Notes from my Knapsack 5-12-22
Jeff Gill
How we got where we are
___
There's a quote often passed around credited to Ed Deming or Peter Drucker, that appears to go back to a Procter & Gamble executive named Arthur W. Jones. It fits all of the above, and is useful to think about.
"All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get."
In other words, if you don't like your outcomes, you need to change your processes, your operations, even your leadership.
This gets trickier with communities and even, I'll venture, cultures. But I think it's a truth, or at least a truism, we should engage with. If our community is perfectly designed to create the results we're getting, what does that mean?
One thing I keep coming back to is the continued eruption of "self-storage facilities" across the country. We have so much stuff (and yes, I could use a different word for stuff) that we pay people a deceptively small amount to build a cheap enclosure with a lock on the door and let us use it by the month or year. If you have a storage unit, I invite you to multiply your monthly rental times twelve and contemplate it. I can wait.
Yeah, that's more than you thought? Wait until you multiply that figure times five or ten. Then compare that amount to the value of the stuff. Hey, I'm not saying storage units are a scam, I'm not blasting the rates charged, I'm asking about the outcomes we're creating.
Our culture is perfectly designed to cause us to purchase and hold onto more stuff (ahem) than we can keep in our living quarters, which themselves are on average double the square footage of the generation before us. Interesting to consider, no?
Likewise, as I shuttle frequently between Columbus and Indianapolis, I see the expansion of vast inhuman structures all along our expressways. I'm not saying the businesses in them are inhumane; I don't know enough to have an opinion. But the lack of human scale along our highways, the building of vast expanses on concrete pads with tip-up concrete walls with steel supports propping up trusses and light metal roofing, each with a small somewhat human scaled habitation of sorts wedged into one corner . . . oh, I get it! Way stations for stuff, on its way from manufacture to sales to consumption.
Then we store it in a vast distribution of units as well as attics and basements and garages around the country. Our society is perfectly designed to cause us to consume and squirrel away and . . . hmmm. If this isn't the outcome we want, how do we change it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's thinking out loud is all. Tell him about your relationship with stuff at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, May 02, 2022
Faith Works 5-6-22
Faith Works 5-6-22
Jeff Gill
Worrying about the wrong thing wrongly
___
First, let me just lay some scripture down as a marker: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." That's in Matthew.
Also, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes." That's in Luke.
Then there's Paul in Second Timothy: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels."
Yeah, I know.
What I am willing to stick my oar into is the maelstrom around "critical race theory," or perhaps you say "Critical Race Theory" but we can all just save me the typing and put CRT. We're being told we should worry about CRT. It's become a topic for legislation and educators and preachers and churches, and that's kinda in my wheelhouse. So here goes.
Before I got right with God, if not with seminary, I spent some time in college wandering in the wilderness of pre-law courses and over the years around a great many lawyers, most of whom are lovely and charming individuals. Likewise for judges. And I'd say anyone thinking about theological study in particular or ministry in general would be blessed by a couple of classes in Constitutional Law. It's a marvelous discipline, and a model for theological thinking except I believe the influence actually runs the other way. Anyhow.
There is, emphatically, a field of study called "critical legal theory." CRT is a subset of that concept; critical legal theory looks at matters of legislation and jurisprudence and asks (or interrogates, if you're being all academical about things) where we got ideas like the three-fifths compromise, and how those adaptations, while void in strict application today, are still playing a role in our governance and social interactions through the practice of law.
No shock here, race plays a role in stuff like how the Constitution (salute!) got written the way it did, and how it has played out with amendments and the stray Civil War and various Supreme Court rulings. Hence, critical legal theory has produced a stream of thought called critical race theory. Or, CRT.
In the contentious politics of our day — and I'm writing this is what I anticipate will be a blessed interlude after the primaries are over, but before the fall midterms get roiling in a boiling — CRT has become the cart into which we put all our preferred dislikes. If we don't like it, says a hearty contingent of conservative elected officials, it's CRT, so let's ban it. As many wiser than I have already tried to outline, the big problem is making almost any discussion of race or racism equal CRT is just asking for trouble. Likewise, if you want to argue that racism is over (we elected Obama, etc.) I think that's simply not going to hold up. Nor would I agree with someone who says racism is "worse than it ever has been in this country," a discussion in which I tried not to spit out my coffee.
What I worry about as a Christian preacher and leader is actually not that churches or schools might talk too much about race and racism, let alone about CRT however defined. Our problem is that as CRT is derived from critical legal theory, critical legal theory is itself a subset of critical theory, and there's the real problem.
Critical theory has been around quite a while, plenty of simple primers online you can read to sum it up, and I ran smack into it during college myself which was (off) a few decades back. In brief, critical theory says that reality is socially constructed. Yeah, just about all of it. How we see everything is entirely artificially generated by the Matrix, and . . . wait, different topic. BUT: those movies are riffing on this set of ideas, that we are perceiving differently than things actually are, and by changing language we change perceptions on one level, and reality on another.
Here's the thing. I worry about critical theory, but I do not want to ban it. I want to argue with it. I dispute both its epistemology, and its application to life in general. More to come!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on interpreting reality like we all do. Don't we? Tell him how you refute Bishop Berkeley at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Worrying about the wrong thing wrongly
___
First, let me just lay some scripture down as a marker: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." That's in Matthew.
Also, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothes." That's in Luke.
Then there's Paul in Second Timothy: "Don't have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels."
Yeah, I know.
What I am willing to stick my oar into is the maelstrom around "critical race theory," or perhaps you say "Critical Race Theory" but we can all just save me the typing and put CRT. We're being told we should worry about CRT. It's become a topic for legislation and educators and preachers and churches, and that's kinda in my wheelhouse. So here goes.
Before I got right with God, if not with seminary, I spent some time in college wandering in the wilderness of pre-law courses and over the years around a great many lawyers, most of whom are lovely and charming individuals. Likewise for judges. And I'd say anyone thinking about theological study in particular or ministry in general would be blessed by a couple of classes in Constitutional Law. It's a marvelous discipline, and a model for theological thinking except I believe the influence actually runs the other way. Anyhow.
There is, emphatically, a field of study called "critical legal theory." CRT is a subset of that concept; critical legal theory looks at matters of legislation and jurisprudence and asks (or interrogates, if you're being all academical about things) where we got ideas like the three-fifths compromise, and how those adaptations, while void in strict application today, are still playing a role in our governance and social interactions through the practice of law.
No shock here, race plays a role in stuff like how the Constitution (salute!) got written the way it did, and how it has played out with amendments and the stray Civil War and various Supreme Court rulings. Hence, critical legal theory has produced a stream of thought called critical race theory. Or, CRT.
In the contentious politics of our day — and I'm writing this is what I anticipate will be a blessed interlude after the primaries are over, but before the fall midterms get roiling in a boiling — CRT has become the cart into which we put all our preferred dislikes. If we don't like it, says a hearty contingent of conservative elected officials, it's CRT, so let's ban it. As many wiser than I have already tried to outline, the big problem is making almost any discussion of race or racism equal CRT is just asking for trouble. Likewise, if you want to argue that racism is over (we elected Obama, etc.) I think that's simply not going to hold up. Nor would I agree with someone who says racism is "worse than it ever has been in this country," a discussion in which I tried not to spit out my coffee.
What I worry about as a Christian preacher and leader is actually not that churches or schools might talk too much about race and racism, let alone about CRT however defined. Our problem is that as CRT is derived from critical legal theory, critical legal theory is itself a subset of critical theory, and there's the real problem.
Critical theory has been around quite a while, plenty of simple primers online you can read to sum it up, and I ran smack into it during college myself which was (off) a few decades back. In brief, critical theory says that reality is socially constructed. Yeah, just about all of it. How we see everything is entirely artificially generated by the Matrix, and . . . wait, different topic. BUT: those movies are riffing on this set of ideas, that we are perceiving differently than things actually are, and by changing language we change perceptions on one level, and reality on another.
Here's the thing. I worry about critical theory, but I do not want to ban it. I want to argue with it. I dispute both its epistemology, and its application to life in general. More to come!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's working on interpreting reality like we all do. Don't we? Tell him how you refute Bishop Berkeley at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Faith Works 4-30-22
Faith Works 4-30-22
Jeff Gill
Again and again (and again)
___
There are things you just have to keep doing.
Saying good morning, washing your hands, taking out the trash.
There are acts which are never ending, in a way: cooking dinner, doing the dishes, putting everything away . . . waking up to more dirty bowls in the sink. If you have babies, diapers; if you have older children, conversations & suggestions once made and twice and now to be again (and again).
If you are married, saying "I love you" isn't out of fashion because you've said it before; asking "what's wrong" or saying "you look happy" are the sort of rituals that circle past again and again.
And if you happen to be the possessor of a body for the time being, you know that exercise isn't something you can save up, let alone put off for too long. Your need to stretch and loosen up and then get your limbs in motion is something that will continue; God willing, for a very long time. But again and again for all that.
As any preacher will tell you, and probably has, many are the parallels between the physical and the spiritual. They are not exactly the same at all, but the comparisons are often instructive. Your spiritual muscles need to be used, stretched a bit and put to useful exercise. If you get out of the habit of testing your assumptions, of forgiving those you find in opposition to you, or perish forbid you lose the knack of thankfulness, you'll find it hard to get those impulses in motion again later when you really need them.
Driving cross-country and listening to some podcasts, I heard a minister of a multi-ethnic congregation talk about how so many churches fear conflict, and avoid disputes, because they're out of shape. Not quite his words, but they landed on my ear that way. If a faith community gets slack and repetitive in assuming that all right thinking people believe as they do, and avoid anyone in disagreement as obviously wrong thinking folk, you get flabby and loose thinking.
Then an unavoidable conflict comes out into the open, and people go "Ow!" That hurt, to stretch my thoughts and assumptions and yes, my beliefs a bit. One response is to snuggle down into the easy chair and vow not to end up working those muscles again. Limit the sphere of debate, reduce your contacts with those who aren't already clearly with you, and stay sedentary, recumbent, slothful.
Or, you realize "hey, that discomfort reminds me I'm out of practice putting my beliefs and commitments to the test" and that's a reminder to work those fibers of the spirit more frequently.
Many church discussions can run the risk of only being "questioned" by someone asking if we are all agreeing in exactly the correct way. The idea that direct opposition could even be considered by the light of day, in a classroom or chapel, even a sermon . . . that pushes us. We can push back, with love indeed, with forbearance and gentleness and care, but learn how to push back, or we can retreat into a safely padded zone.
Resistance training is something I know, physically, much more secondhand than perhaps I ought. But it seems a common physical therapy practice, and it doesn't mean someone hits you upside the head, just that you learn how to press on against a weight or force or obstacle set against you. I'd have to say as a preacher and a theologian, I've been blessed to put my beliefs into dialogue with people who do not share my assumptions, and while it's not always comfortable, I find I learn as much about my own faith as I do the other. Talking about spiritual practices and essential worldviews with followers of Islam, Buddhists, agnostics and yes atheists (absolutely atheists!) has been a blessing to me.
If you've not had the experience, I commend it; if you dive in headlong, it's like going into a weight room and just starting to try to pick up dumbbells at random. You can stub your toe or pull a muscle. Find a guide, but test yourself. I dislike the term "step out of your comfort zone" as a bit of a cliche, but I think our call is to expand our comfort zones, and be willing to again and again explore how our faith is at work in our life.
Word is, you'll never end in so doing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's had both fruitful and pointless arguments over the years, and the trick is knowing when to let it go. Tell him how you know at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Again and again (and again)
___
There are things you just have to keep doing.
Saying good morning, washing your hands, taking out the trash.
There are acts which are never ending, in a way: cooking dinner, doing the dishes, putting everything away . . . waking up to more dirty bowls in the sink. If you have babies, diapers; if you have older children, conversations & suggestions once made and twice and now to be again (and again).
If you are married, saying "I love you" isn't out of fashion because you've said it before; asking "what's wrong" or saying "you look happy" are the sort of rituals that circle past again and again.
And if you happen to be the possessor of a body for the time being, you know that exercise isn't something you can save up, let alone put off for too long. Your need to stretch and loosen up and then get your limbs in motion is something that will continue; God willing, for a very long time. But again and again for all that.
As any preacher will tell you, and probably has, many are the parallels between the physical and the spiritual. They are not exactly the same at all, but the comparisons are often instructive. Your spiritual muscles need to be used, stretched a bit and put to useful exercise. If you get out of the habit of testing your assumptions, of forgiving those you find in opposition to you, or perish forbid you lose the knack of thankfulness, you'll find it hard to get those impulses in motion again later when you really need them.
Driving cross-country and listening to some podcasts, I heard a minister of a multi-ethnic congregation talk about how so many churches fear conflict, and avoid disputes, because they're out of shape. Not quite his words, but they landed on my ear that way. If a faith community gets slack and repetitive in assuming that all right thinking people believe as they do, and avoid anyone in disagreement as obviously wrong thinking folk, you get flabby and loose thinking.
Then an unavoidable conflict comes out into the open, and people go "Ow!" That hurt, to stretch my thoughts and assumptions and yes, my beliefs a bit. One response is to snuggle down into the easy chair and vow not to end up working those muscles again. Limit the sphere of debate, reduce your contacts with those who aren't already clearly with you, and stay sedentary, recumbent, slothful.
Or, you realize "hey, that discomfort reminds me I'm out of practice putting my beliefs and commitments to the test" and that's a reminder to work those fibers of the spirit more frequently.
Many church discussions can run the risk of only being "questioned" by someone asking if we are all agreeing in exactly the correct way. The idea that direct opposition could even be considered by the light of day, in a classroom or chapel, even a sermon . . . that pushes us. We can push back, with love indeed, with forbearance and gentleness and care, but learn how to push back, or we can retreat into a safely padded zone.
Resistance training is something I know, physically, much more secondhand than perhaps I ought. But it seems a common physical therapy practice, and it doesn't mean someone hits you upside the head, just that you learn how to press on against a weight or force or obstacle set against you. I'd have to say as a preacher and a theologian, I've been blessed to put my beliefs into dialogue with people who do not share my assumptions, and while it's not always comfortable, I find I learn as much about my own faith as I do the other. Talking about spiritual practices and essential worldviews with followers of Islam, Buddhists, agnostics and yes atheists (absolutely atheists!) has been a blessing to me.
If you've not had the experience, I commend it; if you dive in headlong, it's like going into a weight room and just starting to try to pick up dumbbells at random. You can stub your toe or pull a muscle. Find a guide, but test yourself. I dislike the term "step out of your comfort zone" as a bit of a cliche, but I think our call is to expand our comfort zones, and be willing to again and again explore how our faith is at work in our life.
Word is, you'll never end in so doing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's had both fruitful and pointless arguments over the years, and the trick is knowing when to let it go. Tell him how you know at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 4-28-22
Notes from my Knapsack 4-28-22
Jeff Gill
The Natural History of Granville
___
In 1789, an Anglican priest serving in a small rural community in the south of England called Selborne published a book.
It had the straightforward title "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," and with the help of his brother in London, Gilbert White offered up what had been in part a series of letters he'd written to fellow naturalists in London and Wales. In fact, some of the letters were never sent as such, but White used letters he had written and sent as a literary device, a framing tool for over a hundred installments in the natural history portion and a few dozen about the antiquities of his district in Hampshire.
Some have said that Gilbert White helped create what we call today "ecology," and his acute awareness of a local environment, along with precise observations, recorded over time, contributed to much of the evolutionary and environmental science that was to follow in the 19th century.
And for subsequent generations, "The Natural History of Selborne" became a benchmark for the growing field of nature writing. The "antiquities" as a second volume often were left off, and "The Natural History" has not gone out of print for over 230 years. Selborne has changed, but not drastically; what has changed is the environment, and Gilbert White started a sequence of both precise and poetic observations which can be added to more modern scientific data for modern climate change evaluations.
If you've lived in a particular place for any amount of time, you have your own "natural history" in the back of your mind. Did the daffodils come up earlier this year than previous blossoms? When did you start seeing sparrows nesting, and is it in the same bush as last year? How many snows after the forsythia? Basically, that's what Gilbert White was up to, just in greater detail.
I've often wished since we moved to the village in 2004 that I'd kept a sort of naturalist's calendar, as did White, to record on paper or in pixels, not just in unreliable memory, when certain trees first budded out, bulbs sprouted, birds returned, frost last struck (in our part of Ohio, Mother's Day in general and May 15 more specifically is considered our frost free date). I'm just not that disciplined.
What the recent news of development on our western borders has made me think (among other things) about is how we have a great deal of natural resource that we're about to lose, how our environment is likely to change as habitat is reduced, and how species will no doubt adapt or move on, increase or decrease. Modern development has been bad for some wetland creatures, for instance, but raccoons thrive (that's why they call them trash pandas, after all.
All of which has me thinking about working on "A Natural History of Granville." We live in a dynamic ecosystem which has already seen great changes in the last two hundred years (look up "The Famous Wolf Hunt" of 1823 in Harrison Township online). Perhaps it's time to start recording our present landscape before it becomes what was.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's kind of into the idea of a parson-naturalist. Tell him how you observe the wildlife in your domestic settings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
The Natural History of Granville
___
In 1789, an Anglican priest serving in a small rural community in the south of England called Selborne published a book.
It had the straightforward title "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne," and with the help of his brother in London, Gilbert White offered up what had been in part a series of letters he'd written to fellow naturalists in London and Wales. In fact, some of the letters were never sent as such, but White used letters he had written and sent as a literary device, a framing tool for over a hundred installments in the natural history portion and a few dozen about the antiquities of his district in Hampshire.
Some have said that Gilbert White helped create what we call today "ecology," and his acute awareness of a local environment, along with precise observations, recorded over time, contributed to much of the evolutionary and environmental science that was to follow in the 19th century.
And for subsequent generations, "The Natural History of Selborne" became a benchmark for the growing field of nature writing. The "antiquities" as a second volume often were left off, and "The Natural History" has not gone out of print for over 230 years. Selborne has changed, but not drastically; what has changed is the environment, and Gilbert White started a sequence of both precise and poetic observations which can be added to more modern scientific data for modern climate change evaluations.
If you've lived in a particular place for any amount of time, you have your own "natural history" in the back of your mind. Did the daffodils come up earlier this year than previous blossoms? When did you start seeing sparrows nesting, and is it in the same bush as last year? How many snows after the forsythia? Basically, that's what Gilbert White was up to, just in greater detail.
I've often wished since we moved to the village in 2004 that I'd kept a sort of naturalist's calendar, as did White, to record on paper or in pixels, not just in unreliable memory, when certain trees first budded out, bulbs sprouted, birds returned, frost last struck (in our part of Ohio, Mother's Day in general and May 15 more specifically is considered our frost free date). I'm just not that disciplined.
What the recent news of development on our western borders has made me think (among other things) about is how we have a great deal of natural resource that we're about to lose, how our environment is likely to change as habitat is reduced, and how species will no doubt adapt or move on, increase or decrease. Modern development has been bad for some wetland creatures, for instance, but raccoons thrive (that's why they call them trash pandas, after all.
All of which has me thinking about working on "A Natural History of Granville." We live in a dynamic ecosystem which has already seen great changes in the last two hundred years (look up "The Famous Wolf Hunt" of 1823 in Harrison Township online). Perhaps it's time to start recording our present landscape before it becomes what was.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's kind of into the idea of a parson-naturalist. Tell him how you observe the wildlife in your domestic settings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 4-23-22
Faith Works 4-23-22
Jeff Gill
So what has changed?
___
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
And?
I'll avoid the more caustic "so what?" which implies a more negative angle on the question. Let me deploy the conjunction, the question mark, the punctuation which implies a consequence.
Easter Sunday is when Christians, a majority perspective in our area, celebrate the epochal event of human history as we understand it: Christ is risen!
Mary Magdalene, a hesitant Peter, a frightened John, a doubting Thomas and then many more besides gave witness: Christ is risen! A couple came running back from Emmaus with further confirmation: Jesus is alive, we ate dinner with him! Groups in Jerusalem, a multitude on the Mount of Olives, a gathering by the Sea of Galilee would all agree that their eyes and awareness all conclude: He lives.
And?
There's the post-Easter question, and just to offer some wider context, there's this book called "Acts" which offers 28 chapters of reply to "and" and "so what" and "what then?" You could start there.
But that would safely contextualize the event and the answer both into a foreign location, to a couple of millennia and a safe ocean of distance far away. What about right here, in our neck of the woods?
Christ is risen, and that means I should . . .
Do you have an answer to that? Because we really should take our celebration and our rejoicing and our ham and colored eggs and baskets full of candy and use all of that holiday energy to get us going on the implications of what we're claiming. Christ is risen, and that means God is good, the Good News is for thee and me, and we'd best be sharing it with others who need a word or two of hope. Jesus is alive, and if he could do it, his teaching appears to have been setting up all along that it will be possible for us, too. Resurrection may not play out exactly the same way for each and all, but Paul's talk of "the first fruits" of resurrection in Jesus is saying to us that death is not a final answer, but a pause, a semi-colon, a period through which we pass, but there is more.
And if there is more, then what we do with our now might just need to change. If age and infirmity and human limits are just one part of a wider longer broader arc, then we are not just winding up but getting ready. If our mistakes and missteps in this life that the world says will permanently mark us are not, in fact, the defining character of eternity and our future with God, then we may need to live with hope even when everyone around us says we're done.
God, unlike downtown Granville or Newark's Courthouse Square, allows U-turns. Unexpected U-turns are a traffic hazard, to be fair, but in living our lives and dealing with consequences, the record of divine activity in scripture, which Jesus rising from death to life would seem to validate, says God is fine with U-turns, even favors them somewhat. (The streets in the Holy City, we're told, are paved with gold, but the signage must be something…)
Christ is risen! And? This is what the churches of Christian belief and believers of a Christian perspective can and should be wrestling with between now and Pentecost. It had to be what Phillip and Andrew and Stephen, Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and all those disciples and apostles had to be dealing with in the days after the resurrection, before the ascension. Jesus is alive and now: we have to think through what he said to us, realize that some of the implausibilities he casually spoke have more import than even the practical advice he gave us. Christ is risen and now: we have to reflect on what this event tells us about the words of the prophets and the priests and the lamentations we have from those waiting generations before us. He lives, and I need to live as if that means something to me. Not that I'm marking time until my own death, but I have a place in a plan, a story, a heavenly banquet being prepared.
You know, the one Jesus kept talking about. Turns out he really meant it.
Do we?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad to know he has a seat at the table. Tell him about your Easter blessings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
So what has changed?
___
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
And?
I'll avoid the more caustic "so what?" which implies a more negative angle on the question. Let me deploy the conjunction, the question mark, the punctuation which implies a consequence.
Easter Sunday is when Christians, a majority perspective in our area, celebrate the epochal event of human history as we understand it: Christ is risen!
Mary Magdalene, a hesitant Peter, a frightened John, a doubting Thomas and then many more besides gave witness: Christ is risen! A couple came running back from Emmaus with further confirmation: Jesus is alive, we ate dinner with him! Groups in Jerusalem, a multitude on the Mount of Olives, a gathering by the Sea of Galilee would all agree that their eyes and awareness all conclude: He lives.
And?
There's the post-Easter question, and just to offer some wider context, there's this book called "Acts" which offers 28 chapters of reply to "and" and "so what" and "what then?" You could start there.
But that would safely contextualize the event and the answer both into a foreign location, to a couple of millennia and a safe ocean of distance far away. What about right here, in our neck of the woods?
Christ is risen, and that means I should . . .
Do you have an answer to that? Because we really should take our celebration and our rejoicing and our ham and colored eggs and baskets full of candy and use all of that holiday energy to get us going on the implications of what we're claiming. Christ is risen, and that means God is good, the Good News is for thee and me, and we'd best be sharing it with others who need a word or two of hope. Jesus is alive, and if he could do it, his teaching appears to have been setting up all along that it will be possible for us, too. Resurrection may not play out exactly the same way for each and all, but Paul's talk of "the first fruits" of resurrection in Jesus is saying to us that death is not a final answer, but a pause, a semi-colon, a period through which we pass, but there is more.
And if there is more, then what we do with our now might just need to change. If age and infirmity and human limits are just one part of a wider longer broader arc, then we are not just winding up but getting ready. If our mistakes and missteps in this life that the world says will permanently mark us are not, in fact, the defining character of eternity and our future with God, then we may need to live with hope even when everyone around us says we're done.
God, unlike downtown Granville or Newark's Courthouse Square, allows U-turns. Unexpected U-turns are a traffic hazard, to be fair, but in living our lives and dealing with consequences, the record of divine activity in scripture, which Jesus rising from death to life would seem to validate, says God is fine with U-turns, even favors them somewhat. (The streets in the Holy City, we're told, are paved with gold, but the signage must be something…)
Christ is risen! And? This is what the churches of Christian belief and believers of a Christian perspective can and should be wrestling with between now and Pentecost. It had to be what Phillip and Andrew and Stephen, Martha and Mary and Lazarus, and all those disciples and apostles had to be dealing with in the days after the resurrection, before the ascension. Jesus is alive and now: we have to think through what he said to us, realize that some of the implausibilities he casually spoke have more import than even the practical advice he gave us. Christ is risen and now: we have to reflect on what this event tells us about the words of the prophets and the priests and the lamentations we have from those waiting generations before us. He lives, and I need to live as if that means something to me. Not that I'm marking time until my own death, but I have a place in a plan, a story, a heavenly banquet being prepared.
You know, the one Jesus kept talking about. Turns out he really meant it.
Do we?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's glad to know he has a seat at the table. Tell him about your Easter blessings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Friday, April 08, 2022
Faith Works 4-15-22
Faith Works 4-15-22
Jeff Gill
Telling the story, again and again
___
Even in Easter week, people are talking about Intel. And most of us don't know the half of it.
Their arrival will forever transform the look and feel and population of Licking County, or at least for as much forever as any of us will have on this side of the soil. Farmland will be converted to factories, open land will become subdivisions, and new people will arrive.
The jobs we hear about won't all go to Ohioans, let alone Licking Countians: Intel is going to send many of their own employees here at least to start, those who already know how to build a chip factory, a "fab" as those in the know like to say. But that doesn't mean the talk of employment for ourselves, our friends, our children and grandchildren, is untrue. Some work to build means many more reliable jobs in construction, and the facilities and amenities and infrastructure will all pull in our local workforce.
And however many people end up working inside the fabs, the tens of billions of dollars just to open them up, all of this will draw in ancillary businesses. Anything from suppliers who want to locate nearby to needing more gas stations and schools where the houses will be sprouting like squarish mushrooms in the springtime.
Hey, preacher, it's Easter week — enough with the economic development talk, okay? Right, I know, but hold on. Because this is a macro version of the micro challenge for every Christian preacher of the gospel this time of year. We see on Easter morning full pews, added seating, and many unfamiliar faces. They may in large part be family coming to make grandma happy, or those who traveled who once lived in your parish and used to attend, but are now many states away. Are lots of the visitors on Easter complete strangers to your church? Probably not.
But we all know that there are large numbers of people who come for Resurrection Sunday as a way station on the way to ham and Easter candy, who are in worship rarely if at all the rest of the year. Maybe not even for Christmas Eve. Yet here they are.
Unchurched? Let's say lots of de-churched, functional agnostics, uncertain fallen away gone-fishing people who'd say "Christian" on a survey but are unclear in their own minds what it means to claim that name.
Your task, as an Easter preacher, is to tell the story. The Story, that is, for Christians. Liturgically, we take at least a week to do it right, from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, but for plenty of your guests, you have this one chance to plant seed and nurture some growth and pray for the Holy Spirit to blow even before Pentecost. The every week attenders are there, too, looking forward to singing "He Lives" and all that, but they might just need to be reminded of The Story.
And this is what I hope and pray devoted and committed Christian leaders are thinking about this Easter, 2022, before everything changes, and indeed it will. It's going to be Easter writ large, because friends, there are a lot of people coming to Licking County who do not know our story, or The Story. Unchurched? How about a big contingent of Never Churched? Oh, you've never met or talked to someone who has never been to a church service? May I suggest you think about what that might be like, from both perspectives?
Because this is, in at least one important and even eternal dimension, the great opportunity coming to our communities thanks to the Intel announcement. For a completely different set of reasons, maybe, than Easter Sunday morning in a crowded church, we will have a large number of guests coming our way. Some are interested in what we have to say about ourselves and how we give an account of the faith that is in us, some are quite cheerfully disinterested, and I don't doubt there are a few who will arrive hostile. That's fine: Saul was pretty hostile, too, but on the way to Damascus he encountered The Story in a new way, and his story changed.
How will we tell our story, The Great Story, the old, old story, of Jesus and his love? Guests, visitors, seekers, inquirers are coming. Are we ready to greet and welcome them?
Haste, for dawn is coming.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has mixed feelings about change, too. Tell him how you plan to welcome strangers and angels unawares at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Telling the story, again and again
___
Even in Easter week, people are talking about Intel. And most of us don't know the half of it.
Their arrival will forever transform the look and feel and population of Licking County, or at least for as much forever as any of us will have on this side of the soil. Farmland will be converted to factories, open land will become subdivisions, and new people will arrive.
The jobs we hear about won't all go to Ohioans, let alone Licking Countians: Intel is going to send many of their own employees here at least to start, those who already know how to build a chip factory, a "fab" as those in the know like to say. But that doesn't mean the talk of employment for ourselves, our friends, our children and grandchildren, is untrue. Some work to build means many more reliable jobs in construction, and the facilities and amenities and infrastructure will all pull in our local workforce.
And however many people end up working inside the fabs, the tens of billions of dollars just to open them up, all of this will draw in ancillary businesses. Anything from suppliers who want to locate nearby to needing more gas stations and schools where the houses will be sprouting like squarish mushrooms in the springtime.
Hey, preacher, it's Easter week — enough with the economic development talk, okay? Right, I know, but hold on. Because this is a macro version of the micro challenge for every Christian preacher of the gospel this time of year. We see on Easter morning full pews, added seating, and many unfamiliar faces. They may in large part be family coming to make grandma happy, or those who traveled who once lived in your parish and used to attend, but are now many states away. Are lots of the visitors on Easter complete strangers to your church? Probably not.
But we all know that there are large numbers of people who come for Resurrection Sunday as a way station on the way to ham and Easter candy, who are in worship rarely if at all the rest of the year. Maybe not even for Christmas Eve. Yet here they are.
Unchurched? Let's say lots of de-churched, functional agnostics, uncertain fallen away gone-fishing people who'd say "Christian" on a survey but are unclear in their own minds what it means to claim that name.
Your task, as an Easter preacher, is to tell the story. The Story, that is, for Christians. Liturgically, we take at least a week to do it right, from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, but for plenty of your guests, you have this one chance to plant seed and nurture some growth and pray for the Holy Spirit to blow even before Pentecost. The every week attenders are there, too, looking forward to singing "He Lives" and all that, but they might just need to be reminded of The Story.
And this is what I hope and pray devoted and committed Christian leaders are thinking about this Easter, 2022, before everything changes, and indeed it will. It's going to be Easter writ large, because friends, there are a lot of people coming to Licking County who do not know our story, or The Story. Unchurched? How about a big contingent of Never Churched? Oh, you've never met or talked to someone who has never been to a church service? May I suggest you think about what that might be like, from both perspectives?
Because this is, in at least one important and even eternal dimension, the great opportunity coming to our communities thanks to the Intel announcement. For a completely different set of reasons, maybe, than Easter Sunday morning in a crowded church, we will have a large number of guests coming our way. Some are interested in what we have to say about ourselves and how we give an account of the faith that is in us, some are quite cheerfully disinterested, and I don't doubt there are a few who will arrive hostile. That's fine: Saul was pretty hostile, too, but on the way to Damascus he encountered The Story in a new way, and his story changed.
How will we tell our story, The Great Story, the old, old story, of Jesus and his love? Guests, visitors, seekers, inquirers are coming. Are we ready to greet and welcome them?
Haste, for dawn is coming.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he has mixed feelings about change, too. Tell him how you plan to welcome strangers and angels unawares at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Wednesday, April 06, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 4-14-22
Notes from my Knapsack 4-14-22
Jeff Gill
The epistemology of Easter
___
Epistemology is just a fancy word for asking the question "how do we know what we know?"
I was at a program at Denison University with a panel of Pulitzer Prize winning journalists talking about how their discipline has changed, and how the means of delivering news has meant many changes in methods. But their emphasis was on the reality that we now can get information, news, data, from a wide variety of sources.
Online, many of those sources are questionable at best. So the panelists talked about how each of us, journalist or not, has to make decisions about what kinds of knowing count for us as knowledge. They discussed, in my words, not theirs, how we each have our own "mattering map" for sorting out the influx of ideas and information.
Most of us are perfectly aware in general that a fact or a story or a message can be shared into our social media feed by thousands of people, and still be wrong, incorrect, false. Mistakes get made, and especially in a highly stressful context, an error of fact can take on a life of its own: a misplaced identification, an assumption based on a particular video angle, a confusion of cause and effect.
One well-studied example is that in plane crashes, it is very common for eyewitnesses to report the aircraft was in flames before the fiery impact with the ground . . . even when videotape evidence can show clearly there were no flames until the moment of the crash itself. It's so common as to likely tell us something about how the brain processes and stores memories. And investigators know that eyewitness accounts of a plane in flames have to be taken into account very carefully.
The media angle here is that for many of us, there's the social media (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) story, but until we see it in a mainstream or legacy media platform, like the Washington Post or CNN, we're not sure. Has Russia invaded Ukraine? Social media was flooding our feeds with information, but there's a point at which we can start saying "yeah, that really must have happened" when we see the same or parallel info in more traditional outlets.
Some spin or interpretation comes out about cultural events that we may, in Ohio, know little about if it begins in LA or Orlando or Europe. Did it "happen"? We check our sources, some of us have a preferred set of sources. I like to triangulate and check "National Review Online" and "Mother Jones," rather than believe one or the other. There's an epistemological triangulation we can do to pin down the intersection of fact and truth.
History can be as slippery as current events. Nations and cultures have agendas and shape how we look at slavery, western expansion, economic growth; how do we know what we know about what was right, who was correct, which group is honored?
Then there's 2000 years ago. Unlikely events catch our attention, inflame our imaginations: could someone have risen from the dead after a cruel execution? Whose account do we trust? On what basis do we decide which story we believe?
Easter is a story we have to make a decision about, an epistemological choice between alternative accounts. Either someone went from death to life, or it's always a one way journey the other way. How do we decide?
May light shine for you as we all ask ourselves these questions, every day.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made his choices, and is simply inviting you to make yours. Tell him how you know what you know at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
The epistemology of Easter
___
Epistemology is just a fancy word for asking the question "how do we know what we know?"
I was at a program at Denison University with a panel of Pulitzer Prize winning journalists talking about how their discipline has changed, and how the means of delivering news has meant many changes in methods. But their emphasis was on the reality that we now can get information, news, data, from a wide variety of sources.
Online, many of those sources are questionable at best. So the panelists talked about how each of us, journalist or not, has to make decisions about what kinds of knowing count for us as knowledge. They discussed, in my words, not theirs, how we each have our own "mattering map" for sorting out the influx of ideas and information.
Most of us are perfectly aware in general that a fact or a story or a message can be shared into our social media feed by thousands of people, and still be wrong, incorrect, false. Mistakes get made, and especially in a highly stressful context, an error of fact can take on a life of its own: a misplaced identification, an assumption based on a particular video angle, a confusion of cause and effect.
One well-studied example is that in plane crashes, it is very common for eyewitnesses to report the aircraft was in flames before the fiery impact with the ground . . . even when videotape evidence can show clearly there were no flames until the moment of the crash itself. It's so common as to likely tell us something about how the brain processes and stores memories. And investigators know that eyewitness accounts of a plane in flames have to be taken into account very carefully.
The media angle here is that for many of us, there's the social media (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) story, but until we see it in a mainstream or legacy media platform, like the Washington Post or CNN, we're not sure. Has Russia invaded Ukraine? Social media was flooding our feeds with information, but there's a point at which we can start saying "yeah, that really must have happened" when we see the same or parallel info in more traditional outlets.
Some spin or interpretation comes out about cultural events that we may, in Ohio, know little about if it begins in LA or Orlando or Europe. Did it "happen"? We check our sources, some of us have a preferred set of sources. I like to triangulate and check "National Review Online" and "Mother Jones," rather than believe one or the other. There's an epistemological triangulation we can do to pin down the intersection of fact and truth.
History can be as slippery as current events. Nations and cultures have agendas and shape how we look at slavery, western expansion, economic growth; how do we know what we know about what was right, who was correct, which group is honored?
Then there's 2000 years ago. Unlikely events catch our attention, inflame our imaginations: could someone have risen from the dead after a cruel execution? Whose account do we trust? On what basis do we decide which story we believe?
Easter is a story we have to make a decision about, an epistemological choice between alternative accounts. Either someone went from death to life, or it's always a one way journey the other way. How do we decide?
May light shine for you as we all ask ourselves these questions, every day.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made his choices, and is simply inviting you to make yours. Tell him how you know what you know at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, March 28, 2022
Faith Works 4-2-22
Faith Works 4-2-22
Jeff Gill
Answered prayers are two edged tools
___
"More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."
This saying has been attributed to St. Teresa of Avilá, and it certainly sounds like her, but it's not found in her writings, at least not that pithily.
Truman Capote used the line for his last novel, but his relationship with facts was always a creative one. Let's just call it folk wisdom of a sort.
We think we know what we want, and when we get it, things don't always work out as we might have hoped. Our unanswered prayers, the times we knew what we wanted and didn't get it, can end up opening doors we never knew we could go through. Sometimes it takes a closing down of options before we can narrow things down to the one thing we really ought to choose.
But answered prayers? Those really can be tricky. Especially if it's the culmination of a long held hope, a plan much anticipated. Our fondest wish is granted, and then . . . as certain fairy tales point out, both ancient or modern, there's what happens after happily ever after.
At the risk of sounding cavalier about some sincerely voiced concerns, I think much of the reaction to the Intel announcement for Jersey Township (or New Albany) in Licking County fits into the category of answered prayers evoking some weeping and wailing.
We've all said that it's too bad so much industry and manufacturing has closed, and how good it would be to see new production facilities open up in our area. It's a commonplace in political campaigns not just to say they're going to create jobs but to make opportunities for our young people to stay nearby. Economic development has been the core of most of the community planning and visioning I've been privy to since I first moved here in 1989.
Twenty billion dollars is quite a lot of economic development. I had to look that up just to make sure I was remembering it correctly, and saw Kent Mallett's reminder that Intel has suggested it could be $100 billion by the time they're done. And that's not counting the affiliated businesses that undoubtedly will move in next door. Economic development? The question isn't about calling in the wave now, it's learning how to surf it as the wave washes over us.
This is a dramatic and region-wide version of what happens in a faith community, to a congregation that wishes and plans and prays for growth, and then reacts awkwardly to new people and different practices and the dynamics of larger numbers, let alone a significant percentage of strangers. Thom Rainer talks about "the berry bucket" and what happens at a certain moment for clergy when the number of people in a church shifts from everyone having been there before you came, which is always the case at the start, to the tipping point that comes when after enough losses and departures and funerals versus new members who came since the preacher arrived, you have a new equilibrium.
Rainer actually notes that it's often not an equilibrium that comes when the older berries are equalled by the new pickings (and I don't love the metaphor, but it's a well known one). Sometimes the previous critical mass reacts against the new cohort, both consciously and unconsciously, to reassert how things "used to be" or even "should be."
The problem for a church in a time of change is that the existing congregation can, at least for a while, stop it. Now, the outcome is usually not for a different sort of growth, but to freeze it in place, if not roll things backwards. Leaving the question of God's vision for growth to one side for the moment, we'll just stipulate that congregations can halt growth when it gets uncomfortable.
Our region can't do that. The floodgate is already open, and the changes are already happening. No amount of angst will alter the short-term reality, which is growth. New people, new jobs, new buildings, new traffic, new money.
It's what we wanted, right? Yeah, we can say now "but not quite like this" or even "not this much!" for all the good it will do. Growth, and fairly dramatic growth, is coming. How will we be good stewards of this opportunity?
I believe this is an opportunity for faith communities, and hope to share more about how our impending future can bless both our existing religious landscape, and the one that is coming into being.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's never seen anything like this, either. Let's share our ignorance and scraps of knowledge through knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Thursday, March 17, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 3-31-22
Notes from my Knapsack 3-31-22
Jeff Gill
Going on a trip, returning home
___
Spring break is back after a two year hiatus, and if my social media is any guide, there's a great deal of traveling going on.
As it turns out, I've traveled a great deal through COVID times, mostly back and forth to a single house in the Indianapolis suburbs. I can't account for supply chain problems, but I'd assure you that if I-70 is any guide, the trucks have not stopped running, and that's in both directions.
Outside of the "resort" (as my wife and I joke in our texts, about arriving at "the resort" where there's no tipping, but the laundry & housekeeping is definitely self-service) we have been making pre-dawn runs to stock up when there's few others at the stores, and mostly otherwise going to hospitals where masking and precautions are still considered reasonable, given that (unless you're a patient's escort) most of those arriving are in a risk category.
To be honest, we were never world travelers, unless you count a lap or two of EPCOT. We had hopes. And online, there are some interesting options if you can't travel, but would like to engage in a little creative self-distraction.
Which is how I've become a regular pedestrian in Paris, with a few ventures in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Google Street View is a pleasant way to meander around a strange place, and while I can't test this out anytime soon, I have a definite sense that if you dropped me off by taxi from the airport in downtown Anyoftheabove, I could get around at least a bit to places I hope to see in person some fine day.
It started with some professional reasons to check out addresses before I drove to the location, all here locally, and I found that a quick scout-around online could help me do what I needed to do in person later. Yes, things can change a year or two or four later, but in general it's a useful lay of the land. And then I retraced some steps in midtown & downtown Manhattan through my laptop, and developed a sense of what reality looks like versus the admittedly limited window of my computer screen.
One fun break I've taken a few times in a moment of stress: walking the embankments of the Seine in Paris, or the Thames in London. Just type in the city, click the map on the right that is a usual search option, then zoom into a riverbank until [plop] you leave the aerial view to a click-by-click, one arrow at a time, online opportunity to wander past Notre Dame or Parliament. Like most computer games, there are limits to how far you can go: it's not an "open world" by a long shot. But I think of what touristing I've done in my life, and how often I end up bustling from one place to the next, not seeing much or as much in between as I might have. This ain't bad, I have to say.
April in Paris, anyone? I think we have some ripples of virus still to endure for another year or two, and I've still got a person to be cautious on behalf of, so it's going to be one click at a time for a while yet.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not been everywhere, man. Tell him where you've virtually been at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Going on a trip, returning home
___
Spring break is back after a two year hiatus, and if my social media is any guide, there's a great deal of traveling going on.
As it turns out, I've traveled a great deal through COVID times, mostly back and forth to a single house in the Indianapolis suburbs. I can't account for supply chain problems, but I'd assure you that if I-70 is any guide, the trucks have not stopped running, and that's in both directions.
Outside of the "resort" (as my wife and I joke in our texts, about arriving at "the resort" where there's no tipping, but the laundry & housekeeping is definitely self-service) we have been making pre-dawn runs to stock up when there's few others at the stores, and mostly otherwise going to hospitals where masking and precautions are still considered reasonable, given that (unless you're a patient's escort) most of those arriving are in a risk category.
To be honest, we were never world travelers, unless you count a lap or two of EPCOT. We had hopes. And online, there are some interesting options if you can't travel, but would like to engage in a little creative self-distraction.
Which is how I've become a regular pedestrian in Paris, with a few ventures in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Google Street View is a pleasant way to meander around a strange place, and while I can't test this out anytime soon, I have a definite sense that if you dropped me off by taxi from the airport in downtown Anyoftheabove, I could get around at least a bit to places I hope to see in person some fine day.
It started with some professional reasons to check out addresses before I drove to the location, all here locally, and I found that a quick scout-around online could help me do what I needed to do in person later. Yes, things can change a year or two or four later, but in general it's a useful lay of the land. And then I retraced some steps in midtown & downtown Manhattan through my laptop, and developed a sense of what reality looks like versus the admittedly limited window of my computer screen.
One fun break I've taken a few times in a moment of stress: walking the embankments of the Seine in Paris, or the Thames in London. Just type in the city, click the map on the right that is a usual search option, then zoom into a riverbank until [plop] you leave the aerial view to a click-by-click, one arrow at a time, online opportunity to wander past Notre Dame or Parliament. Like most computer games, there are limits to how far you can go: it's not an "open world" by a long shot. But I think of what touristing I've done in my life, and how often I end up bustling from one place to the next, not seeing much or as much in between as I might have. This ain't bad, I have to say.
April in Paris, anyone? I think we have some ripples of virus still to endure for another year or two, and I've still got a person to be cautious on behalf of, so it's going to be one click at a time for a while yet.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not been everywhere, man. Tell him where you've virtually been at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 3-26-22
Faith Works 3-26-22
Jeff Gill
Lent and a world of glass and sand
___
Fragile and robust, or cracked yet whole.
Our smartphones (irony alert) are, for many, expensive appliances we treat casually, and broken tools which still work until they don't.
I'm noticing how for more and more people the tablet is more a device the better-off use, and phones are the go-to computer for everyday use. Younger adults can go days, weeks without working on a traditional keyboard or using a desktop, let alone laptop computer. Phones are getting bigger, and use of online materials, whether documents or applications or websites, is mostly handled in one hand, not on a screen.
Maybe this is just the folks I'm working with these days, but I talk and assist large numbers of parents of school age children now, and telling them on the phone (a device on my desk with a handset I can crunch into my shoulder while typing on a computer workstation) to check a certain website will often get me "okay, I'm looking at it on my phone."
Not to tell the digital age something it already knows better than me, but a web page on a 15 inch screen (or paired screens) is a very different interaction than a smartphone browser's rendition. So I've learned when I need to walk someone through a registration or updating or revising of online information, I look at it on my phone first.
It's a function of age and long-ailing eyesight, but this lesson took me a while because a complex form online of any sort would normally cause me, if say I learned I needed to use it by an email on my phone (hold that thought) I'd still wait until I got home, for a larger view and more fingers on the keyboard — maybe not ten, but definitely not all with one finger or two thumbs. Not so most people I'm learning. The internet is becoming a landscape viewed more through the porthole of a phone screen than a wider window as I prefer.
And just to further belabor the obvious, all kinds of former viewscapes are clamping down to three or four inches by five or six: movie theaters are celebrating a return to seats that are clearly fewer in number than we once had, and that's not all due to COVID times, and even home theater large TV screens may be secondary to what people are looking at in their lap, cradled in one hand.
There are people I think very well of indeed who have said, without irony, that they believe we should ban all social media until people hit age 18 or so. I can understand where they're coming from without entirely agreeing with them. And in a separate but somewhat parallel line of thinking, some wise heads have voiced a belief that faith communities should quit providing online worship, to promote attendance and fellowship and engagement with one another. I can only agree with the goal, the ends, while I'm skeptical of the means.
Now we have a factory complex coming our way which takes silicon, sand in essence, and fabricates from it a vast house of data. I'll save 500 words and let you mull over that sermon illustration right there (house, sand, build, hmmm). The ironies get richer when you think of how a century and a half ago we had glass factories to the east of Newark, today a brilliant Heisey Glass Museum in the heart of the city, and a silicon transmutation complex going up to our west.
The chips more and more go into devices, we still call them phones, which are as the interface a pane of glass, both window and mirror for us. Honestly, for anyone, let alone a Christian preacher, it sets us up for an embarrassment of homiletic riches.
Looking into our world of glass and sand, reading about the radical, transformative changes that are coming to our area, are we seeing our reflection, a distorted window, or are we getting a clear view of what's to come? I hear fear, I hear joy, I see excitement, and I see dread as I've talked to various community leaders and local residents these last few weeks.
What we should remember is that we're getting most of our impressions through accidentally cracked glass, artfully fused sand, semiconductors which can only transmit semi truths, if that's what's put into them.
Or from the earliest days of computers: garbage in, garbage out. That's a phrase worth contemplating, over halfway through this Lent of 2022.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his screen is cracked, too. Tell him how you keep your perceptions clear at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Lent and a world of glass and sand
___
Fragile and robust, or cracked yet whole.
Our smartphones (irony alert) are, for many, expensive appliances we treat casually, and broken tools which still work until they don't.
I'm noticing how for more and more people the tablet is more a device the better-off use, and phones are the go-to computer for everyday use. Younger adults can go days, weeks without working on a traditional keyboard or using a desktop, let alone laptop computer. Phones are getting bigger, and use of online materials, whether documents or applications or websites, is mostly handled in one hand, not on a screen.
Maybe this is just the folks I'm working with these days, but I talk and assist large numbers of parents of school age children now, and telling them on the phone (a device on my desk with a handset I can crunch into my shoulder while typing on a computer workstation) to check a certain website will often get me "okay, I'm looking at it on my phone."
Not to tell the digital age something it already knows better than me, but a web page on a 15 inch screen (or paired screens) is a very different interaction than a smartphone browser's rendition. So I've learned when I need to walk someone through a registration or updating or revising of online information, I look at it on my phone first.
It's a function of age and long-ailing eyesight, but this lesson took me a while because a complex form online of any sort would normally cause me, if say I learned I needed to use it by an email on my phone (hold that thought) I'd still wait until I got home, for a larger view and more fingers on the keyboard — maybe not ten, but definitely not all with one finger or two thumbs. Not so most people I'm learning. The internet is becoming a landscape viewed more through the porthole of a phone screen than a wider window as I prefer.
And just to further belabor the obvious, all kinds of former viewscapes are clamping down to three or four inches by five or six: movie theaters are celebrating a return to seats that are clearly fewer in number than we once had, and that's not all due to COVID times, and even home theater large TV screens may be secondary to what people are looking at in their lap, cradled in one hand.
There are people I think very well of indeed who have said, without irony, that they believe we should ban all social media until people hit age 18 or so. I can understand where they're coming from without entirely agreeing with them. And in a separate but somewhat parallel line of thinking, some wise heads have voiced a belief that faith communities should quit providing online worship, to promote attendance and fellowship and engagement with one another. I can only agree with the goal, the ends, while I'm skeptical of the means.
Now we have a factory complex coming our way which takes silicon, sand in essence, and fabricates from it a vast house of data. I'll save 500 words and let you mull over that sermon illustration right there (house, sand, build, hmmm). The ironies get richer when you think of how a century and a half ago we had glass factories to the east of Newark, today a brilliant Heisey Glass Museum in the heart of the city, and a silicon transmutation complex going up to our west.
The chips more and more go into devices, we still call them phones, which are as the interface a pane of glass, both window and mirror for us. Honestly, for anyone, let alone a Christian preacher, it sets us up for an embarrassment of homiletic riches.
Looking into our world of glass and sand, reading about the radical, transformative changes that are coming to our area, are we seeing our reflection, a distorted window, or are we getting a clear view of what's to come? I hear fear, I hear joy, I see excitement, and I see dread as I've talked to various community leaders and local residents these last few weeks.
What we should remember is that we're getting most of our impressions through accidentally cracked glass, artfully fused sand, semiconductors which can only transmit semi truths, if that's what's put into them.
Or from the earliest days of computers: garbage in, garbage out. That's a phrase worth contemplating, over halfway through this Lent of 2022.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his screen is cracked, too. Tell him how you keep your perceptions clear at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Faith Works 3-19-22
Faith Works 3-19-22
Jeff Gill
Righteous anger might be an oxymoron
___
If we start with a Biblical and New Testament perspective, it's hard to support the concept of righteous anger. To wit:
"My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires." James 1:19-20 (NIV)
Pretty much closes that door, at least for those of us wanting to affirm Biblical authority in a statement that precise, that clear.
It's still a temptation.
And when it comes to temptation, I call on God to help me resist it, to save me from the time of trial, and in Jesus trust in grace when I fail. Which is not infrequently.
Last week I was escorting an elderly relative in his 90s through a medically ordered heart test; he has a pacemaker and some other symptoms that had us wanting to check out some basic questions. So we made our cautious, careful way inside, and back to the suite where we checked in and waited our turn for the exam, and both he and I were masked, as not only makes sense for a hospital setting but is clearly required for entry at the main door, in the hallway, and signage reaffirming all of this on entry to this part of the (did I mention this?) heart hospital.
Just as we were getting my charge seated, and it was busy enough there were not seats enough for such as me, which was fine but tells you how relatively crowded the room was, a nurse came out of the back and walked up to a man seated right next to us. Clearly a request had gone into the clinic from (I assume) one of the registry clerks behind their windows before we walked in.
The man next to us had his mask on, but pulled down below his chin. And let's exercise compassion early on here: he's alone, while most of the patients had someone escorting them. He looked about my age, but heavier, and obviously he's waiting on a heart test of some sort himself, and may be on edge, not at his best.
Nonetheless.
The nurse in scrubs, mask on face, leaned over the man and said as nicely as one could wish that he needed to put the mask on over his face, mouth and nose both. Without going into the whole sad dialogue, the seated man told the nurse that he was stupid, the policy was stupid, and it was stupid to make him wear a mask when it was his risk to take. At this point, I'll simply add that words came to my mind, phrases and sentences I was tempted to speak.
With grace and firmness, the hospital staffer persisted, stating stupid or not, this policy was for the protection of everyone, and he needed to put the mask on or he would have to leave. He pulled up his mask, and told the kindly staff member they were stupid and they'd done their stupid thing so they should leave now.
After the door closed behind the nurse, he pulled the mask down below his nose, and turned to look right at me. And cocked an eyebrow. I stood there, standing over my responsibility, a 93 year old who can barely hear and is easily confused on a good day.
"Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil."
I thought that, and say it, not because the sad silly man glaring at me was evil, but because of my own temptation to respond in anger and hostility. I didn't speak, in part out of prudence, and in large part because I feared what I'd say if I did, and even more what I'd say next if his defiance continued, as it likely would have in the moment.
Whatever your opinion about masks & precautions, in a heart hospital, surrounded by fellow patients clearly of whom most were what you might call immunocompromised, it's beyond question that simple human decency means you follow house rules and wear your mask, even if it's only a partial protection. He chose not to, and to echo a certain cinematic scene, he chose poorly.
I'm still working on my choice. My choice in the moment, my choices now, my choice of words writing this column. "Deliver us from evil," from righteous anger, from selfish defiance, from my own sin.
We are not done looking out for each other, and that's not just about masks. Let love prevail, and grace abound.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still working on some issues himself. Tell him how you exercise prudence, restraint, and godly defiance at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Righteous anger might be an oxymoron
___
If we start with a Biblical and New Testament perspective, it's hard to support the concept of righteous anger. To wit:
"My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires." James 1:19-20 (NIV)
Pretty much closes that door, at least for those of us wanting to affirm Biblical authority in a statement that precise, that clear.
It's still a temptation.
And when it comes to temptation, I call on God to help me resist it, to save me from the time of trial, and in Jesus trust in grace when I fail. Which is not infrequently.
Last week I was escorting an elderly relative in his 90s through a medically ordered heart test; he has a pacemaker and some other symptoms that had us wanting to check out some basic questions. So we made our cautious, careful way inside, and back to the suite where we checked in and waited our turn for the exam, and both he and I were masked, as not only makes sense for a hospital setting but is clearly required for entry at the main door, in the hallway, and signage reaffirming all of this on entry to this part of the (did I mention this?) heart hospital.
Just as we were getting my charge seated, and it was busy enough there were not seats enough for such as me, which was fine but tells you how relatively crowded the room was, a nurse came out of the back and walked up to a man seated right next to us. Clearly a request had gone into the clinic from (I assume) one of the registry clerks behind their windows before we walked in.
The man next to us had his mask on, but pulled down below his chin. And let's exercise compassion early on here: he's alone, while most of the patients had someone escorting them. He looked about my age, but heavier, and obviously he's waiting on a heart test of some sort himself, and may be on edge, not at his best.
Nonetheless.
The nurse in scrubs, mask on face, leaned over the man and said as nicely as one could wish that he needed to put the mask on over his face, mouth and nose both. Without going into the whole sad dialogue, the seated man told the nurse that he was stupid, the policy was stupid, and it was stupid to make him wear a mask when it was his risk to take. At this point, I'll simply add that words came to my mind, phrases and sentences I was tempted to speak.
With grace and firmness, the hospital staffer persisted, stating stupid or not, this policy was for the protection of everyone, and he needed to put the mask on or he would have to leave. He pulled up his mask, and told the kindly staff member they were stupid and they'd done their stupid thing so they should leave now.
After the door closed behind the nurse, he pulled the mask down below his nose, and turned to look right at me. And cocked an eyebrow. I stood there, standing over my responsibility, a 93 year old who can barely hear and is easily confused on a good day.
"Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil."
I thought that, and say it, not because the sad silly man glaring at me was evil, but because of my own temptation to respond in anger and hostility. I didn't speak, in part out of prudence, and in large part because I feared what I'd say if I did, and even more what I'd say next if his defiance continued, as it likely would have in the moment.
Whatever your opinion about masks & precautions, in a heart hospital, surrounded by fellow patients clearly of whom most were what you might call immunocompromised, it's beyond question that simple human decency means you follow house rules and wear your mask, even if it's only a partial protection. He chose not to, and to echo a certain cinematic scene, he chose poorly.
I'm still working on my choice. My choice in the moment, my choices now, my choice of words writing this column. "Deliver us from evil," from righteous anger, from selfish defiance, from my own sin.
We are not done looking out for each other, and that's not just about masks. Let love prevail, and grace abound.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still working on some issues himself. Tell him how you exercise prudence, restraint, and godly defiance at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Monday, March 07, 2022
Faith Works 3-12-22
Faith Works 3-12-22
Jeff Gill
Grief isn't waiting
___
"How long does mourning take?"
I've heard that question more times than I can count over the years as a pastor, and I have an answer that's been my first response for most of them:
"As long as it takes."
There's no set timetable for recovering from a personal loss. Some people may take a few weeks or months, others take years. And the same person can find one death from among those they love to be a fairly straightforward process, not that it's ever easy, but then have another loss set them back for much longer.
Those are, in some ways, the hardest pastoral conversations. "I should be over this by now!" Who says, I reply. Not God. Not me. Yes, anniversaries can both help in the healing and re-open old wounds, there's just no set schedule for affairs of the heart.
And if you are involved in hospice work, there's an inverse proposition involved. How long does a particular person's passing take? There are patterns and templates and a general history of how this sort of illness and that sort of condition will play out, but anyone who's been around death and dying knows that it's foolish and dangerous ground to walk onto when raising up a sign saying "they have exactly this long." You don't know.
What I can tell you is that there's a strange sort of mourning in advance that happens when you are caring for a seriously ill person. It's not the anticipation let alone expectation, but the reality of coming to terms, day by day, with the loss of a loved one, and then there's the uncertainty of asking when you will need to make use of that pre-sadness, preparatory sorrow, advance pain.
My wife recently said "Grief doesn't wait." I told her "I'm stealing that." Because it's something more of us need to think through, to hear at first and accept in the final assessment. Grief isn't waiting, not for us to be ready, not for our lives to get to a convenient place to pause, not for death, even. Grief is here, a part of our thoughts even before what we are grieving has happened.
Grief is an emotional and I would argue a spiritual reality for each of us, just as pain is a reality for any of us as embodied persons. If you have a physical form, you have pain. It's a part of our warning and monitoring system — hand hurts, remove from fire — that's actually quite useful. Foot hurts, don't put your weight on it, until more healing takes place. Leprosy is most dangerous, I'm told, because you no longer have the sensation of pain, so bad things can happen to fingers and toes and you don't do anything. Pain gets our attention, and ideally points us toward healing.
Grief is like that. It reminds us that healing isn't done. How long does healing take? Don't ask me, ask a nurse practitioner (but we'll tell you the same thing: as long as it takes). Some people can heal up from a broken bone in four weeks, others for their own material reasons physically will take ten or twelve. The orthopedic surgeon says "six to eight weeks," but even they will offer a cautious caveat.
Today is two years since the call came that my dad died earlier that March 12. I'm better than I was those first few weeks, and more in balance with my own thoughts and reactions than I was perhaps a year ago this day. Will I be "over it"? Others who've lost parents say "never," some say "it's always there in certain ways." Some move on, close doors behind them, say they're fine.
For me, the "I need to tell Dad about that" moments come less often. The healing isn't so much that increased interval as it is how when the shock of "but I can't do that" hits, my world doesn't wobble quite as much, or as long. Grief for me has been an imbalance, a disorientation, a loss of equilibrium in my movement forward. The earth shook, and there have been aftershocks, but now I can at least find my footing and move more easily on the way.
How long does it take? I wouldn't say two years. Might be a bit longer. It depends. Just remember that grief isn't waiting on our timetables, before or after a loss, but it's also quite possibly a friend. It can help us heal.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking about love and life and loss for a while. Tell him how you find your balance when knocked off of your path at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Grief isn't waiting
___
"How long does mourning take?"
I've heard that question more times than I can count over the years as a pastor, and I have an answer that's been my first response for most of them:
"As long as it takes."
There's no set timetable for recovering from a personal loss. Some people may take a few weeks or months, others take years. And the same person can find one death from among those they love to be a fairly straightforward process, not that it's ever easy, but then have another loss set them back for much longer.
Those are, in some ways, the hardest pastoral conversations. "I should be over this by now!" Who says, I reply. Not God. Not me. Yes, anniversaries can both help in the healing and re-open old wounds, there's just no set schedule for affairs of the heart.
And if you are involved in hospice work, there's an inverse proposition involved. How long does a particular person's passing take? There are patterns and templates and a general history of how this sort of illness and that sort of condition will play out, but anyone who's been around death and dying knows that it's foolish and dangerous ground to walk onto when raising up a sign saying "they have exactly this long." You don't know.
What I can tell you is that there's a strange sort of mourning in advance that happens when you are caring for a seriously ill person. It's not the anticipation let alone expectation, but the reality of coming to terms, day by day, with the loss of a loved one, and then there's the uncertainty of asking when you will need to make use of that pre-sadness, preparatory sorrow, advance pain.
My wife recently said "Grief doesn't wait." I told her "I'm stealing that." Because it's something more of us need to think through, to hear at first and accept in the final assessment. Grief isn't waiting, not for us to be ready, not for our lives to get to a convenient place to pause, not for death, even. Grief is here, a part of our thoughts even before what we are grieving has happened.
Grief is an emotional and I would argue a spiritual reality for each of us, just as pain is a reality for any of us as embodied persons. If you have a physical form, you have pain. It's a part of our warning and monitoring system — hand hurts, remove from fire — that's actually quite useful. Foot hurts, don't put your weight on it, until more healing takes place. Leprosy is most dangerous, I'm told, because you no longer have the sensation of pain, so bad things can happen to fingers and toes and you don't do anything. Pain gets our attention, and ideally points us toward healing.
Grief is like that. It reminds us that healing isn't done. How long does healing take? Don't ask me, ask a nurse practitioner (but we'll tell you the same thing: as long as it takes). Some people can heal up from a broken bone in four weeks, others for their own material reasons physically will take ten or twelve. The orthopedic surgeon says "six to eight weeks," but even they will offer a cautious caveat.
Today is two years since the call came that my dad died earlier that March 12. I'm better than I was those first few weeks, and more in balance with my own thoughts and reactions than I was perhaps a year ago this day. Will I be "over it"? Others who've lost parents say "never," some say "it's always there in certain ways." Some move on, close doors behind them, say they're fine.
For me, the "I need to tell Dad about that" moments come less often. The healing isn't so much that increased interval as it is how when the shock of "but I can't do that" hits, my world doesn't wobble quite as much, or as long. Grief for me has been an imbalance, a disorientation, a loss of equilibrium in my movement forward. The earth shook, and there have been aftershocks, but now I can at least find my footing and move more easily on the way.
How long does it take? I wouldn't say two years. Might be a bit longer. It depends. Just remember that grief isn't waiting on our timetables, before or after a loss, but it's also quite possibly a friend. It can help us heal.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking about love and life and loss for a while. Tell him how you find your balance when knocked off of your path at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Wednesday, March 02, 2022
Notes from my Knapsack 3-17-22
Notes from my Knapsack 3-17-22
Jeff Gill
A month of whipsaw weather
___
March means spring in central Ohio.
That doesn't mean it also can sneak up on us with a wicked fall of snow, or worse yet the black ice of early morning, especially on north-facing slopes where the higher sun angle isn't putting heat into the pavement all day to keep it clear overnight.
Melt and rain dancing on either side of freezing, which is still a feature of every March here, means you can expect dawns with a dollop of danger on bridges and overpasses. Our frost-free day in this neighborhood is around May 15, so the tomatoes can wait (unless you're starting seeds up on top of the refrigerator).
But daffodils, our heritage and inheritance in the Granville area, are popping up and right behind come other bulb-rooted flowers, hyacinths and tulips and more perennials on the way. Baseball players may not be at spring training, but our local lads are selling mulch and delivering it just as the weeds are rustling up out of sleep.
March means spring in central Ohio, and the trees start budding and bursting and casting more debris down on lawns and parked cars. Maples are especially good at this. Lawnmowers need checked, and I hope you didn't leave the gas in it all winter; the more conscientious among us sharpen with files the edge of spades and shovels or whet the shears and trimmers. The last of the ornamental grasses need to be cut back before the new green shoots poke up among the midst of them, and there are loads of brush and downed limbs to tend to.
Keep the scraper in the car, and the spare coat and extra blanket in the back, but soon it will be June and you'll realize you can stow them away for next November. Not yet, though. Frost in the morning, chills yet to come.
As a young Scout, I still remember our troop's biggest setback, but most lasting lesson. This is back when scout troops could still own and operate their own secondhand school buses, and ours was painted purple, with the back third converted to a quartermaster's store of shelves and stowage. We were an every month camping troop, and our leaders were steelworkers along Lake Michigan who knew the outdoors and taught us well.
But it was a March campout that caught us. It had been warm and sunny for weeks, the grass was already growing strongly by mid-month, and this was a few hundred miles north of here. The forecast was mild, and the weekend dawned balmy, the Friday night gathering and trip to our campsite mostly in t-shirts and shorts. In mid-March.
Saturday, after a mellow morning, a shift in the wind, a drop in the temperatures. People dug in backpacks for coats and found windbreakers; more than a few of us as we set out on an afternoon hike realized digging into our pockets that there were no gloves. We'd thrown them weeks before onto the hall closet upper shelf.
Back at camp, the snow started. Heavy, wet, steady. Fires were lit for supper, but they offered too little warmth; the adults made a circuit of the three patrol sites, and assessed our (gulp) preparedness for a winter night. And for perhaps the only time in Troop 7 history, we went home early.
March means spring, but it can still bite. Be prepared!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he learned about what "Be Prepared" really means that weekend. Tell him about your outdoor education at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
A month of whipsaw weather
___
March means spring in central Ohio.
That doesn't mean it also can sneak up on us with a wicked fall of snow, or worse yet the black ice of early morning, especially on north-facing slopes where the higher sun angle isn't putting heat into the pavement all day to keep it clear overnight.
Melt and rain dancing on either side of freezing, which is still a feature of every March here, means you can expect dawns with a dollop of danger on bridges and overpasses. Our frost-free day in this neighborhood is around May 15, so the tomatoes can wait (unless you're starting seeds up on top of the refrigerator).
But daffodils, our heritage and inheritance in the Granville area, are popping up and right behind come other bulb-rooted flowers, hyacinths and tulips and more perennials on the way. Baseball players may not be at spring training, but our local lads are selling mulch and delivering it just as the weeds are rustling up out of sleep.
March means spring in central Ohio, and the trees start budding and bursting and casting more debris down on lawns and parked cars. Maples are especially good at this. Lawnmowers need checked, and I hope you didn't leave the gas in it all winter; the more conscientious among us sharpen with files the edge of spades and shovels or whet the shears and trimmers. The last of the ornamental grasses need to be cut back before the new green shoots poke up among the midst of them, and there are loads of brush and downed limbs to tend to.
Keep the scraper in the car, and the spare coat and extra blanket in the back, but soon it will be June and you'll realize you can stow them away for next November. Not yet, though. Frost in the morning, chills yet to come.
As a young Scout, I still remember our troop's biggest setback, but most lasting lesson. This is back when scout troops could still own and operate their own secondhand school buses, and ours was painted purple, with the back third converted to a quartermaster's store of shelves and stowage. We were an every month camping troop, and our leaders were steelworkers along Lake Michigan who knew the outdoors and taught us well.
But it was a March campout that caught us. It had been warm and sunny for weeks, the grass was already growing strongly by mid-month, and this was a few hundred miles north of here. The forecast was mild, and the weekend dawned balmy, the Friday night gathering and trip to our campsite mostly in t-shirts and shorts. In mid-March.
Saturday, after a mellow morning, a shift in the wind, a drop in the temperatures. People dug in backpacks for coats and found windbreakers; more than a few of us as we set out on an afternoon hike realized digging into our pockets that there were no gloves. We'd thrown them weeks before onto the hall closet upper shelf.
Back at camp, the snow started. Heavy, wet, steady. Fires were lit for supper, but they offered too little warmth; the adults made a circuit of the three patrol sites, and assessed our (gulp) preparedness for a winter night. And for perhaps the only time in Troop 7 history, we went home early.
March means spring, but it can still bite. Be prepared!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he learned about what "Be Prepared" really means that weekend. Tell him about your outdoor education at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Faith Works 3-5-22
Faith Works 3-5-22
Jeff Gill
Crutches and healing and strength
___
Last week we had Garrison Keillor in town for a show at the Midland Theatre. I had the opportunity to interview him in advance for this paper, and on the phone he was generous with his time and spoke at length about a variety of subjects, much more than I could get into the article I wrote earlier.
Keillor is known best for storytelling, and his renown in that field on the radio was already growing when I was in seminary in the 1980s. Many of my peers in preaching found his approach to narrative and public presentation to be a healthy corrective to the sometimes overly academic model we were getting in class, focused on a manuscript and a systematic presentation, controlled and cautious.
On "Prairie Home Companion," when Keillor moved into the portion of the radio program called "News from Lake Wobegon," for this listener it often seemed as if he was a high wire walker on stage, working without a net. There was both a spontaneity and a sense of carefully crafted speech in what we would listen to, leaning in even sitting in the car as he would pause and in many small subtle ways communicate that he was thinking out loud. And for me, at least, it was impossible to hear his delivery and observe the effect that kind of narrative had on other listeners, and not think about preaching the Gospel, which deserved careful preparation but also seemed to call for a mutual humanity in how the Good Story is told and re-told.
Mind you, I'm not saying this is the only way to preach, but for me it felt like an approach worth investigating. And it shaped my time in the pulpit. So I was interested in talking to the man about church and faith and preaching.
He was more than willing to speak on those subjects, but his observations kept coming back to his local parish, the church he clearly attends regularly in Manhattan. When I would ask about narrative theology and preaching as storytelling, he would respond with a comment about how the sermon works in a wider context, and it was more as a parishioner than as a preacher he spoke.
In talking about some of his own personal journey, and internal struggles after some public controversy he experienced, he came back a few times to his church's healing service, a weekly part of their cycle of worship which is focused on prayer as a congregation, and the opportunity to come forward and be prayed for by the ministers fo the church.
"I went forward," Keillor said about one such service, "and the deacon at the front put her hands on my shoulders. It meant so much, I can't tell you, to go forward and say it out loud. I said to her 'I hurt,' and she looked right at me, and I felt listened to. I felt the burden of anger lifted from my life."
That was not about preaching, but it was about a minister being truly present to someone. He didn't have to make the connection for me. Effective communication is about that kind of presence and openness to someone who is hurting, who is in need. Sometimes it happens in sermons, sometimes in other acts of pastoral ministry.
A few decades ago the governor of the state of Minnesota, Keillor's home, said "Christianity is a crutch." He said it was for "weak people." I've always appreciated the clarity Jesse Ventura brought to this conversation. I think he's right, even if we come to different conclusions on what that means.
Only a person who's sure they'll never need a crutch can laugh at them. If you are confident you'll never want to have a commode chair handy, I guess you could find one ludicrous, worth a chuckle. But if we all are likely to need a crutch, a place to find relief, or even hope to find a healing hand on our shoulder, then we probably should be careful about making fun of weakness, before we find we're just mocking ourselves.
In Lent, we have forty days to reflect on our own weakness, our own needs, and the promises of God to lift us up, and sometimes even to carry us. To say to the Lord "I hurt" and know we are heard, and in that knowledge find healing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's had his weak moments in and out of the pulpit. Tell him where you find the crutch you need to carry on at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Crutches and healing and strength
___
Last week we had Garrison Keillor in town for a show at the Midland Theatre. I had the opportunity to interview him in advance for this paper, and on the phone he was generous with his time and spoke at length about a variety of subjects, much more than I could get into the article I wrote earlier.
Keillor is known best for storytelling, and his renown in that field on the radio was already growing when I was in seminary in the 1980s. Many of my peers in preaching found his approach to narrative and public presentation to be a healthy corrective to the sometimes overly academic model we were getting in class, focused on a manuscript and a systematic presentation, controlled and cautious.
On "Prairie Home Companion," when Keillor moved into the portion of the radio program called "News from Lake Wobegon," for this listener it often seemed as if he was a high wire walker on stage, working without a net. There was both a spontaneity and a sense of carefully crafted speech in what we would listen to, leaning in even sitting in the car as he would pause and in many small subtle ways communicate that he was thinking out loud. And for me, at least, it was impossible to hear his delivery and observe the effect that kind of narrative had on other listeners, and not think about preaching the Gospel, which deserved careful preparation but also seemed to call for a mutual humanity in how the Good Story is told and re-told.
Mind you, I'm not saying this is the only way to preach, but for me it felt like an approach worth investigating. And it shaped my time in the pulpit. So I was interested in talking to the man about church and faith and preaching.
He was more than willing to speak on those subjects, but his observations kept coming back to his local parish, the church he clearly attends regularly in Manhattan. When I would ask about narrative theology and preaching as storytelling, he would respond with a comment about how the sermon works in a wider context, and it was more as a parishioner than as a preacher he spoke.
In talking about some of his own personal journey, and internal struggles after some public controversy he experienced, he came back a few times to his church's healing service, a weekly part of their cycle of worship which is focused on prayer as a congregation, and the opportunity to come forward and be prayed for by the ministers fo the church.
"I went forward," Keillor said about one such service, "and the deacon at the front put her hands on my shoulders. It meant so much, I can't tell you, to go forward and say it out loud. I said to her 'I hurt,' and she looked right at me, and I felt listened to. I felt the burden of anger lifted from my life."
That was not about preaching, but it was about a minister being truly present to someone. He didn't have to make the connection for me. Effective communication is about that kind of presence and openness to someone who is hurting, who is in need. Sometimes it happens in sermons, sometimes in other acts of pastoral ministry.
A few decades ago the governor of the state of Minnesota, Keillor's home, said "Christianity is a crutch." He said it was for "weak people." I've always appreciated the clarity Jesse Ventura brought to this conversation. I think he's right, even if we come to different conclusions on what that means.
Only a person who's sure they'll never need a crutch can laugh at them. If you are confident you'll never want to have a commode chair handy, I guess you could find one ludicrous, worth a chuckle. But if we all are likely to need a crutch, a place to find relief, or even hope to find a healing hand on our shoulder, then we probably should be careful about making fun of weakness, before we find we're just mocking ourselves.
In Lent, we have forty days to reflect on our own weakness, our own needs, and the promises of God to lift us up, and sometimes even to carry us. To say to the Lord "I hurt" and know we are heard, and in that knowledge find healing.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's had his weak moments in and out of the pulpit. Tell him where you find the crutch you need to carry on at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Sunday, February 20, 2022
Faith Works 2-26-22
Faith Works 2-26-22
Jeff Gill
Rehearse a funeral, just to get it right
___
Could we see worship services as "birthing classes and funeral rehearsals"?
That's what I've been meditating on recently, and the more I think about the two-sided image, the more I like it.
Last week I was mulling the experience of a birthing class as preparing people for an event that's both natural and utterly unlike anything else, a process much anticipated but equally anxiety producing. In spiritual terms, everyone likes to talk about new life, but when it involves dying to self, that's not so popular.
And birthing classes really do spend a fair amount of time on reminding everyone, from mother to cheerfully uncertain spectators, that breathing is a really good idea. Focus on the basics, and breathe, and just take things one step at a time.
Okay, so maybe worship practices and effective preaching can be compared to a birthing class, but what about that odd phrase "funeral rehearsals"?
We are coming up quickly on the doorstep of Lent. Ash Wednesday is March 2, and many Christians will be looking for ways to spend the 40 days and intervening Sundays 'til Easter in penitent contemplation, preparing hearts for resurrection joy by adopting certain spiritual disciplines along the way.
That's another way of saying "funeral rehearsals." I know, funerals don't tend to have rehearsals, and that may be the problem. Wedding preparation classes and rehearsals before the big day for the bridal party to walk through where they go and what they do so the event can be appreciated for what it's supposed to be . . . that's normal, right?
I think we need to prepare ourselves for funerals, too. For dying, and for death. Now there's a Lenten thought, right? My late friend Father Tom Shonebarger liked to talk about "contemplating our mortality" and he was in no way a gloomy person. His point was that we prepare ourselves, mind and body and spirit, for the fact that we will leave this life.
Once in making preparations for a funeral, there was a divided opinion in the family about having the service at the church building or in the funeral home. What prevailed was a few key people saying they didn't want to remember the casket and funeral and finality every time they came back to Sunday services.
I did not press, and we followed those wishes, but I'll share now long after the event that I wished not that I'd argued in that particular case more vehemently, but that in general I'd reminded people of why a church funeral can be truly redemptive and ultimately supportive.
Yes, it can be hard to come into a space where Christmases and weddings and happy times are in your mind, and put a coffin or an urn in the center aisle. But I truly believe that part of being a member of a church family is that you find ways to weave it all together, the baptisms and the departing, the celebrations and the grief, and you prepare in advance and sort out after the fact that the 23rd Psalm has a variety of applications, but you'll never hear it again the same way after hearing it at a graveside. That's not a reason to avoid using it there, it's part of the depth and richness and power of scripture.
Likewise, when you have a church home or just in your mental map of the congregations and church buildings you've been part of, there's something deep and rich and important about that intersection of aisle and altar, before a communion table not just for sermons and Christmas pageants, but also for home goings and farewells. Yes, that first Sunday back is wrenching in a different sort of way than the funeral itself, but that inner realization of what's at stake and why it happened may help the mourner heal all the better, not to say more quickly.
Many of us lost out in these last couple years on funerals as we'd rehearsed them. I pray each of us found our own way to realizing it wasn't all about having the events and activities play out exactly as we'd imagined, the few times we let ourselves contemplate mortality for those we love.
It's arranging the furniture of the heart, developing practices of the spirit that we need to rehearse, not just for an upcoming Lent. Maybe every Sunday in some ways. Even for ourselves.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still working on his metaphors for many things. Tell him how you keep worship in front of you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Rehearse a funeral, just to get it right
___
Could we see worship services as "birthing classes and funeral rehearsals"?
That's what I've been meditating on recently, and the more I think about the two-sided image, the more I like it.
Last week I was mulling the experience of a birthing class as preparing people for an event that's both natural and utterly unlike anything else, a process much anticipated but equally anxiety producing. In spiritual terms, everyone likes to talk about new life, but when it involves dying to self, that's not so popular.
And birthing classes really do spend a fair amount of time on reminding everyone, from mother to cheerfully uncertain spectators, that breathing is a really good idea. Focus on the basics, and breathe, and just take things one step at a time.
Okay, so maybe worship practices and effective preaching can be compared to a birthing class, but what about that odd phrase "funeral rehearsals"?
We are coming up quickly on the doorstep of Lent. Ash Wednesday is March 2, and many Christians will be looking for ways to spend the 40 days and intervening Sundays 'til Easter in penitent contemplation, preparing hearts for resurrection joy by adopting certain spiritual disciplines along the way.
That's another way of saying "funeral rehearsals." I know, funerals don't tend to have rehearsals, and that may be the problem. Wedding preparation classes and rehearsals before the big day for the bridal party to walk through where they go and what they do so the event can be appreciated for what it's supposed to be . . . that's normal, right?
I think we need to prepare ourselves for funerals, too. For dying, and for death. Now there's a Lenten thought, right? My late friend Father Tom Shonebarger liked to talk about "contemplating our mortality" and he was in no way a gloomy person. His point was that we prepare ourselves, mind and body and spirit, for the fact that we will leave this life.
Once in making preparations for a funeral, there was a divided opinion in the family about having the service at the church building or in the funeral home. What prevailed was a few key people saying they didn't want to remember the casket and funeral and finality every time they came back to Sunday services.
I did not press, and we followed those wishes, but I'll share now long after the event that I wished not that I'd argued in that particular case more vehemently, but that in general I'd reminded people of why a church funeral can be truly redemptive and ultimately supportive.
Yes, it can be hard to come into a space where Christmases and weddings and happy times are in your mind, and put a coffin or an urn in the center aisle. But I truly believe that part of being a member of a church family is that you find ways to weave it all together, the baptisms and the departing, the celebrations and the grief, and you prepare in advance and sort out after the fact that the 23rd Psalm has a variety of applications, but you'll never hear it again the same way after hearing it at a graveside. That's not a reason to avoid using it there, it's part of the depth and richness and power of scripture.
Likewise, when you have a church home or just in your mental map of the congregations and church buildings you've been part of, there's something deep and rich and important about that intersection of aisle and altar, before a communion table not just for sermons and Christmas pageants, but also for home goings and farewells. Yes, that first Sunday back is wrenching in a different sort of way than the funeral itself, but that inner realization of what's at stake and why it happened may help the mourner heal all the better, not to say more quickly.
Many of us lost out in these last couple years on funerals as we'd rehearsed them. I pray each of us found our own way to realizing it wasn't all about having the events and activities play out exactly as we'd imagined, the few times we let ourselves contemplate mortality for those we love.
It's arranging the furniture of the heart, developing practices of the spirit that we need to rehearse, not just for an upcoming Lent. Maybe every Sunday in some ways. Even for ourselves.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still working on his metaphors for many things. Tell him how you keep worship in front of you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Garrison Keillor interview 2-8-22
Garrison Keillor interview 2-8-22
Jeff Gill
Songs, stories, and gratitude on stage
___
What Garrison Keillor wanted to talk about was gratitude.
"With aging, when your life comes into much clearer perspective," Keillor mused. "I think back to the decades of my so-called career and it was so hectic, so busy. I remember certain events, but I recall my adolescence and childhood more clearly, more than what I was doing in the years with the radio program, and the tours, and the travel. I was consumed with ambition, and the next thing, and the thing after that…"
But now, encountering aging and limits: "You just feel gratitude for everything. What's left is really beautiful. My wife and I play Scrabble every day. When I was so ambitious, I didn't have time for that, but now I do."
I was asking the noted author, performer, and soon third time guest on the Midland Theatre stage about preaching and sermons and storytelling. It was an interview as a long-time fan I'd imagined many times before, and like Lake Wobegon it didn't quite seem real, except there was no mistaking the voice on the other end of the phone advising me on the tension between preparation and delivery in speaking to an audience.
"If you sit down and write out what you're going to say, you find out that when you get up and go out to deliver that manuscript by heart, you will remember what you need to," said Garrison Keillor.
"Memory is a wonderful editor."
A fixture on public radio for many years with his "Prairie Home Companion" Saturday night program, a year after he chose to end his weekly appearances on the air and turn things over to a new host, a former coworker accused Keillor of inappropriate behavior in the workplace. His public radio employers quickly cut all ties with him, and a settlement was reached.
In his now weekly Substack dialogue with fans he said about the incident recently "it's an interesting story but I'm not going to tell it. The old friend who accused me asked for anonymity and I see no reason to disrupt her life. I'm looking at 80 in a few months and so what's the point?"
His recent writing has addressed his age and aging, and I've found myself freshly interested in this new theme of his, just as I dove into his work decades back to understand the gift and grace of public speaking, if not of preaching itself.
Keillor was the very presence on the phone of grace and welcome. He also is persistently very much who he's been through the years, an inquisitive, quizzical, and insightful student of human nature without an excess of optimism about our foibles, but with a strong emphasis on hope. After all, he was the bass anchor for the Hopeful Gospel Quartet.
"We just had a show in Holland, Michigan where we had a singing intermission," Keillor explained. Each "Keillor & Company" program is different; he brings a pianist and vocalist to accompany him, but his goal is clearly to find out if the audience is willing to sing a cappella together — "it's not me, it's not my singing, it's giving people the opportunity to do this, and they almost always rise to the occasion." In Michigan, those assembled responded in four part harmony, a challenge to which I assured him Ohio could rise. Our opportunity to respond in Newark comes on March 3 at the Midland Theatre, with tickets available online for his 7:30 pm show (see the Midland website for details).
"In Easton, Maryland last Sunday, in the monologue I found myself using pieces from my recent novel which had stuck with me, bits from columns I'd written not long ago, stories from my family: I was stealing from myself," Keillor chuckled. "Then we started out with 'My Country 'Tis Of Thee,' and went on to 'It Is Well With My Soul' and 'How Great Thou Art' all a cappella, and since we were near Baltimore, we sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner' and people just responded."
He was very open and candid about his childhood background in a very conservative religious tradition, and the kinds of social limits that were taken for granted by his parents, but also how out of their marriage "doctrine had to give way to love." Keillor's parents took differing views on Christmas observances and musical preferences, but found their way together towards harmonious resolutions as their family story was lived out.
"There's no doubt about it, stories have a certain power," Keillor noted. As we talked our conversation kept coming back to that question of how a community, how a diverse group of people can find in story and song a common purpose, a unifying thread.
"People are wary of a story that carries too clever a moral," he pointed out. "Through stories, we learn about our own culture." And songs, I added. "I worry about how little song some of our younger people know, what songs they have in common." Keillor observed "everyone knows 'Amazing Grace'" and that "Softly and Tenderly" brings everyone together pretty quickly, but what he's trying to keep alive "is the sheer joy you can feel in a room when everyone is singing out and singing together and even in harmony sometimes."
In a career which has ranged from short stories in "The New Yorker" to appearing as a version of himself in a Hollywood movie based on his radio show, his latest turn is online through Substack, with "Garrison Keillor and Friends," where his most recent columns and reader response "Post to the Host" entries have become regular reading.
I pointed out to him that his regular writing has made me think of where he lives as a friendly, compact, small town, even though he makes it clear he's living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He laughed at the idea, and explained "since COVID, I've been living a very small life. And a small life, perhaps, is perfect for a writer." His wife runs in Central Park, they have their groceries delivered, he walks to his Episcopal church where he speaks warmly about the ministries they provide, from a rich mix of musical styles and offerings to healing services and sermons to which he's clearly happy to just listen.
As we wrapped up our conversation, he said of his daily routines "It's a very simple life, it happens to take place in a very large city." I assured him that the small city of Newark was looking forward to welcoming him again, and his audience would come grateful for the opportunity to hear him, and for the chance to sing together.
Jeff Gill
Songs, stories, and gratitude on stage
___
What Garrison Keillor wanted to talk about was gratitude.
"With aging, when your life comes into much clearer perspective," Keillor mused. "I think back to the decades of my so-called career and it was so hectic, so busy. I remember certain events, but I recall my adolescence and childhood more clearly, more than what I was doing in the years with the radio program, and the tours, and the travel. I was consumed with ambition, and the next thing, and the thing after that…"
But now, encountering aging and limits: "You just feel gratitude for everything. What's left is really beautiful. My wife and I play Scrabble every day. When I was so ambitious, I didn't have time for that, but now I do."
I was asking the noted author, performer, and soon third time guest on the Midland Theatre stage about preaching and sermons and storytelling. It was an interview as a long-time fan I'd imagined many times before, and like Lake Wobegon it didn't quite seem real, except there was no mistaking the voice on the other end of the phone advising me on the tension between preparation and delivery in speaking to an audience.
"If you sit down and write out what you're going to say, you find out that when you get up and go out to deliver that manuscript by heart, you will remember what you need to," said Garrison Keillor.
"Memory is a wonderful editor."
A fixture on public radio for many years with his "Prairie Home Companion" Saturday night program, a year after he chose to end his weekly appearances on the air and turn things over to a new host, a former coworker accused Keillor of inappropriate behavior in the workplace. His public radio employers quickly cut all ties with him, and a settlement was reached.
In his now weekly Substack dialogue with fans he said about the incident recently "it's an interesting story but I'm not going to tell it. The old friend who accused me asked for anonymity and I see no reason to disrupt her life. I'm looking at 80 in a few months and so what's the point?"
His recent writing has addressed his age and aging, and I've found myself freshly interested in this new theme of his, just as I dove into his work decades back to understand the gift and grace of public speaking, if not of preaching itself.
Keillor was the very presence on the phone of grace and welcome. He also is persistently very much who he's been through the years, an inquisitive, quizzical, and insightful student of human nature without an excess of optimism about our foibles, but with a strong emphasis on hope. After all, he was the bass anchor for the Hopeful Gospel Quartet.
"We just had a show in Holland, Michigan where we had a singing intermission," Keillor explained. Each "Keillor & Company" program is different; he brings a pianist and vocalist to accompany him, but his goal is clearly to find out if the audience is willing to sing a cappella together — "it's not me, it's not my singing, it's giving people the opportunity to do this, and they almost always rise to the occasion." In Michigan, those assembled responded in four part harmony, a challenge to which I assured him Ohio could rise. Our opportunity to respond in Newark comes on March 3 at the Midland Theatre, with tickets available online for his 7:30 pm show (see the Midland website for details).
"In Easton, Maryland last Sunday, in the monologue I found myself using pieces from my recent novel which had stuck with me, bits from columns I'd written not long ago, stories from my family: I was stealing from myself," Keillor chuckled. "Then we started out with 'My Country 'Tis Of Thee,' and went on to 'It Is Well With My Soul' and 'How Great Thou Art' all a cappella, and since we were near Baltimore, we sang the 'Star-Spangled Banner' and people just responded."
He was very open and candid about his childhood background in a very conservative religious tradition, and the kinds of social limits that were taken for granted by his parents, but also how out of their marriage "doctrine had to give way to love." Keillor's parents took differing views on Christmas observances and musical preferences, but found their way together towards harmonious resolutions as their family story was lived out.
"There's no doubt about it, stories have a certain power," Keillor noted. As we talked our conversation kept coming back to that question of how a community, how a diverse group of people can find in story and song a common purpose, a unifying thread.
"People are wary of a story that carries too clever a moral," he pointed out. "Through stories, we learn about our own culture." And songs, I added. "I worry about how little song some of our younger people know, what songs they have in common." Keillor observed "everyone knows 'Amazing Grace'" and that "Softly and Tenderly" brings everyone together pretty quickly, but what he's trying to keep alive "is the sheer joy you can feel in a room when everyone is singing out and singing together and even in harmony sometimes."
In a career which has ranged from short stories in "The New Yorker" to appearing as a version of himself in a Hollywood movie based on his radio show, his latest turn is online through Substack, with "Garrison Keillor and Friends," where his most recent columns and reader response "Post to the Host" entries have become regular reading.
I pointed out to him that his regular writing has made me think of where he lives as a friendly, compact, small town, even though he makes it clear he's living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He laughed at the idea, and explained "since COVID, I've been living a very small life. And a small life, perhaps, is perfect for a writer." His wife runs in Central Park, they have their groceries delivered, he walks to his Episcopal church where he speaks warmly about the ministries they provide, from a rich mix of musical styles and offerings to healing services and sermons to which he's clearly happy to just listen.
As we wrapped up our conversation, he said of his daily routines "It's a very simple life, it happens to take place in a very large city." I assured him that the small city of Newark was looking forward to welcoming him again, and his audience would come grateful for the opportunity to hear him, and for the chance to sing together.
Faith Works 2-19-22
Faith Works 2-19-22
Jeff Gill
What about birthing classes?
___
Various questions have been asked of me about my idea that worship services are describable as "birthing classes and funeral rehearsals."
Now, I didn't say that's a comprehensive summary of the totality of what Christian worship is or should be, just that I thought it was a useful template to use, imaginatively speaking.
If someone else wants to say "worship should be communion with the Living God" I won't dispute the point; if another argues "Christian assembly on the Lord's Day should be about turning hearts toward heaven and lifting up Jesus" I'd smile and say "Amen!" to you. Each is an attempt to find a model in words how to sum up and guide the ever-challenging question of leading worship, something both my wife and I have done in a variety of settings from Scout camp shorelines to rented middle school auditoriums, let alone a variety of church buildings, over many years. Worship is not something that can be summarized easily . . . any more than God can be, come to think of it.
But the more I think about my off-hand phrase, the more I like it. It kind of grew out of a post I've done multiple times over the years, after first taking our son to Disney World, and seeing a discreet sign over by the Mad Tea Party: "First Aid & Lost Children." For a long time, that was a phrase I would mention in congregational leadership and in social media as a working summary of what church is at its best: "First Aid & Lost Children." An effective congregation, I'd still say, should be a place where the spiritually hurting can hope to find a kind of first aid for the soul, and where those who feel lost and without a loving parent watching out for them can find a refuge, and maybe even be reconnected with the love they once knew.
That's for faith communities in general (and for the nonce, I think it's a nicely ecumenical description, too, not just a Christian model), but it's not quite as descriptive and prescriptive for worship services. I didn't spend much time thinking about that, just a mental placeholder to note I didn't have a neat summary phrase that worked as well.
My phrase "birthing classes and funeral rehearsals" I think has it's roots, as perhaps too much of my thinking does, in the writing of Wendell Berry, and specifically the closing of his blank verse poem "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (trust me, you should read it if you haven't, easy to find online). Two words: practice resurrection.
"Practice resurrection" might do better in two words what I propose in five, but it's a bit opaque. I'm still claiming it as wisdom, but the fleshing out of it ended up with first "birthing classes" and needed the logical bookend of "funeral rehearsals."
If you've never been through a birthing class, male or female, the main thing to remember is that the leaders want you to be prepared to welcome new life into your own. And they want to be honest with you: it won't come easy, you need to breathe, and you need to accept what comes while working with what's happening. Our natural impulses are not always our friends when birth is ready to occur, but with a modest amount of coaching, the pregnant woman and even the hapless male (or friend, as was true for some of the couples when I was in a birthing class) can make it through.
New life is what we all say we want, but that's not the same as saying we're ready for what it means to let new life be born, or to accept the changes new life brings into our life as it was. Birthing classes do spend a great deal of time on breathing: because that's one of the simple things we need to remember to do when life is changing dramatically, just remembering to breathe. And there's a fair amount of conventional wisdom and outright truism that needs to be shared, because now we're hearing familiar phrases in the context of — now this means us.
Does this description sound more like birthing classes, or preaching and prayer in worship? Stay with me, and I'll get to the second part, too.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's practicing resurrection every day. Tell him how you've learned to rise up and go forth at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
What about birthing classes?
___
Various questions have been asked of me about my idea that worship services are describable as "birthing classes and funeral rehearsals."
Now, I didn't say that's a comprehensive summary of the totality of what Christian worship is or should be, just that I thought it was a useful template to use, imaginatively speaking.
If someone else wants to say "worship should be communion with the Living God" I won't dispute the point; if another argues "Christian assembly on the Lord's Day should be about turning hearts toward heaven and lifting up Jesus" I'd smile and say "Amen!" to you. Each is an attempt to find a model in words how to sum up and guide the ever-challenging question of leading worship, something both my wife and I have done in a variety of settings from Scout camp shorelines to rented middle school auditoriums, let alone a variety of church buildings, over many years. Worship is not something that can be summarized easily . . . any more than God can be, come to think of it.
But the more I think about my off-hand phrase, the more I like it. It kind of grew out of a post I've done multiple times over the years, after first taking our son to Disney World, and seeing a discreet sign over by the Mad Tea Party: "First Aid & Lost Children." For a long time, that was a phrase I would mention in congregational leadership and in social media as a working summary of what church is at its best: "First Aid & Lost Children." An effective congregation, I'd still say, should be a place where the spiritually hurting can hope to find a kind of first aid for the soul, and where those who feel lost and without a loving parent watching out for them can find a refuge, and maybe even be reconnected with the love they once knew.
That's for faith communities in general (and for the nonce, I think it's a nicely ecumenical description, too, not just a Christian model), but it's not quite as descriptive and prescriptive for worship services. I didn't spend much time thinking about that, just a mental placeholder to note I didn't have a neat summary phrase that worked as well.
My phrase "birthing classes and funeral rehearsals" I think has it's roots, as perhaps too much of my thinking does, in the writing of Wendell Berry, and specifically the closing of his blank verse poem "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (trust me, you should read it if you haven't, easy to find online). Two words: practice resurrection.
"Practice resurrection" might do better in two words what I propose in five, but it's a bit opaque. I'm still claiming it as wisdom, but the fleshing out of it ended up with first "birthing classes" and needed the logical bookend of "funeral rehearsals."
If you've never been through a birthing class, male or female, the main thing to remember is that the leaders want you to be prepared to welcome new life into your own. And they want to be honest with you: it won't come easy, you need to breathe, and you need to accept what comes while working with what's happening. Our natural impulses are not always our friends when birth is ready to occur, but with a modest amount of coaching, the pregnant woman and even the hapless male (or friend, as was true for some of the couples when I was in a birthing class) can make it through.
New life is what we all say we want, but that's not the same as saying we're ready for what it means to let new life be born, or to accept the changes new life brings into our life as it was. Birthing classes do spend a great deal of time on breathing: because that's one of the simple things we need to remember to do when life is changing dramatically, just remembering to breathe. And there's a fair amount of conventional wisdom and outright truism that needs to be shared, because now we're hearing familiar phrases in the context of — now this means us.
Does this description sound more like birthing classes, or preaching and prayer in worship? Stay with me, and I'll get to the second part, too.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's practicing resurrection every day. Tell him how you've learned to rise up and go forth at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Notes from my Knapsack 3-3-22
Notes from my Knapsack 3-3-22
Jeff Gill
A round trip of the Land of Legend
___
If you've got about three hours to spend & have cabin fever, here's my suggestion for a day when the sun is shining. You'll drive a hundred miles and never leave Licking County, but get a great sense of the whole rich wide range of terrain we have.
I'm starting in general around downtown Newark, so adjust from there as suits your location. Head east, exit at Cedar St. and go north on Rt. 79. Drive on through Wilkins Corners, on to turn at Rocky Fork Road heading north: watch you swing left just north of 79 and don't end up on Rainrock Rd., but cross the bridge.
You'll pass Camp Falling Rock but enjoy the geological formations on either side of Rocky Fork, clearly visible from your car this time of year, hidden from the road during leafier seasons. Beware as the pavement ends, keep going until you run into Camp Ohio Rd., turn left. You'll run into Martinsburg Rd., jog north to Richards Rd. then it runs right into Bell Church: get out, enjoy the view from the cemetery hilltop outside the historic church building -- Amish farming to your east makes for a different sort of look to the fields.
Take Bell Church Rd. over to US 62, turn left, roll past Utica (Watts Restaurant just a few blocks north), head across the county with sweeping views north and south and straight ahead. When you hit 657/Marion Rd., turn right; more rolling countryside until you reach the hamlet of Lock and Lock Rd., turning left to shadow the northern county line until you reach Fairgrounds Rd., turning left. Past the Hartford Fairgrounds, into Croton, south on Croton Rd. -- heavily glaciated flat farmfields on either side, after you just saw unglaciated geology all around you up Rocky Fork.
The road ends at Rt. 37, turn left and pass through Johnstown, and just east of town south on 310. Back into rolling terrain, on across Rt. 16 and then south of the highway turn left on Morse Rd., the main road from central Licking County to Worthington and Franklinton in the 19th century. You'll turn right on Outville Rd., and on through one of Licking County's often missed little gems, Outville itself.
Then to US 40, the Old National Road at Kirkersville. This next stretch is straight ahead driving through Luray and Hebron and Jacksontown, but look for old buildings and of course the milestones still often in view on the north side of the road, some nicely maintained, all along the way. Eagle's Nest just before Brownsville, about 15 miles from Kirkersville, is the highest point on the National Road in Ohio, and the views to the south along here are always stunning.
Take Brownsville Road north, aka CR 668; turn right at Flint Ridge State Memorial and pause there as suits you. Flint Ridge Rd. to Gratiot Rd. north (left turn) and at the jog, just turn left and stay on Brushy Fork Rd., making sure to see the Old Stone Church of Christ on your left, the oldest church building in the county still in use (c. 1836, just ahead of St. Luke's in Granville). Meander on down the valley until you reunite with Brownsville Rd., turning right to cross the Licking River, and return to Rt. 16, crossing it, and then veering left on Marne Rd.; you'll pass through Marne village, and watch for Montour's Point on your left (a George Ball home on a site that was a trading post back likely into the 1750s) then Bowling Green Cemetery on the right, oldest pioneer settler cemetery in the county. Cross Rt. 16 again, and enter Newark on E. Main St., returning home as you wish.
About 100 miles, three hours or so depending on stops, and you'll have sampled a grand circuit of this Land of Legend we call home.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's driven all of this a few times and backwards, too. Tell him sights you like to share in this county at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Friday, February 04, 2022
Newark Earthworks essays for the Advocate running series of guest editorials
Newark Earthworks editorial essay - Spring 2022
Jeff Gill
On foot around the earthworks
___
Over the last thirty-plus years, I've had the pleasure of leading thousands of people on tours of the Newark Earthworks.
They arrive on school buses, some in tour coaches riding high, or in flotillas of cars from the local college campus.
Groups are a large number of our visitors, but people come from farther away individually or as couples, unscheduled and uncertain, sometimes attaching themselves to larger groups as we walk and talk. And on open house days or other planned events, those of us who lead tours meet people who sometimes came after weeks and months of planning and anticipation.
Whether a retired couple on vacation, or three yellow busloads of excited and energetic schoolchildren, one part of the process I enjoy is helping visitors get their feet on the ground, and seeing the earthworks as the original builders did, two thousand years ago, shortly after the construction phase was over.
And while the big groups coming to see the major preservation locations are rewarding to guide and inform, at the Great Circle off Rt. 79 and the Octagon Earthworks at the end of Parkview and 33rd St., they are but two sections of what was originally a four and a half square mile geometric earthen enclosure. Yes, we've lost a great deal; yes, we should be thankful for the foresight of community leaders and average citizens who set aside the Circle as county fairgrounds by 1854, and saw fit to tax themselves to purchase and preserve the Octagon earthworks in a public vote of 1892.
But what I've come to truly enjoy is taking groups, a dozen or two at a time, on foot across the landscape of modern Newark, to visit the pieces that have, in most cases, been accidentally preserved. Some now have protections around them, others at risk, but my best strategy right now I believe is simply to take people to see them, step by step, and raise our awareness of just how much remains even between our two grand monuments at either end of the majestic original whole.
There are subtleties in how the Native American builders used the landscape, and how the terrain today both hides and can help reveal what was built here millennia ago. You can't catch it as you drive along in your car; from a high bus window you miss much traveling in between. And our contemporary obsession with aerial views, overhead maps, now drone perspectives, can lift our eyes so far up we miss what's right at our feet.
These tours are quiet and discreet; we travel on public streets and sidewalks, and a few alleys, but some of what we're viewing is beyond where we can go, so I don't promote these locations casually. The Wright Earthworks is owned by the Ohio History Connection, a central fragment whose location can be shared abroad, and where we can triangulate from there to lost elements now only seen on old maps . . . or occasionally, to locate another small piece hiding in plain sight.
The research, the learning, the discovery still continues. Sometimes, just step by step.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.
=+=+=+=
Newark Earthworks editorial essay - Summer 2022
Jeff Gill
Moving earth across the landscape
___
One challenge we have in doing what's called "interpretation" of the Newark Earthworks are the assumptions, and even misconceptions many visitors bring to the sites.
Interpretation is the kind of non-formal education that park rangers and tour guides do. Interpretation isn't education in that there's not a set outcome in mind, of grades or credits or course participation scores. You participate for a very different set of motivations: social, family, personal reasons for taking a trip, spending some of your leisure at a place where you can learn or just relax and pick up a different point of view.
Obviously education and interpretation have a fair amount of overlap in terms of tools and techniques, but the biggest difference is that your visitors can walk away at any time. Students in school usually don't have that option. So a good interpreter knows they can't just lecture, shouldn't try to be merely entertaining, but there's a tricky balance to maintain.
This is why it's hard to deal with mistaken assumptions. If someone voluntarily comes and joins in an interpretive program or takes a guided walk, and says "but we know aliens built all of this, right?" we might be a little argumentative. What you don't always know is exactly what your visitors are assuming, and how that's shaping the way they hear what you're telling them.
There are words, for that reason, we avoid. "Savage" I hope we all understand is an inaccurate as well as unhelpful term; "primitive" is right up there from my point of view. Some visitors do start from an assumption that if you don't have written records, or metal alloys, or gunpowder, you're not a civilization, but they'd be quite mistaken.
In fact, one of the archaeological and anthropological marvels around the Newark Earthworks scholarship we've done thus far, is how we see not only the engineering precision built into this four and a half square mile complex of geometric earthworks, but the social complexity we're only just starting to come to understand.
Briefly put, there are major civil engineering projects in ancient history around the world, and in this hemisphere, of pyramids and monuments and causeways and roads, all of which took large numbers of workers. But almost without exception, the archaeological record shows in funerary remains and nutritional analysis of teeth and bones that there was some serious social stratification in those cultures. There were bosses, kings or priests or poobahs, who show less wear and tear on the bones and better food in their bellies. And there were workers, servants, even slaves, who lived notably less well.
Through the Middle Woodland period of the Ohio Valley, in the population archaeologists call the Hopewell Culture, we don't find this. Slave labor, even significant social stratification, doesn't appear in the archaeological record. This is significant.
Because to built earthen enclosures made up of literally millions of basket loads of soil and clays, sometimes brought from miles away, you need hundreds or more likely thousands of people voluntarily working together. Working hard, and apparently without coercion. This is quite a civilization, and I'd like to ease my visitors around to leaving behind their assumptions about early America, and call it an advanced civilization, in its own unique way.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.
=+=+=+=
Newark Earthworks editorial essay - Fall 2022
Jeff Gill
Taking shelter from the storms
___
Every year, as the nights get longer and the weather gets colder, I think about the Native American builders of the Newark Earthworks, of their ancestors in what we call the Archaic period and even before that the Paleoindian era, and how they faced the coming winter.
The lives of the indigenous people to North America were different than ours today, no doubt, but I think it's more helpful to start with what we have in common rather than to dwell on the fact that they had neither cars nor speeding tickets.
In fact, pausing as I walk in the evening to think about how those ancient builders got ready for a night in Ohio helps me look at my own evening routine a little differently.
Look, much of what we call a house is a machine for doing two things. Keeping the water off of us, whether rain, sleet, or dew, and for keeping heat inside, which is why we yell at our kids about leaving doors hanging open. And that's another thing I suspect has not changed in 12,000 years or so.
Modern houses have pitch roofs, gutters, downspouts, and drains. American Indian inhabitants of what we now call Licking County are known to have built what are commonly called wigwams, domed or cone shaped structures which are different from the more stereotypical "teepee," which is more of a Plains Indian living quarters.
Different tribes and languages have a variety of words which adjoin wigwam, but basically you're talking about a well crafted structure, with poles made from more flexible saplings placed in the ground, bent across to a partner opposite and lashed together. A framework of such poles would be lashed with spruce roots or other natural materials carefully selected for toughness with flexibility. The structure would then be covered with panels of bark taken off of suitable trees, and in some situations animal hides might be used; in the early historic records we read about woven panels which could be rolled up and transported if the residents were moving.
Those same records tell us moss sheets or woven grass mats could be packed around the bark to divert the rain and fend off heavy winds. Doorways were usually covered by animal hides.
When it rained or blew, I imagine the head of a household in the valleys along Raccoon Creek wondering "will the roof hold? will it leak?" Whether shingles nailed by a hired crew, or bark mats caulked with moss and reeds, the questions and worries are really just the same.
And instead of worrying about the furnace, when it was last serviced, and if I need to replace the air filter, in a wigwam was a central fire pit, used for cooking, illumination, and warmth. If there was enough firewood at hand, and it was a quiet night, you and your family would watch the smoke rise up through the carefully crafted smoke hole at the peak of the wigwam, and see the stars flicker just beyond.
The houses are different, but the concerns have not changed. And the good feeling of knowing your family is being kept dry, kept warm, and together in your home here in Licking County.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.
Jeff Gill
On foot around the earthworks
___
Over the last thirty-plus years, I've had the pleasure of leading thousands of people on tours of the Newark Earthworks.
They arrive on school buses, some in tour coaches riding high, or in flotillas of cars from the local college campus.
Groups are a large number of our visitors, but people come from farther away individually or as couples, unscheduled and uncertain, sometimes attaching themselves to larger groups as we walk and talk. And on open house days or other planned events, those of us who lead tours meet people who sometimes came after weeks and months of planning and anticipation.
Whether a retired couple on vacation, or three yellow busloads of excited and energetic schoolchildren, one part of the process I enjoy is helping visitors get their feet on the ground, and seeing the earthworks as the original builders did, two thousand years ago, shortly after the construction phase was over.
And while the big groups coming to see the major preservation locations are rewarding to guide and inform, at the Great Circle off Rt. 79 and the Octagon Earthworks at the end of Parkview and 33rd St., they are but two sections of what was originally a four and a half square mile geometric earthen enclosure. Yes, we've lost a great deal; yes, we should be thankful for the foresight of community leaders and average citizens who set aside the Circle as county fairgrounds by 1854, and saw fit to tax themselves to purchase and preserve the Octagon earthworks in a public vote of 1892.
But what I've come to truly enjoy is taking groups, a dozen or two at a time, on foot across the landscape of modern Newark, to visit the pieces that have, in most cases, been accidentally preserved. Some now have protections around them, others at risk, but my best strategy right now I believe is simply to take people to see them, step by step, and raise our awareness of just how much remains even between our two grand monuments at either end of the majestic original whole.
There are subtleties in how the Native American builders used the landscape, and how the terrain today both hides and can help reveal what was built here millennia ago. You can't catch it as you drive along in your car; from a high bus window you miss much traveling in between. And our contemporary obsession with aerial views, overhead maps, now drone perspectives, can lift our eyes so far up we miss what's right at our feet.
These tours are quiet and discreet; we travel on public streets and sidewalks, and a few alleys, but some of what we're viewing is beyond where we can go, so I don't promote these locations casually. The Wright Earthworks is owned by the Ohio History Connection, a central fragment whose location can be shared abroad, and where we can triangulate from there to lost elements now only seen on old maps . . . or occasionally, to locate another small piece hiding in plain sight.
The research, the learning, the discovery still continues. Sometimes, just step by step.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.
=+=+=+=
Newark Earthworks editorial essay - Summer 2022
Jeff Gill
Moving earth across the landscape
___
One challenge we have in doing what's called "interpretation" of the Newark Earthworks are the assumptions, and even misconceptions many visitors bring to the sites.
Interpretation is the kind of non-formal education that park rangers and tour guides do. Interpretation isn't education in that there's not a set outcome in mind, of grades or credits or course participation scores. You participate for a very different set of motivations: social, family, personal reasons for taking a trip, spending some of your leisure at a place where you can learn or just relax and pick up a different point of view.
Obviously education and interpretation have a fair amount of overlap in terms of tools and techniques, but the biggest difference is that your visitors can walk away at any time. Students in school usually don't have that option. So a good interpreter knows they can't just lecture, shouldn't try to be merely entertaining, but there's a tricky balance to maintain.
This is why it's hard to deal with mistaken assumptions. If someone voluntarily comes and joins in an interpretive program or takes a guided walk, and says "but we know aliens built all of this, right?" we might be a little argumentative. What you don't always know is exactly what your visitors are assuming, and how that's shaping the way they hear what you're telling them.
There are words, for that reason, we avoid. "Savage" I hope we all understand is an inaccurate as well as unhelpful term; "primitive" is right up there from my point of view. Some visitors do start from an assumption that if you don't have written records, or metal alloys, or gunpowder, you're not a civilization, but they'd be quite mistaken.
In fact, one of the archaeological and anthropological marvels around the Newark Earthworks scholarship we've done thus far, is how we see not only the engineering precision built into this four and a half square mile complex of geometric earthworks, but the social complexity we're only just starting to come to understand.
Briefly put, there are major civil engineering projects in ancient history around the world, and in this hemisphere, of pyramids and monuments and causeways and roads, all of which took large numbers of workers. But almost without exception, the archaeological record shows in funerary remains and nutritional analysis of teeth and bones that there was some serious social stratification in those cultures. There were bosses, kings or priests or poobahs, who show less wear and tear on the bones and better food in their bellies. And there were workers, servants, even slaves, who lived notably less well.
Through the Middle Woodland period of the Ohio Valley, in the population archaeologists call the Hopewell Culture, we don't find this. Slave labor, even significant social stratification, doesn't appear in the archaeological record. This is significant.
Because to built earthen enclosures made up of literally millions of basket loads of soil and clays, sometimes brought from miles away, you need hundreds or more likely thousands of people voluntarily working together. Working hard, and apparently without coercion. This is quite a civilization, and I'd like to ease my visitors around to leaving behind their assumptions about early America, and call it an advanced civilization, in its own unique way.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.
=+=+=+=
Newark Earthworks editorial essay - Fall 2022
Jeff Gill
Taking shelter from the storms
___
Every year, as the nights get longer and the weather gets colder, I think about the Native American builders of the Newark Earthworks, of their ancestors in what we call the Archaic period and even before that the Paleoindian era, and how they faced the coming winter.
The lives of the indigenous people to North America were different than ours today, no doubt, but I think it's more helpful to start with what we have in common rather than to dwell on the fact that they had neither cars nor speeding tickets.
In fact, pausing as I walk in the evening to think about how those ancient builders got ready for a night in Ohio helps me look at my own evening routine a little differently.
Look, much of what we call a house is a machine for doing two things. Keeping the water off of us, whether rain, sleet, or dew, and for keeping heat inside, which is why we yell at our kids about leaving doors hanging open. And that's another thing I suspect has not changed in 12,000 years or so.
Modern houses have pitch roofs, gutters, downspouts, and drains. American Indian inhabitants of what we now call Licking County are known to have built what are commonly called wigwams, domed or cone shaped structures which are different from the more stereotypical "teepee," which is more of a Plains Indian living quarters.
Different tribes and languages have a variety of words which adjoin wigwam, but basically you're talking about a well crafted structure, with poles made from more flexible saplings placed in the ground, bent across to a partner opposite and lashed together. A framework of such poles would be lashed with spruce roots or other natural materials carefully selected for toughness with flexibility. The structure would then be covered with panels of bark taken off of suitable trees, and in some situations animal hides might be used; in the early historic records we read about woven panels which could be rolled up and transported if the residents were moving.
Those same records tell us moss sheets or woven grass mats could be packed around the bark to divert the rain and fend off heavy winds. Doorways were usually covered by animal hides.
When it rained or blew, I imagine the head of a household in the valleys along Raccoon Creek wondering "will the roof hold? will it leak?" Whether shingles nailed by a hired crew, or bark mats caulked with moss and reeds, the questions and worries are really just the same.
And instead of worrying about the furnace, when it was last serviced, and if I need to replace the air filter, in a wigwam was a central fire pit, used for cooking, illumination, and warmth. If there was enough firewood at hand, and it was a quiet night, you and your family would watch the smoke rise up through the carefully crafted smoke hole at the peak of the wigwam, and see the stars flicker just beyond.
The houses are different, but the concerns have not changed. And the good feeling of knowing your family is being kept dry, kept warm, and together in your home here in Licking County.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.
Notes from my Knapsack 2-17-22
Notes from my Knapsack 2-17-22
Jeff Gill
Preserve, enhance, advance
___
For Granville and western Licking County, as we all see some dramatic changes coming as clearly as a squall line sweeping down out of the sky, I have three words of counsel.
Of course, I have more than those three, but this is what came to mind as I drove around, during the reflections I wrote about here last time, about the land we're going to see transformed into globally significant factories and economically disruptive locations.
Preserve, enhance, advance.
Preserve: the reality is, was, and always will be that we can't save it all. We cannot and should not want to preserve everything like a fly in amber, with the same stiffness not to say deadness that would result. Broadway and its businesses are not the same as it all was when I first moved here; some I miss, some I have trouble remembering. There are views we had from my house that are now blocked by new buildings which may or may not make my heart sing. I could have bought that lot across the road to prevent someone from building on it, and I did not, so I lose a particular vista.
The same is true for communities, townships, regions. The green space efforts we've made now look even wiser than they did at the time; zoning disputes are already happening where developers and builders are looking for maximum return even before the chip factory news. The time is now for us to figure out a) what do we want to preserve, and b) how much will we pay for it? Natural, historical, familiar things might all change soon: what do we want to preserve?
Enhance: since we can't preserve everything, we have to look at what it takes, as a communal endeavor, politically or in other civic arenas, to shore up and secure what we do have that we're going to keep. Schools and education are usually at the top of this list, but perhaps we've been content too long with a two item list of "excellent schools and a small town way of life." Seriously, what specific features do we want to make better, stronger, more secure as change like a rip tide washes around us?
Advance: Seven generations. If I have learned anything in the wonderful opportunity I've had in working with Native American groups and tribes and individuals in the last few decades in reference to the Newark Earthworks, it's the principle shared across many tribal nations and indigenous cultures in North America: how does this decision have an impact seven generations on? What in roughly 150 years will this choice mean? And if you can't answer the seven generations question, you haven't come up with a solution of any sort worth the name.
Preserve, enhance, advance. Because for good or ill, there are few things more socially disruptive than economic development. Anything we do not as a community make an intentional choice to preserve and maintain is going to be dramatically changed in the next few decades. And we can't preserve everything.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen a few communities change, sometimes for the better, sometimes otherwise. Tell him what you'd like to preserve at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
Jeff Gill
Preserve, enhance, advance
___
For Granville and western Licking County, as we all see some dramatic changes coming as clearly as a squall line sweeping down out of the sky, I have three words of counsel.
Of course, I have more than those three, but this is what came to mind as I drove around, during the reflections I wrote about here last time, about the land we're going to see transformed into globally significant factories and economically disruptive locations.
Preserve, enhance, advance.
Preserve: the reality is, was, and always will be that we can't save it all. We cannot and should not want to preserve everything like a fly in amber, with the same stiffness not to say deadness that would result. Broadway and its businesses are not the same as it all was when I first moved here; some I miss, some I have trouble remembering. There are views we had from my house that are now blocked by new buildings which may or may not make my heart sing. I could have bought that lot across the road to prevent someone from building on it, and I did not, so I lose a particular vista.
The same is true for communities, townships, regions. The green space efforts we've made now look even wiser than they did at the time; zoning disputes are already happening where developers and builders are looking for maximum return even before the chip factory news. The time is now for us to figure out a) what do we want to preserve, and b) how much will we pay for it? Natural, historical, familiar things might all change soon: what do we want to preserve?
Enhance: since we can't preserve everything, we have to look at what it takes, as a communal endeavor, politically or in other civic arenas, to shore up and secure what we do have that we're going to keep. Schools and education are usually at the top of this list, but perhaps we've been content too long with a two item list of "excellent schools and a small town way of life." Seriously, what specific features do we want to make better, stronger, more secure as change like a rip tide washes around us?
Advance: Seven generations. If I have learned anything in the wonderful opportunity I've had in working with Native American groups and tribes and individuals in the last few decades in reference to the Newark Earthworks, it's the principle shared across many tribal nations and indigenous cultures in North America: how does this decision have an impact seven generations on? What in roughly 150 years will this choice mean? And if you can't answer the seven generations question, you haven't come up with a solution of any sort worth the name.
Preserve, enhance, advance. Because for good or ill, there are few things more socially disruptive than economic development. Anything we do not as a community make an intentional choice to preserve and maintain is going to be dramatically changed in the next few decades. And we can't preserve everything.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's seen a few communities change, sometimes for the better, sometimes otherwise. Tell him what you'd like to preserve at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
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