EDITORIAL
Portents of Doom, Warblers of Hope

Michael A. King

This autumn of 2006 the five-year anniversary of 9-11 is being remembered, it seemed appropriate to find ways to mark it in this autumn issue of DreamSeeker Magazine. This is why the lead article by Steve Kriss and the final ones by Daniel Hertzler and by me address 9-11 or issues connected with it. Kriss feels and thinks his way through New York City five years later. Hertzler casts a jaundiced eye on readings of the Bible that turn it into a book for seeing today’s events as end-times portents. And I dare to wonder what my marriage teaches me about fighting terrorists.

Then as has been true in so many ways since 9-11, as some have declared us in a war on terror conceivably to be fought for decades, as war grinds down people and souls in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Lebanon, Africa, and elsewhere, life still must somehow be lived. So other articles and poetry explore the nooks and crannies of ongoing life.

Some do so with a particularly light touch. 9-11 seems particularly and nicely far away to me when I read my sister Noël King’s report on the aliens whose spaceship’s tires go flat. Ditto when faced with Elaine Jordan’s “stupid car” and the enlightenment she somehow manages to pull from the story surrounding it.

Nor do Renee Gehman or Deborah Good wander far from laughter. Gehman lets us smile with her at the mismatch between who she feels herself to be and who she is expected to be while serving in Vietnam. And Good manages simultaneously to convey the enlightenment that comes from walking and to tell of things like tooth caps that get swallowed and don’t “pass.”

Then Mark Wenger and Katie Funk Wiebe help us explore the meaning of church. Although neither intends explicitly to connect church with 9-11, questions of how we relate to church and faith and God have only become more urgent as 9-11 and terrorism so regularly force us to confront what we ultimately believe and what values we will love out in this troubled world.

Wenger helps us celebrate anew that it’s worth going to church. And by drawing lessons from her sometimes fundamentalist background Wiebe helps explore another issue related to 9-11: how we commit ourselves to sacred values as well as to the churches that support them even as we remain ever-growing seekers.

Meanwhile poets Dale Bicksler and Darren Belousek take us back out into a world of pain and poverty, of questions about who or how God is—yet also of heaven to be brought down to earth through egrets and hummingbirds. Portents of doom surround us these five years after 9-11. And warblers of hope.
—Michael A. King