EDITORIAL
A Holy Mess

This is a true story but let me fuzz the details. A son went to a father and reported the questionable thing he might to do when away from home with friends. “How will you feel about that?” wondered the son.

“Let me be clear,” said the father. “It’s against the law and it’s against our family rules.”

“I know, Dad,” said the son. “But if I do it, can I talk to you about it?”

“Yes,” said the father.

“Good,” said the son, “because if I couldn’t talk to you about it then I’d do it anyway but I wouldn’t let you know.”

What that story illustrates is this: We must constantly negotiate how we will live between what could be and what is. Particularly for persons of faith or committed to high ideals, the tension is inevitable, because life is always messier than the ideals.

Issues of DSM are also messier than any theme, but if there is a theme this time, it involves looking squarely at life’s messiness, then experiencing within and not outside the mess whatever holiness is to be found. That’s why this time Paul Schrock’s response to last issue’s focus on mental illness, Leonard Nolt’s poem on change, and my own Kingsview come first—because hopefully they provide doorways through which to enter the explorations that follow of messiness, holiness, or both.

In the following two articles the exploration brushes against death itself, as David Flowers tells of the faces he had to learn to know when cancer took away his usual face, and as Polly Ann Brown tells of how the manner of her dog’s death taught her next time to trust the voice of her soul.

Then Katie Funk Wiebe both surveys her life from within the messy realities of aging and teaches us to gallop with her, naked, in the night—sometimes, perhaps, through the labyrinths Elizabeth Raid describes as helpful to her journey through midlife. Meanwhile Valerie Weaver-Zercher looks again at the small talk she has maligned and now sees in its humdrum ordinariness hints of so much more, even as poet Jeremy Frey sees much in a Wissahickon stream.

Ever criss-crossing messiness and holiness are the church and also our walks of faith. We see this as Hubert Schwartzentruber explains what he learned about church from a girl forbidden messy tears. And we see it as Randy Klassen invites us to take on a lived, not just doctrinal, Jesus shape, after which Dan Hertzler explores the presence and absence of a Jesus shape in a Mennonite community studied by John Ruth.

Topping it all off, Dave Greiser uses film to bore in on the nature of reality itself. On the back cover Nolt chills us with parallels between today and when Anabaptists were executed for their beliefs. And Noël King sends us back out the door laughing, one of the better ways to find joy within the mess, by reporting on the “woman distracted by work on the job." —Michael A. King