Peace

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
-Virginia Woolf

On this 56th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the bombs continue to fall and cities like Mariupol’ keep getting reduced to rubble, it’s tempting to imagine peace by all the things it doesn’t include–all the things that need to stop so peace can prevail. Warfare. Violence. Waste. Enmity and hate. Lies. Aggression. Fear. Destruction.

Even apart from the wars and worries of the wider world–even as we consider personal peace–it seems like we look mostly for things to go away. We seek an end to worry and stress, an end to anxiety about what is unresolved in our hearts or unhealed in our relationships. We want the pain to go away, and if it doesn’t or can’t, we start to suspect that any peace is out of reach, or not for us.

In the text for this coming Sunday, the risen Jesus’ first words to his lonely closed-off, closed up disciples include the gift of peace. In my mind this is not a lead-from-the-front group bestowal, either. Jesus is not preaching or lecturing. He breathes on them, it says. I believe Jesus put himself up against each person in that locked room, and breathed his presence and his peace into their faces, into their lungs. It’s a tricky image in this COVID world, I know. Fraught, perhaps, but there you go. 

For Jesus, peace involves not absence but presence. Jesus’ resurrection gift of peace, of shalom’s fat fullness, is one that arrives into our lives as they are right now, not as we would like them to be or think they must be. This peace makes its own space in us and through us. From each of us it flows into others’ lives.

So breathe today, beloved. Take a lungful of this broken and blessed planet’s own breath, even as you pray and work for an end to the suffering that surrounds us. Breathe through a mask if you must; care for yourself and the people you meet. No matter what seems lacking in the life of the world or the state of your heart, receive the presence of peace that passes all human understanding. 

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.
-Jesus (John 14:27)