EDITORIAL: SHADOWS AND SUNSHINE

As this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine is being finalized, the United States, as it has so often since 9-11, is wrestling yet again with how to treat enemies. We mostly seem to have resolved it’s okay to kill them if they’re bad enough. But we’re still not quite sure it’s okay to torture them, although apparently (according to a recent survey), a majority of more faithful churchgoing evangelical Christians do think torture is the way to go.

Even amid gauzy summer breezes, then, it seems important to think yet again about what we do with evil, with bad people, with Jesus’ teachings to love even beyond what seems right to us. Dan Schreiber and Stephen Mitchell, who submitted their overlapping and mutually enriching articles without being aware of the other’s, keep us pondering. My column on robins goes next because it worries about where God fits when robins are taken (which extends to when people are tortured). 

Nevertheless, it is summer. During a recession. I at least yearn also to feel touched during summer by the magic of landscapes, laughter, the sheer joy of the moment. So next comes Renee Gehman, reminding us, precisely, to cherish the moment, which for me includes the summer sunshine, so soon gone, such a gift while here. Brenda Hartman-Souder extends and deepens the theme with a meditation on, of all things, lice.

Then Craig Pelkey-Landis takes us to sun-dappled Phoenix. And Deborah Good ponders life on the cusp of “what-next” in various insightful ways and settings—but not least an Arizona road trip.

Ah, but this issue of DSM will remain current through September and the beginning of fall, when school starts and we expect minds to work hard. So onward with a thoughtful review by Dave Greiser of “The Soloist” and the complexities of mental illness it both addresses and fails to address; by James Juhnke of “Silent Light” and the film’s illuminating (sometimes) treatment of Old Order Mennonites; by Dan Hertzler of ways Marlene Epp “lifts the fog” in telling of the treatment and mistreatment of Mennonite women. The poets add their own dappling of light, longing, God leaving or lurking.

Finally I can’t resist closing on a resurgent summery note, with Noël King’s fantasy of what happens when a babysitter realizes she’s taking care of Alison, daughter of Wonderland Alice. 

Shadows and sunshine. Summer into autumn, 2009.
—Michael A. King