I’ve got orientation on the brain. Yesterday I began the day attending high school orientation with our youngest son and ended the day 451 miles away from home where we will take my eldest daughter, second child, to her college orientation. Strange as it may seem, theology is often a good coping mechanism for DISORIENTATION for me. So no real surprise that my mind went back a long way to Tremper Longman’s teaching on the Psalms (How to Read the Psalms). He first told me about Walter Bruegemann’s categorization of the Psalms in terms of disorientation, orientation, and re-orientation. Here is part of what Bruegemann wrote:
“Creation here is not a theory about how the world came to be. That is not how the Bible thinks about creation. It is rather an affirmation that God’s faithfulness and goodness are experienced as generosity, continuity, and regularity. Life is experienced as protected space. Chaos is not present to us and is not permitted a hearing in this well-ordered world.
Elemental certitudes are known to be operative in the world. The nomos holds, and there is as yet no inkling of anomie. Experientially, of course, such certitudes have behind them previous awareness of disorientation, for that belongs to human experience. The process is continually dialectic. But formally, these psalms tend to disregard such previous experience and begin anew.
The function of this kind of psalm is theological, i.e., to praise and thank God. But such a psalm also has a social function of importance. It is to articulate and maintain a ‘sacred canopy’ under which the community of faith can live out its life with freedom from anxiety. That is, life is not simply a task to be achieved, an endless construction of a viable world made by effort and human ingenuity. There is a givenness to be relied on, guaranteed by none other than God. That givenness is here before us, stands over us, endures beyond us, and surrounds us behind and before. The poetic speech of the Psalms is our best language for such givenness, which is not initiated by us but waits for us. There is a coherence that provides a context for our best living. Whenever we use these psalms, they continue to assure us of such a canopy of certitude — despite all the incongruities of life.” from Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms.
Want to explore some of this? Try reading these aloud and meditating on the glory of what God has done: Psalm 145, 104, 33