EDITORIAL
Between the War and the Gingko Leaves

I’m not usually prone to escape fantasies, but this fall has been enough to turn anyone to contemplating how to get out of whatever we’re in. I’ve followed some of those famous escape routes of North Americans—sleep, food, and movies—and added some hopefully healthier ones to the mix—walks, books, and playing with my baby. Either way, my goals have been non-thinking, diversion, oblivion.

I’m sure I would have had these urges even if the September 11 violence and the ensuing U.S. strikes in Afghanistan were the only crises (although “only” seems a bad choice of words). But then a friend dies just after September 11. Two sets of friends hit marital crises. Now everything seems loose at the hinges, or skidding downhill toward some edge.

I wonder how to balance the absorption and action in the world’s and my friends’ pain and the forgetfulness that suddenly becomes a grace-filled gift. Daily I wander between these two territories: replaying global and personal tragedies in my head and wondering how to pray or help, on the one hand; and the irresponsible joy of pushing a stroller and thinking only of sunlight and ducks and gingko leaves, on the other.

So how does one avoid falling into extremes: either the drain of workaholic activism and friendship, or the apathy of escapist pleasures? This issue of DSM provides one model of such balance. You’ll find essays on the September 11 violence and U.S. military action and others that don’t mention it. You’ll be asked to touch the dust of the World Trade towers Steve Kriss wipes from his forehead with a tissue, then keeps for weeks, “feeling it was somehow too sacred to throw away.” You’ll be asked to consider arguments about arrogance and peacemaking and how to best follow Christ’s way in days of two-sided terror.

Then again, you’ll vicariously watch movies with David Greiser and read a book with Daniel Hertzler. You’ll taste electricity and enter “the apparent, winter quiet” through poems by David Wright and William Dellinger.

Ultimately, as Parker Palmer writes in The Active Life, we should move beyond what he calls “the vacation approach,” in which we exhaust ourselves engaging with the world, then retreat into contemplation to gather up energy for the next round. Action and contemplation can occur simultaneously, Palmer writes, so they are “the interwoven threads that form the fabric of who we are and who we are becoming.”

For right now, however, when the grief of the globe and my friends’ lives exhausts me, I’m going to settle for walking back and forth between the pain and the beauty, action and contemplation, absorption and escape. I have a feeling that I’m finding God somewhere in the middle of both.
—Valerie Weaver-Zercher