Have you had an opportunity to reflect on the events of the last year? Intensifying culture wars before and during the 2020 election, attempts to overturn the election, including the insurrection, the very public death of George Floyd at the hands of police and the ensuing social unrest, more than 500,000 deaths from COVID-19, and economic hardships experienced by many have resulted in significant stress and anxiety across the socio political spectrum. And while 2020 is in the rearview mirror, the physical, emotional and spiritual consequences of what has transpired are still unfolding for many.
While it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully characterize what we’ve endured collectively and as individuals, the events and circumstances have revealed disturbing flaws and fissures in our social order. Over the course of the year, it is likely that your own assumptions about what it means to be an American, a Christian, and consequently a neighbor in our communities have been challenged, maybe even upended.
Nevertheless, I have come to believe that difficult and even traumatic times in our lives are not simply to be endured, but received with a degree of openness and acceptance anticipating that God is able to use and redeem all that he allows. Richard Rohr in his book The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder examines this perennial aspect of what it means to be human and has observed that: “It seems quite clear that we grow by passing beyond some periods of order, through an often painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to a more enlightened reordering, a resurrection of sorts.” The disruptions that inevitably arise in our lives force us to strip away the comfortable assumptions we’ve adopted about who we are and how things should be. We find ourselves with little choice but to surrender to God, and receiving his mercy, embrace a Spirit guided life-altering transformation.
For myself, the tumultuous and jarring happenings of last year experienced in relative isolation, and the collective weight of sadness that accrued were disorienting. Finding myself in a period of profound disorder I wrote the following verses:
TRANSFORMATION
The weight of sadness
can, in a moment,
undo the the work of a lifetime.
No longer well fit together,
I find myself undone.
Chaotic emotions
roiling deep waters;
anchors unmoored.
No ground emerges,
no footing secured.
I am undone.
Yet, knowing Love,
I yearn to be love.
There can be
no turning back.
What was undone
cannot simply be
neatly fit together again.
Discerning anew the Way,
knowing Truth,
embracing Life
I begin again.
Knit together, but
broken, humbled,
dependent upon grace.
In my experience there are not distinct transitions between disorder and reordering, but a gradual regaining of one’s balance and a growing discernment of how a reordered life might be lived; how to engage life again in light of what one has learned about self, others and Reality.
My parting word to you is do not surrender to despair regardless of your circumstances, but to open yourself to God’s presence, his love and mercy, and to the extent possible, live in hope through the disorder knowing that reordering and transformation will come in God’s time. May the Spirit grant you wisdom, grace and peace as you reflect on the meaning of Christian discipleship in our time.
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