Editorial: Mundane Details as Big Pictures Fracture

As we headed toward this autumn I shared with Eastern Mennonite Seminary staff and faculty a quote from New York Times (Sunday August 21, 2011) columnist Maureen Dowd. She offered the memorable thought that “Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis.”

At that very moment a strange rumbling began. We later learned it was an earthquake centered not even a hundred miles away. We weren’t quite sure whether to think God wanted to confirm or unsettle my citing of Maureen Dowd. Soon after a hurricane raked much of the same area. 

Unsettled times. Hard to know how to plan. Hard to get a clear picture of what to focus on. Such factors came to mind as I pondered whether this Autumn 2011 issue of DreamSeeker Magazine has a unifying theme. I couldn’t quite find one—except when I started thinking that this collection of articles feels a bit like our times: each of us focusing here and there on this or that catching our attention or seeming to be something we can make sense of amid larger forces we can’t get our minds fully around.

So this DSM seems not to provide so much an intentional bigger picture as to echo times in which if we can grasp a bigger picture it seems to be the sense that things aren’t entirely holding together, whether locally, globally, or at the level of our physical enviroment.
This seems also to connect with the lead article by Brenda Hartman-Souder, who is by no means one unaware of things that make one curl into a ball, living as she does in an unsettled part of Africa, yet who decides to focus memorably and invitingly on the joys of fruits. 

My column, which follows, is my effort to find some sort of meaning in the many deaths of parents and mentors that have marked my past year and unraveled much of my own previously taken-for-granted personal big picture.

We might think of Joyce Peachey Lind as learning from lives whose unraveling she experiences in court even as she worried the lesson her son has learned is itself more focused on the small picture than she might have wished for. On the other hand, Woody Allen, as reviewed by David Greiser, could be thought of as sometimes paradoxically finding bigger pictures through the very act of exploring life’s small and sometimes petty details and dramas. 

In Daniel Hertzler’s  review of three authors who loom large in their intertwining fields, it can be fascinating to learn something about the autobiographical details intertwining with and sometimes seeming to run counter to their larger authorial themes. 

As she says goodbye to DSM, Deborah Good can be read as saying that big pictures cannot hold—life stages are impermanent. Suzy, in Noel King’s telling, experiences a huge big-picture shift—aliens live among us!—but for now Suzy mostly just keeps eating at Taco Bell. 

Marlin Jeschke shows God’s big dreams for the Holy Land perpetually stymied by peoples ever at odds with each other in Israel-Palestine. Finally the poets address some larger matters—grief, life itself—through such mundane details as soybeans and touch football. 

Daily details amid forces that seem to shake the earth itself. Life on earth today. —Michael A. King