A Season of Disorientation

We have all heard people expressing the uncertainty brought about by the Coronavirus. Expressions like “the new normal” are common. Teachers are having to develop lessons and plans that can be taught online. Pastors have to speak to congregations they can see only in their mind’s eye. Others are trying to figure out how to work from home with children calling for their attention. Some have lost their jobs. Others are asking “How do I walk this out? Do I have what it takes to walk this out?” We are in a time of disorientation.

This is not really new. It may be new to us at the moment, but it is not new. In fact, it is really the way life works. This notion comes from the Psalms. Walter Brueggemann introduced me to the idea that the Psalms can be generally organized around three themes. Orientation, Disorientation, and New Orientation. I want to suggest that looking at the Psalms from this vantage point will help us understand what is happening and how to cope with it.

Times of Orientation are characterized by seasons of well-being, times when we are generally satisfied with life. We have come through such a season, at least in the west. Our economy was strong, people were growing in prosperity. Globally, there were signs that we were moving away from the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part, life was good, and things happened as expected.

Times of Disorientation are characterized by seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering, and death. These seasons evoke rage, resentment, self-pity, and hatred. These seasons are expressed in language that is extravagant and characterized by hyperbole. We are in such a season. All that was predictable, all that we counted on for our sense of security and normality is either not available or seriously threatened. In times of disorientation, we tend to seize control. It is no surprise that March gun sales were the highest on record.

Times of New Orientation are characterized by being overwhelmed with the new gifts of God. Things are made right again. Order is again restored, and life makes sense.

Life, as depicted in the Old Testament, shows that we move through these three seasons in a cyclical fashion. In times of orientation, we drift from God and are consumed with prosperity and all that it can provide. As a result, we receive the inevitable results of living life without God at the center. We experience a breakdown in the family, a de-structuring of society, or some catastrophe from the outside such as war or disease.

This results in a season of disorientation. People then cry out to God for deliverance. In time the pain of disorientation causes them to remember God, to repent and turn back to God and His order for the world. He then brings deliverance and a season of new orientation is experienced.

It is especially fitting to think about this pattern this week. The disciples moved through all three of these seasons in a little over a week. At the beginning of the week they were sure of so many things, sure of how things would play out - Jesus the Messiah would overthrow the Romans and lead Israel into a new golden age of supremacy. Thursday night all of that came crumbling down. Jesus is arrested and the disciples enter a season of disorientation. What was happening, what did all this mean? They hid in fear and confusion. It wasn’t until Sunday and the startling realization that Jesus had risen from the dead that they entered a season of new orientation.

There is a way forward during this season of disorientation. We can choose to hide in fear and be driven by anxiety or we can choose to live by faith.  We can hold on to what we know of God through Scripture and our experience of Him. We can hold onto what God has shown to be true about himself. We can refuse to doubt in the dark, what God has shown us in the light. We can look for the redemptive work of God in and through the crisis of this pandemic. We seek to listen to what He is saying to us, to our nation and to the world. That message from the Lord may require us to hold loosely some of our theological preferences and pet interpretations of Scripture. Listen and look for the new orientation that He will introduce!

Rev. Douglas G. Conley
District Superintendent