Is It Chaos Yet?
Photo by Yung Chang on Unsplash
She’s most widely known for her catchy, hopeful saying, “All shall be well. … All manner of things shall be well.” But lately I’ve been intrigued by the strange and plague-ridden world of the medieval writer Julian of Norwich. How she stayed radiant even amid the gritty, devastating events in her troubled English era. I even video-recorded a talk about her (available here) with the title “Communion in the Chaos.”
And, as I worked, I thought I would look up definitions of the word chaos, which I’m seeing in print a lot these days as folks grope for words for the turmoil of our own aching, anxious times.
In physics, I learned, chaos is defined as “behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to … small changes in conditions.” I was struck especially by the first part: That’s how chaos can feel. Like things are random. That they are hard (or impossible) to predict. Subject to big forces and little moments.
But while that word picture helps, most of us will see or use the word for a more general condition: “complete disorder and confusion.” Like when we might say, “the blizzard caused chaos in the region.”
Then I found online a list of two dozen words that the compiler said were similar, some of which were:
disarray
confusion
mayhem
bedlam
pandemonium
havoc
turmoil
tumult
commotion
upheaval
a maelstrom
a muddle
a mess
a shambles
an omnishambles
a madhouse
Isn’t that how the world can seem some days, especially the hard days? It can look like any one of those disappointing things. Sometimes it seems like more than one at the same time.
On what we thought would be a normal day, then, it feels chaotic when everything implodes on the project at work, or someone you love snubs you, or when the medical test is darker and more worrisome than you hoped, or when you agonize over a child.
Sometimes we read the news and catches glimpses of chaos in the wider world: Gaza and Israel, Ukraine and Russia, Washington, D.C. and Lewiston, Maine. You think of children growing up in war-torn lands, if they grow up at all.
On 9-11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks in the United States, that evening, on my way back from the church where I worked at the time, I listened to a public radio program. And the host spoke of that “off-balance feeling” you have when something hard has shaken you. When the world seems not only more fragile, but also changed forever.
That off-balance feeling is a natural response to chaos.
I was in a bookstore recently and was struck by a couple of books there. Generation Dread was one title wiith a gripping subtitle: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety. Another book on the new releases table: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.
“Well before COVID-19 swept the globe,” Astra Taylor wrote in the second book, “compounding suffering and leaving greater instability in its wake, insecurity was everywhere. Millions of people had only precarious access to housing, health, food, and employment. Changing weather patterns increased the risk of fires and flooding, destabilizing communities and ecosystems, and triggering ecological tipping points.”
She listed other challenges, including the vulnerability of our online work to hackers, or the disintegration and division in our communities, our homes and relationships. To say nothing of insecurity about “our very selves—about our appearance, our intelligence, our age, our health.”
If it’s not chaos yet, it’s at least chaotic. Why else would, according to a 2022 Gallup survey focused on the emotional lives of 150,000 people in over 140 countries, a record number of folks report heightened “anger, stress, sadness, physical pain and worry?”
We feel a dull ache, pulled into the news feeds, doing what someone called doomscrolling. We don’t quite know how to respond or how to pray.
But we do want steadying for that off-balance feeling, help for facing our own chaos. And not a facile, surfacy promise that everything will just somehow work out. Not a too-quick, too glib statement that “everything happens for a reason.”
That doesn’t cut it.
And we need something deeper than we get from circumstances alone, especially because we can’t control much. Not really, not for all we try. A lot happens without us, and we not only feel off-balance, we feel powerless. Maybe deflated or even defeated.
I write on a Sunday known in some churches as Christ the King, or the Reign of Christ Sunday. It is a day to recall how God’s got all this, somehow, some way. A liturgical reminder that as we move toward the first Sunday of the season of Advent, Christ is not flummoxed. God’s reign in and through Christ gives us a picture of some ultimate settling of the topsy-turvy. Some settling possible in our hearts. Some reorienting for that off-balance feeling.
I think of Julian of Norwich’s oft-quoted line, “All shall be well. … All manner of thing shall be well.”
This was gritty in a way we might not realize. We get glimmers of the chaos around Julian when she speaks of her yearning for a world to come, writing in her Revelations of Divine Love, “I had a great longing and desire as a gift from God to be released from this world and from this life; for I often considered the misery that is here.” And misery there was! One historian called the Black Death the “most lethal disaster of recorded history.” And that’s just a piece of it: not only chaotic, but apocalyptic, with the turmoil of war, famine, and explosive church in-fighting.
It matters that the reassurance God gave Julian began with a crucifix placed before her eyes when she seemed mortally ill. Her visions take place after she not only suffered but she also glimpsed Christ and his crown of thorns. The hope she felt amid the chaos around her grew out of her awareness of the pains of Christ. In Jesus’s life and death, she knew, we see not only the intimacy that Jesus enjoyed in his earthly communion with his heavenly Father, not only his kingly authority, but also God’s seeming abandonment of Jesus in his arduous path to crucifixion. This is a God who in God’s very self identified with our tumult and heartbreak.
And Julian of Norwich, serene Julian who said, “All shall be well,” knew that such divine caring could extend to our times of hurt and insecurity and loss. What could matter more? Or better help us amid any chaos?