EDITORIAL
Let Me Rephrase That. . . .

Valerie Weaver-Zercher

Like many amateur writers, I dislike revising my work. I prefer the first crush of the creative process, the sweaty passion and falling-in-love thrill of getting the words down.

By contrast, the work it takes to rethink ideas and to rewrite paragraphs feels cloddish and dreary. It’s not unlike the way in which newly married folks must face the fact that toilets break and schedules conflict and people argue, and that the work of taking care of these must—at least at times—replace going out for dinner and holding hands.

But mature writing—much like marriage, and much like faith—means committing to the messy margins of revision, change, and hard work. If I refuse to “re-view” or “re-read” my work or marriage or faith periodically, or if I do reflect on them but then refuse to change ideas or opinions or actions based on these new readings, the things most dear to me can grow stale and formulaic at best, irrelevant and inert at worst.

In many ways, “revision” is what this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine calls us to: the willingness to literally re-view what we thought we knew about our faith. Mary Schertz writes of having revised her understandings of submission and Gelassenheit in the light of feminism, then of “re-revising” them as she moved further along in her walk as a feminist Christian. Denny Weaver reviews common understandings of the atonement and offers an alternative reading of the reason Jesus died. Michael King reimagines what dialogue between people of different faiths might look like.

Mark Wenger, meanwhile, revisits those “antiquated” rules of marriage that might salvage family life in the twenty-first century, even as Ted Grimsrud encourages us to re-read scriptural comments and churchly beliefs about homosexuality. And Laura Lehman Amstutz invites us to revise our image of the Divine for just long enough to imagine God sipping a Mocha with extra whipped cream.

These ideas about revision clash with that old adage about taking
multiple-choice tests: stick with your first answer, and you’ll probably get it right. Then again, sustaining a marriage, nurturing a faith—and living a life, for that matter—are less like taking a test and a lot more like writing an essay. “Re-visioning” isn’t usually thrilling, it’s rarely neat, and it takes a long time. At least with God there are no deadlines.
—Valerie Weaver-Zercher