EDITORIAL
Exploring the Mansion

Michael A. King

As 2008 wore on, it became ever clearer that profound changes were underway. A culture of debt and consumption was crashing. In the midst of it all a family danced in Kenya as news came that one of their own would lead America.

Now we wait to see what 2009 brings. There is reason for fear. And hope. Who can say what next? But I find myself viewing it all through the prism of Henry’s house, as reported on by Nöel King. Henry thought he was living in an efficiency. But it was a mansion. What if that is what is happening to our country and world? What if the walls of our efficiency are coming down—and showing us the rooms of a mansion?

That is also the image that has guided my arranging of this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine—the house is bigger than we thought. Then what is in its rooms? After King invites us to search, Alan Soffin helps us find the spirit for the quest: one of respect and love for what is there. Ken Beidler shows us that in some rooms are things that stump us yet can be embraced. Von Riege invites us into her mother’s Alzheimer’s and what she seeks in that part of the house she calls "God’s waiting room."

Amid his journey through clinical depression, Andrew Moore unlocks rooms in the house of his soul he has so long kept shut. Jeremy Frey seeks to enter the mansion by walking through doors opened by his grandparents’ lives. Brenda Hartman-Souder learns to walk through the room of rituals in her old American life to those of a Nigerian house. As she wrestles with how to repair her actual house, Renee Gehman hints at issues in her psyche’s house.

David Greiser shows us a Bill Maher who pokes irreverent holes in religions whose rooms he thinks too small. As Greiser suggests, Maher’s own room may be too small, but anyone journeying with him who has eyes to see may be helped to glimpse the mansion.

Daniel Hertzler ponders how often Christians and Jews have locked each other and themselves into small houses. Can they find what Alain Epp Weaver, whom Hertzler reviews, calls "Breaches in the Walls"? Meanwhile the poets in their ways seek mansions.

Finally I report on the mixed pain and joy of watching my daughter fly from Denver not back to my house, now too small for her, but to her own, where she too seeks her mansion.

Now we wait for 2009 to unfold. We wait for Barack Obama to show where he will lead us. We wait for our economy to tear downs walls and usher us into a mansion beyond ways of living grown too small. We wait, there in our one-room apartment of unfettered capitalism and pursuit of forms of treasure not laid up in heaven, to enter a place better than the one whose walls are debt and too much stuff.

—Michael A. King