PEACE

And you will find rest for your souls ...

Peace is coming. It’s real. Can you see it, off in the distance, shimmering and glittering in the afternoon sun?

Peace is circled in red a few months away in your calendar.

You know you want it, but you’re not quite sure how to attain it.

And how about the even-more-unreachable corporate peace: peace among families peace among coworkers peace among nations?

“World peace,” is the generic stock answer when someone wants to sound altruistic with their hopes and dreams for the future.

But what is peace, really? Is it possible? Is it probable? And why are we forced to endure hearing about it in one of the most hectic weeks of the year, a time when over-consumption and resulting overwork renders peace a far-off, unrealistic wish?

SERENITY NOW - ow - ow - ow - ow.

Louder this time.

SERENITY NOWWWWWWW!!!!!

<insert head exploding>

I had a long-awaited catch-up with a writer/mom friend of mine last week, and as always she inspired me and challenged me with the possibilities of our shared vocations, as we cobble together what’s often a non-traditional way of life and trying to make a living.

I told her about this work I’ve been doing on Substack, and she told me about her new website, with its offerings of yoga and writing and wellness classes. We cheer-sed about her new book, an extensive labor of love long in the creating and dreaming and depths of her soul, and she told me about the unexpected place where she’d connected with people around her work.

For the past few months, it turns out, she has been posting short videos online (she even recently ventured into TikTok) called Body Breaks. Her intention, she said, was just to disrupt our static monotony, to get us outside our mindlessly scrolling or comparison-hungry heads, and into our bodies. Take a break. Stand up. Stretch.

She said all sorts of unexpected people were responding to her body breaks. It turned out a lot of us needed to be told to take a break.

I think this idea, of peace forever receding into the distant horizon, is related to Zeno’s paradoxes, which is essentially the idea that all motion is an illusion and as you appear to get closer to something, it only moves further away, and the distance separating you is infinite.

Reasoning all that out in my mind makes my over-taxed brain hurt, which is kind of the opposite of peace, but suffice it to say that too often peace functions as a forever unattainable goal, as we promise ourselves we can have peace “if only” this one thing happens, or we accomplish some goal - and then as soon as we do so another goal or requirement takes its place.

But peace, especially the peace we celebrate in this second week of Advent, preparing for Christmas and Jesus’ birth, was never meant to be a goal.

Peace isn’t the result of hard work, much as it pains this Midwestern Protestant to admit. Peace instead is the result of knowing that sometimes it is OK to stop working. Because Peace is knowing internally that you are a beloved creation of God, and you are OK just as you are.

Peace, like justice, is not earned. Instead, it is a gift from God - and it’s up to us to find ways to enact God’s peace and justice in a world that says people only get what they deserve, something we know deep inside to be untrue and yet cling on to as though on a shoddy life raft in a choppy and stormy sea.

Peace is to allow yourself to let go of that frayed and disintegrating life raft of the flawed promise of the American Dream: the golden illusion of financial independence and hard work and success. Letting go is terrifying. As you do, though, I believe the roaring waves calm and part, and the sun shines upon the water.

As you let go and lean back, the now-calm and warm water buoys you up. To float and be carried is to be at peace, to rest your weary limbs and stop karate chopping and flailing, because only when you stop will the water lift you up.

A Few Notes …

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