EDITORIAL
Sacred Time and Sunflower Mornings

Michael A. King

Sacred time. Sunflower mornings. Sacred moments. Each phrase, a title of an article in this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine, overlaps with the others. Each in some way looks in the ordinary or even the twisted for the sacramental—and in some way finds or at least points to it.

Yet these articles, the first three, by Art Strimling, Carol Schreck, and Deborah Good, were written at different times by different authors unaware of each other’s work. Evidence of the sacred dimension within which each of us lives if we open ourselves to it? I like to think so.

If the other articles in this issue are not always as tightly linked to the search for the sacramental as the first three, all seem within range of it. I wrote my own column before knowing of the articles that would precede it, but my key question was how our bodies energizes traveling toward the sacred. Hope Nisly is grieving what happens when the sacred is deformed by hate or war. Dave Greiser reviews the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which turns out to have much to do with the sacred, not to mention sunshine.

Randy Klassen moves in another yet still related direction: exploring Jesus’ view that a key sin is religious hypocrisy—which involves claiming to be motivated by the sacred even as baser urges steer the ship.
Perhaps I shouldn’t even try to fit the next two articles into the theme. And yet . . . as I ponder Laura Amstutz’s witty exploration of the realities of life as a housewife, including why she now likes to clean the toilet, I can’t resist noting that laughter at its best seems always to flirt with the sacred underside of what it laughs at. And though Glenn Lehman focuses on his dear departed, Ms. Scott Dale, there is in fact something sacred to be sensed in his memories of his lost love.

The theme reemerges more directly in the final columns. In conversation with Ernest Hemingway’s life and writings, Dan Hertzler explores the troubling fruits of believing all life is futile. Yet he manages to do so in a way that honors Hemingway even while making clear Hertzler’s own commitment to life as more than futile—precisely because it is grounded in the sacred.

Next, Nöel King invites us to linger on the back porch until our vision is sharp enough for us to see life in all its delicious clarity and to step into its fullness from the front porch.

Finally, the poetry of Christine Wiebe and Joyce Peachey Lind, written often in awareness of physical frailties and sometimes death, strikes me as one long engagement with the sacred, whether in fear or celebration of its immediacy.
—Michael A. King