Out of Order
By Brooke Lindsey
Time has stretched itself out these days— like taffy, sticky and slow, but it’s been sapped of all its sweetness. In the midst of COVID-imposed quarantine, the suspension of classes, and work from home orders, we don’t know what to make of ourselves, and we don’t know what to make of our time. We simply don’t know what to do.
On the international and systemic scale, leaders and lawmakers scramble to address developing needs and issues; but, on the individual scale as well, what to do? is a question that rings both practical and existential. I’ve picked up my guitar again, finally finished the entire Clone Wars television series, began running (poorly, painfully, and slowly), and am growing my first-ever sourdough starter in the corner of the kitchen. But, more than practicing our new hobbies, many of us find ourselves searching for meaning in the midst of this suffering. What do I do with this one life I’ve been given, when it feels like all that I can do at the moment is rearrange my closet for a third time?
I keep asking my friends how they’re filling their days, but the question feels unfair. The days feel too transient to be stopped and filled; rather, the hours slip away from me as through a sieve. “How are you spending your time?” they ask in response, and I think, shamefully, that it’s amazing how much time I’m really able to waste. I’ll recall a couple of moments from the day, but most of the memories congeal in my mind until they are one amorphous, undifferentiated blur.
Even so, my daily ignorance—my lack of motivation to connect with what is happening around me and, through it, connect to myself—does not feel like bliss. Despite how quickly the world has shifted, each moment feels so slow. More than ever I ought to feel the weight of the worth of the time I have, yet it passes me by, feeling weightless and worthless as ever. The breakneck pace of time during the school year can feel a blur as well: trying to reflect on everything that has occurred in just a few months is like looking out the window of your car at eighty miles per hour, the landscape around you reduced to streaks of light and color. But at least it’s a blur that exhilarates, that has a clear direction, that feeds on productivity and is punctuated by moments of real meaning-making. Looking out the metaphorical window of my life right now, it’s too dark to make out much of anything at all.
So many aspects of life in this moment feel trapped between dichotomies. Each night my parents turn on the evening news, and the grim reality is presented before us: new cases, new deaths, new closures, and further movement up an exponential curve with no end in sight. At the same time, every “new” warning now echoes those of the day before, and presumably those of the day ahead: there is a global pandemic occurring, people are suffering, and our questions remain unanswered. How long, O Lord?
The world’s order and structure typically allows me to perceive meaning. I like having places to go at the same time each week, I like meeting with my church on Sundays, and I like the Anglican liturgy—the formal structure of our worship—that we practice every service, repeating the words and rituals that began a thousand years ago. The way we structure our lives reminds us where we’ve been, where we are, where we’re going, and ultimately, what we value. The way I order my life, ordinarily, is reflective of how meaningful certain people, ends, and institutions really are to me— from my friends, to my education, and to God Himself.
The difficulty of this moment is that it feels as though our world has been stripped of order completely, and we’re all scrambling blindly to find something or someone—a politician, a news source, a friend, a statistic—to explain it. My mind becomes a kind of existential blur in the absence of a well-ordered life; it feeds on my worst fears, my unanswered questions, and my deepest boredom to create a falsified sense of meaning.
Perhaps, some would argue that the structures, rituals, and systems we establish in the world are the very things which imbue it with meaning. They would assert that meaning itself is a creative act, even as we find meaning in our daily acts of creation. Certainly, the Christian would agree that meaning is a creative act, but it’s no collaborative human venture. Rather, all of creation is—as the word implies—the very creative act of God, who by His Word, by the literal act of speaking, breathed life into the world.
We need not read the creation story in Genesis as a historical account of a literal, seven-day creation. We may, however, see in it an account of a God who loves order, and who gives it to the world. Out of nothingness, He speaks, and the world is, and it is Good. He creates a structure of days and nights, and within those seven days, establishes the entire complex ecosystem of the Earth: an ordered kingdom over which He eternally reigns. On this account, we need not apply meaning to the order of the world, because we freely inherit it.
In her brilliant book Liturgy of the Ordinary, Tish Harrison Warren describes how our daily habits and practices become ways of making meaning every day, the habits that become our liturgies: “We don’t wake up daily and form a way of being-in-the-world from scratch, and we don’t think our way through every action of our day. We move in patterns that we have set over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.” [1]
In this time of upheaval, our daily liturgies are no longer those of the ordinary, but of the extraordinary, the dismaying, and the uncertain. We do not have the comfort of normalcy, and our ways of being-in-the-world cannot be the same as they were before. Nevertheless, we habituate ourselves to other ways of being. If I’m honest, I’m still waiting to fall into a rhythm that will give my days a steady beat.
At the moment, I’m trying to remember that there is goodness in the ordinary practices of the world, even in the midst of these unprecedented circumstances. We don’t need to discover some elusive ultimate meaning in the world, or single handedly save it—thank God (literally) that we don’t. By Him and in Him and through Him, the work of creating and redeeming the universe has already been finished.
But there’s difficult work that lies ahead for us in seeking out new ways to honor what has been meaningful all along, and in doing so, honor the God of order who created all things. I don’t have easy answers about how to resolve the mess of a blur that is my mind these days—only a hope and assurance that it is “not a God of disorder but of peace”[2] who reigns, even when the world feels most chaotic and out of time.
For now, I suppose I’ll keep on rearranging my closet, feeding my sourdough, and forming guitar-playing calluses. Rhythmically and repetitiously, I will begin to habituate myself to a new way of living, perhaps learning to lessen the blur of this uncertainty— or at least to see the world clearly in spite of it.
SOURCES
Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary. p. 30
1 Corinthians 14:33 (NIV)