The place of peace

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ (John 20:26)

The morning news has nothing to commend, violence and unresolvable conflict wherever one turns, everything well-seasoned by long injustice and inevitable mistrust. If ever this ends, my lifetime won’t be long enough to see it.

The unsettled heart wants nothing more than peace, as if that were a small thing and not … everything.

And the mind knows what the heart doesn’t want to admit. There is no peace, even when there is justice. Opposition and the clamor of egos to get their way are ever there. It’s the nature of things, or better to say … it’s our nature. Stress and tension remain, inevitable elements of human existence.

We have lost the way or the key or whatever is needed to arrive at the place where the mind grows quiet and the heart rests, no longer insisting that the world serve us, catering to our whims and wills.

Of course, we never knew the way or held the key to the place of peace. For that place is a heart larger than our own.

Peace is a gift to be received, not a state we create. It is the wonder of love filling the temple of the heart’s inner room, leaving room for nothing else, so that we become, if even for a moment, the love who rushes in to fill the ache of human emptiness.

And this love, this Love, stands before those who failed and fled and denied him, breathing a single word, Peace. Peace be with you.

He gives what we cannot give ourselves, the peace that welcomes us whole regardless of the state of our lives. He offers a kind of knowing, love’s knowing, that washes over the heart and carries us into a heart that is immeasurably greater than we can know.

So do nothing. Just stand or sit or be wherever you are and hear this one word spoken to the world by the Wounded One to whom the world did everything possible to reject and kill.

He offers a single word that washes the soul and frees the heart to love and be the peace we so greatly need. Just listen … then listen again.

Peace.

Pr. David L. Miller