Peace

Dear Friends,

I was able to spend some time at Grace Point last week. It's a place of incredible beauty and peace. I left feeling recharged by my time there. On Sunday, I asked a question in our coffee hour conversation about peace and the places or experiences that fill us with peace.

As one might expect, places that brought us more into contact with nature featured frequently in the conversation. A hiking trail, a beautiful backyard, quiet centers for retreat, a home garden. The other prominent place of peace wasn't so much a place but an activity. Specifically, those who practiced contemplative prayer mentioned that practice as a way of finding peace. As the week has gone on, I've had other conversations about places of peace.

In our Wednesday group, Sarah Poole told a story of lying down on a road in the Badlands, where the stars were "right there, in front of your face." A friend from Florida talked about the way that good stories—books, movies, or TV shows—bring her a sense of peace. A few people mentioned that music, both playing it and hearing it, does that.

I tried to figure out what connected these ways of peace. And as I looked around it was the fact that they all teach us something about our own finitude, our limits, our mortality. We stare at the ocean or a mountain and know something of our ultimate insignificance. We read a story and are plunged into a world nothing like our own, created without any input from us. A symphony, with its harmonious diversity, shows us the way small, seemingly disconnected parts join to create something glorious.

It's all about God, of course, which is why prayer is also a peaceful place. God isn't just another being who happens to be a whole lot bigger than us. God is being itself. God is the ground of all our existence, all our breath, all our dreams, all our loves. "In him we live, and move, and have our being," the scriptures say. And to know God is to know both our ultimate belovedness and to know well our finitude, our limits, our mortality.

Which creates a bit of a puzzle. Everything about this time of pandemic, of economic uncertainty, of poisonous political tribalism, feels uncertain, feels so out of control, so beyond ourselves. And it is. This time has all the ingredients of peace, then—the need to know our limits, the sense that reality is bigger than our own existence. But I don't know anyone who would describe anything about this time as peaceful.

But that's because true peace comes when we open our hands, when we admit our lack of control, and when we trust the God who is in control. So if we spend every spare moment of every day being angry about the virus and the ways it's made us change our plans, judging people who aren't making the exact same decisions we are, deciding that scientists working to combat the virus are actually conspiring against us, or any of the other ways we attempt to reassert our control over the universe in this time, it is going to lead us away from peace. Those actions are nothing more than us flailing about, a tiny god trying to assert its will on the universe. Playing the tiny god trying to convince yourself that you are actually in charge will never make for peace.

But the path to peace isn't to give up, or not care, or give into hopeless despondency, either. Rather, it is to know that God holds us through it all. Even in the midst of fear and uncertainty, God is there. Even as the anger, fear, judgement, and hatred rage around us, God is love. Friends, find the place—in the world, in your home, in your heart—that teaches you that, and be willing to relearn it over and over again.

God bless,

Fr. Quinn+