Psalms and the Power of Reorientation

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move from a particular view of ourselves, God, and the cosmos until suddenly we are disoriented by a sudden illness, pregnancy loss, a busted-up economy, being passed over for a job, news of global inequality, racial violence, and even the numbness of our own souls. As we wait, we are then invited to move through the limits that surface, to name the shape of our pain beneath, so that we can journey…