Toward an Orientation-Disorientation-New orientation framework for pastoral care based on Walter Brueggemann's type index of the Psalms

The Psalms have been called the prayers and praise of the people. Through the centuries, the Psalms have given voice to the voiceless, prayers to the prayerless, and hope to the hopeless. Whereas the rest of the Bible is seen as the voice of God, the Psalms are the voices of the people with God. In his seminal work on the Psalms, Walter Brueggemann suggests three places or seasons found in the Psalms.¹ According to Brueggemann, the Psalms can be roughly grouped around three themes: poems of orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. He identifies certain movements in the Psalms that correlate with the lives of the faithful: the movement from Orientation to Disorientation and the movement from Disorientation to a New Orientation. This framework fits the realities of people's lived stories and how life stories repeatedly fit into these three seasons. Human life consists of satisfied seasons of well-being, angry seasons of hurt and death, and seasons of breakthroughs and joy. In this paper, I draw from Brueggemann’s pastoral reading of the Psalms to introduce a framework for pastoral care or, as I preferred, seelsorge, formulated as: “Toward an orientation-disorientation-new orientation framework in the practice of pastoral care, based on Walter Brueggemann’s type index of the Psalms.”