Jehanne Bell -- A Guest Editor's Note

During last year's Kickstarter, we offered backers --

-- the chance to guest edit an issue of the magazine (after some vetting on our part to make sure they weren't insane or terrible). In the process, this month's guest editor, the sublime Jehanne Bell, was offered a selection of stories picked up the team here at The Cosmic Background. The story she chose was the fantastic, The Stolen Sabbath by a person I happen to love, Jennifer Hudak. And now to Jehanne, for her Editor's note.

There is a light in dark times. It goes by many names, and in Jennifer Hudak's story, its name is the Sabbath—in religious terms, a word that remains close in form to its Hebrew roots. In meaning, something that is harder to define. In these days of constant action and insecurity, we talk about taking time to rest, but there is more to the Sabbath the narrator seeks than physical rest or the trappings of tradition. There is restoration, a means to approach peace of mind, however briefly, and the capacity to transform what we have been into what we can become.

This is a fundamentally human action.

Each person who reaches out to find a light in the dark may find it in a different corner. In childhood memories, in learned traditions, in practices discovered like an epiphany. In Sabbath candles, in prayer rugs, in counted beads, in burning incense, in rivers and trees. In silence, in song, and in service. People have always reached out when they need to find the capacity to transform.

Especially in troubled times, this is a fundamentally human need, and a fundamentally human capacity.

What Jennifer Hudak's narrator realizes about where the Sabbath comes from leaves the audience free to watch where it goes when she puts it away. In that moment, a transformation has taken place beyond the covering of the secular with the sacred: Should the narrator need to find the Sabbath again, they will know how. The need to transform what we have been into what we can become, and the capacity for that transformation, are intimately intertwined, just as they are both bound up in the fundamentally human need to seek out restoration and peace.

We must allow ourselves and each other the lights we can find in the dark. Each may find their own light, with its own name, in their own way, but as humans, we are in these times together.

Jehanne Bell -- 12/2/24