“Picture three boxes: order, disorder, reorder. If you read the great myths of the world and the great religions, that’s the normal path of transformation.” -Richard Rohr
Has your practice and personal rhythm been blown apart by the pandemic?
Second question,
Do you really want to go back to normal?
Perhaps the divine is inviting you into the possibilities of love and transformation.
Richard Rohr sees transformation and change happening in three stages:
1. Order
2. Disorder
3. Reorder
Order
Order is what your pre-COVID life used to look like. Seeing patients and earning a living. It was a pretty good life…most of the time.
But it is dangerous to romanticize or stay too long in your previous safe, structured way of life.
It becomes small and self-serving. It becomes difficult to see beyond yourself. We lose the big picture even though we think we’re serving the greater good.
It feels like suffering whenever our normalcy is disrupted. If we’re unwilling to let go of our small selves, then we won’t enter any new or sacred spaces.
Our “order” becomes a tight box that needs to be deconstructed by trials and suffering. We all must go through a period of “disorder” to grow up.
Disorder
We, of all people, should know that we dare not get rid of our pain before we learn what it has to teach us. We are trained to follow the symptoms to underlying causes.
We know there is no direct path from order to reorder. Like scar tissue, we’ve got to go through the disordered stage to get to healing.
Most of the solutions I see on getting our livelihoods back are egocentric, give answers too quickly, and ignore the fact that death is part of life and failure a part of the victory.
The emotional turmoil can create a new awareness and way of seeing.
Spiritual leaders talk of these moments as a liminal space from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold.
Reorder
We are in a genuinely liminal space, due to the coronavirus pandemic. All of us are standing on a new threshold in our lives.
On the one hand, this can cause high anxiety for those of us who have devoted our lives to helping others within an institutional healthcare system.
On the other hand, this can be a time of renewal where we participate in the reformation of big medicine to provide affordable wellness and therapy services to the common man.
What will you do with your threshold moment?
I’d suggest instead of wanting it to end abruptly. I would pause and acknowledge that change is taking place. You have an open invitation to allow transformation to occur in your own heart.
Invest time in silence and solitude to hear the small quiet voice inviting you to love and transformation.
None of us has a reliable crystal ball, (not even Dr. Fauci), of what lies ahead in this unique moment in history. Yet somehow instinctively, we sense we are called into meaningful relationships.
It is through the liminal space that we may reorder our lives around what is truly important. This moment invites us to taste the divine union with our Creator and with one another.
May we all say yes to the divine invitation,
