to their dissolution and loss of power by 1925, but the echoes continued for generations.

 

The congregation I serve has a long history of being very much a church of union workers, with active members and leaders over the years who have been union local officials and leaders in that sphere as well. I grew up in northwest Indiana, where the USW and UAW and Teamsters were just part of the landscape along with the steel mills and factories curving along the lakeshore up into Chicago.

 

But the decline of union membership nationally has certainly been reflected locally. We still have a few open and active union halls in town, but many fewer than just a couple of decades ago. The loss of major manufacturing means the decrease in numbers of members, and that loss of dues means a lessening of influence, both civically and politically in Licking County.

 

There's still a Labor Day parade in Newark, on Monday at noon from the high school down Granville Street to Fifth St. to Main. As with many parades, it's not as big or long as it used to be, but the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions are still out waving their banners for organized labor.

 

For religious communities, the challenge in how to support labor is complicated today by politics, and that's a whole series of columns. But whatever your party affiliation, and whether you've ever paid union dues or not in your working life, people of faith can agree that workers should have a safe and healthy working environment, and receive a fair day's wages for a full day's work.

 

Like any human institution (including the church!) labor unions have their flaws. I still think we need them, even those of us not in their membership.  My dad always said "unions are only needed when there's bad management . . . " and then he'd say there's always going to be bad management, sooner or later.  So I think in the Beloved Community, we're always going to want to have labor unions around.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what you think about labor and grace and the Gospel at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter. 

Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-19

Notes from my Knapsack 8-29-19

Jeff Gill

 

Alarming times, quiet days

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The dog days of summer have lived up to their billing as hot and steamy. They hearken back to a clever guess by ancient astronomers that the Dog Star, Sirius, was adding emphasis to the sun's rays at this time of year.

 

In fact, during the daytime the constellations of Orion the hunter and his faithful canine companion, Canis Major or "the big dog" are overhead, invisible with the greater light of the nearby star we call Sol. Just as sometimes you can catch a glimpse of the moon during the daylight hours if you know where to look, you can even sight a star or two well before sunset or after sunrise, but not at noontime.

 

Yet they are there, and the astronomers who figured this out thought that the brighter Sirius might just be adding some scorching heat to the solar output. It made a certain sort of sense, and is a good reminder of the old "correlation is not causation" adage. Just because something happens when something else shows up doesn't mean the one thing causes another. What seems obvious isn't always.

 

As school begins, it's good to remember that schools are in general safer than they've been in decades; incidents in and around school buildings have been steadily going down in number – violent events, weapons or not – since the 1990s. There have been tragic major events that catch our attention and wring our hearts, but the overall situation is that your child or your friend or neighbor's child is probably safer at school than almost anywhere else.

 

It's like plane crashes and auto travel: an airplane goes down and people worry for years, but the overall numbers are clear that you're safer flying a plane to New Orleans than driving there. My problem is that you have to drive, then fly, then drive again, and repeat the process going home, so there's still plenty of risk traveliong even if the takeoffs didn't make me nervous.

 

And we're going through what I think of as the worst of heavy weather; August and September seem to be the most popular time for storms to rumble through and now for our phones to chime. The outdoor emergency alert sirens almost seem to be an antique method of notification, as the TV channels drop everything for hours with a line of thunderstorms, and if you are on the Granville, Denison, and county alert systems, your phone just about hops across the room with all the alerts, plus a few from weather apps I forgot I'd downloaded.

 

In the news, with the battle for the top few spots in the primaries heating up, it feels like there are alarms being rung for any number of social concerns. The economy, the climate, the atmosphere of racial animus the White House seems to be willing to roil just in order to keep on top of the news cycle. I wonder if the candidates are not running the same risk of the phone alerts: to try ringing our chimes with every ripple in the social fabric, and keeping them in a clamor, might just cause more people to tune out than to focus in.

 

I don't know about you, but I can't worry about everything. I've tried it. What we all need is a little triage, and some prioritization, to help us pace ourselves through the dog days of summer, the elections, and into a cooler and more thoughtful autumn.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's ready to just sit and watch some clouds for a while. Tell him how you'd prioritize our common worries at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 8-24-19

Faith Works 8-24-19

Jeff Gill

 

Privacy and prayer

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I'm originally from the Chicago area, and still love reading about its history and early days.

 

Reading a book about "the middle ground" era when Native American and French and British traders and then the early American nation were in contention over the land between the Great Lakes and the Ohio, I ran across a reference to a location I had just visited this past spring, on the north side of the Chicago River, across from the Michigan Avenue bridge which stands where Fort Dearborn did in the early 1800s.

 

Of early settler John Kinzie, his home – built by earlier trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable – after expansions was called "the Kinzie Mansion," now where the Trump building stands (which before that, if you're an old Chicago hand, was the Sun-Times Building); the Kinzie mansion is documented as having been a majestic 22 feet by 40 feet, with upstairs rooms.

 

I had to grab a tape measure and double check: my home here in Licking County is about 26 by 36 and a second floor. In 1804 terms, I live in a mansion. In historic terms, I've been told that almost any frame home in that era with window glass was called a mansion; Kinzie's glass was for inside doors, but that was good enough.

 

What really caught my attention, though, was that according to account books and journals there were normally eighteen people living in that house. I grew up in a house not much larger and there were six of us, and it felt crowded enough. Eighteen. How much privacy could anyone have had in that mansion?

 

Privacy is a relatively modern thing, at least as we understand it and expect it. There was in earlier eras an assumption of the confidentiality of a confession to a properly certified religious leader, a priest, and a confessional box was designed to give at least a modicum of enclosure and secure communications, with a separate space and curtains and such. The wonderful Aubrey and Maturin series of novels by Patrick O'Brian, set on Royal Navy ships of the early 1800s, often have the lead characters struggle to find a spot on deck, or even rowing some distance away in a small boat, in order to have a confidential exchange of views. The author regularly reminds the reader that there were really no secrets on shipboard, and what was whispered in the captain's cabin was known in the maintop before the next ringing of ship's bells.

 

There's privacy, and there's secrecy. Jesus says in Luke's Gospel "For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light." We might try to keep secrets that we shouldn't, and it's worth remembering that in general no secret endures. But Jesus also says about prayer "But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret." It can be a fine line.

 

In the time of the New Testament, not many people this side of Herod would have "your room," in terms of a personal, private prayer room. You'd be going into what we'd call the hall closet, or the utility shed, or the laundry room, a space used for many things, and appropriating it for a period of time.

 

But I think that's the tension involved in developing a truly vital and sustainable prayer life: the ability to share with God your deepest, innermost thoughts no matter what they are, and the knowledge that in the ultimate analysis, nothing we think will remain hidden. Not as in on the front page of the Advocate, but in the presence of the Judge of All Things.

 

There's much in our lives we aren't ready to share with anyone, so we seek out ways to keep our thoughts private and our concerns or worries or fears to ourselves. And there are those we are comfortable with who will hear things from us we'd rather not see on even page D-1 of this paper, but we'll say "if you tell anyone else I said that I'll deny it."

 

With God, there is no privacy. Which may have something to do with why so many seek to deny God, the existence of such an all-knowing One. Especially if the alternative is to just live out loud, and trust God to forgive us even if no one else does. To be who we are. In faith, we start to be that person in prayer.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's still not sure what he wants to be when he grows up. Tell him what privacy means to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.