EDITORIAL
Celebrating Faith Treasures

Michael A. King

Celebrating the treasures in our own faith journeys. And pondering what to do with conflicting treasures. That seems to me what this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine is in many ways about.

The saga begins with Elrena Evans, as she tells of coming to believe, amid questions, that baptism has sealed her baby as God’s own. Then I ponder what to do when Evans’ accounting of infant baptism arrives just after I’ve completed sermons underscoring the importance of adult baptism.

Next Renee Gehman ponders her own riddle: She sees value in evangelizing but a form of it has left her cold. What to do? And Dan Hertzler reviews books that one way or another want to pose the riddle this way: “Is it insensitive to share your faith?”

Then the articles fit the theme less neatly, but I like to think they still engage faith treasures and claims. Take Mary Alice Hostetter. She helps us see both the strangeness of footwashing—why would we want to do this disgusting thing?—and that once she missed a footwashing treasure.
Or take Carol Nowlin. This time Nowlin is not reflecting on a ritual in her own tradition but longing toward the Quinceañera in a distant land. Yet in her longing we glimpse, I suspect, the aches that drive our different ways of seeking and ritualizing something beyond ourselves.

Where I see Deborah Good tying in is in her conviction that in the end none of us can find the Ultimate alone. She quotes Desmond Tutu, “God created us for fellowship,” and calls us to live in circles of interdependence. What might it look like to do that even across faith understandings and rituals?

On the surface David Greiser’s review of a film steeped in cruelty cuts a different direction. Still it ties in, I believe. “We are, all of us,” he says, “a mixture of beauty and evil.” And this, I think, makes it hard for us to know when there is evil and when there is good in what we choose to treasure or reject. One more reason to help each other do the discerning—interdependently.

Last, but only because that placement seems to me to empower their contributions, are Valerie Weaver-Zercher and Noël King. Weaver-Zercher appears toward the end because she helps me remember that the goal of pondering faith treasures is not an easy tolerance or “an Unconditional Yes” but learning when to say yes and when to say no to stay on the “path of Life.”

And in King’s story of Mrs. Smithlebee, whose blood turns out to confer on her eternal life and who gradually concludes this will let her do just about anything, I wonder if I hear this: a sly warning that no matter how we handle our own and each other’s faith treasures, we’ll never grasp all. —Michael A. King