How Do We Find Peace?

            Rosie and I spent the last week at the beach.  I officiated at the wedding of my nephew in a small town in North Carolina. We then went to the beach to find the peace that the shore offers in abundance.  I hunger for that peace.  We used to own a beach house on the ocean until a winter storm in 1993 took it away from us.  I remember sitting on the deck for hours watching the ocean and meditating.  It was glorious peace.  That is what we were looking for this time when we visited the shore.  

            I’m well aware that “peace” is a relative word.  Peace in the context of struggle is something that we all yearn for.  It is the strain of striving that makes our hearts yearn for peace.  But peace isn’t simply quiet and serenity.  It involves an inner calm that works even in the midst of whatever life presents to us.  

            Jesus speaks to his disciples about peace.  This is his last gift to them before he returns to his Father in heaven.  He says to them:  Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. And how does the world give peace?  Certainly the world does not give peace easily.  I think of all of the trouble spots in the world, Israel and the Palestinians, Syria and the rebels, even congress and the president or husbands and wives.  Peace isn’t easily accomplished.  What we always need is an inner calm in the presence of the turmoil that offers the possibility that lies beyond the political or the familial problems.   

            With the Boston Marathon bombing in our recent experience and the loss of the children and teachers at Newtown, we are well aware that peace isn’t easily achieved.  The congress seems immune to pressure to regulate guns, and we have no idea how it is that we will provide hope to the victims who cry out for some kind of redress.

            What Jesus’ disciples faced in their efforts to follow the Lord was endless difficulty.  The Romans and the Jews surrounded them.  They were always being pursued by those who wanted them to stop their preaching and adhere to the religion that had been theirs before the Christ came into their lives.  Maintaining the peace that Jesus provided for them was sometimes a very difficult task.   So it is for all of us. We also live in a world of contradictions.  It is a world that seems to be losing its faith rather than engaging in it.  Churches are not full anymore.  It takes a great deal to start a new parish.  Within denominations, there is constant struggle.  Certainly what we all went through in Pittsburgh is a validation of that.  When even Christianity itself seems to split apart, where is the peace?  How do we find it?  

            Jesus greatest gift to this world was his resurrection and the promise of the Holy Spirit to walk with us in this life.  That is the only source of peace that we will ever find.  It is what sustained Peter and the apostles through years of turmoil that ended in their deaths.  Even John on Patmos speaks of struggle and pain as he searched for peace in that lonely cave.  I know that he found it, and that we can all find it too, even with all that faces us in our lives.

            The beach was cold and sometimes rainy in the week that we spent there, yet there was a gentle peace that we found with each other and simply with the joy of being together.  That is something to celebrate, and it was a gift to bring home with us.