EDITORIAL
What If Monsters Are Real?

Michael A. King

T his issue begins with Noel King’s story of Imogene’s encounter with a monster because the question Imogene asks is an appropriate doorway into the rest of the issue: If monsters are real, what else thought untrue might actually be true?

Amy Spencer implicitly extends this unsettling question when she ponders whether it is in fact true that the only way to follow Jesus is to go to church. What if, she wonders, sometimes not going to church is the way to regain a true relationship with God?

Randy Klassen, deeply disappointed in a preemptively warmaking United States, wildly wonders what would happen if we loved our enemies instead of thinking the way to handle those we consider monstrous is to kill them. Mark Wenger does not address monsters when describing the Bible as a communal watering hole, yet the realities affirmed in the Bible he celebrates are even wilder than monsters that turn out to be real.

Audrey Metz opens a series of articles that deal in their various ways with our mortality. Here the monster that turns out to be real, hauntingly and shatteringly real, despite our regular efforts to deny it, is death. With unusual courage and directness, Metz confronts the deaths of loved ones . Then Joe Postove tells the wrenching story of helping his mother leave this life to be born in the next. And Deborah Good shares the shattering of her family’s normal life by her father’s diagnosis of cancer.

Thereafter the articles gradually move from death back into life, but still asking what might be true or not—even if normally thought to be.

In my column I ask whether it’s true that bigger and bigger and better and better is the point of life when in fact in the end we all get smaller and smaller. Renee Gehman asks if “easy buttons” are all they are cracked up to be. David Greiser takes us into the exotic realm of Anime, in which cartoons are not just Saturday morning junk but windows into the mythic intensities of human existence. And Daniel Hertzler invites us to ask whether it is true that only the special few are called to be saints.

Finally, Joyce Peachey Lind and Joanne Lehman use poetry about fathers and mothers to invite our hearts into the ongoing cycle of life passed down through the generations, in all its wonder and grief. Here what is real is not monstrous, but the poets help us realize how extraordinary are the realities they invite us to enter.