We confront a world full of violence. It seems appropriate to think instead of Peace. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is a state of being, of harmony with oneself, one's environment, one's fellow sentient beings.
There are many prayers for peace. As my offering in this series, I have chosen to share a number of prayers for and about peace. I will offer a brief commentary on each as a possible starting point for meditation.
I ask that you take time to ponder each, to think how for each of us our words and our actions, our thoughts and our intentions, can contribute to more peace, or instead undercut the efforts of others.
As the Psalmist wrote (34:14): Depart from evil and do good; Seek peace and pursue it
The first few selections can all be found at World Prayers - Prayer Archive (Prayers from all traditions
From the Holy Qu'ran, 2:286 - Al B aqarah - The Cow:
Our Lord! Condemn us not if we forget and fall into error;
Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden
like that which Thou didst lay on those before us;
Our Lord! Lay not on us a burden greater
than we have the strength to bear.
Blot out our sins, and grant us forgiveness.
Have mercy on us.
Thou art our protector;
Help us against those who stand against Faith.
In all of the Abrahamic traditions, there is a strong sense that we need forgiveness, that by ourselves we cannot avoid error, harm to others, which is the point at which we undercut peace. We seek forgiveness for ourselves, although by itself that is insufficient, for as we know in each tradition there is also the strong sense that we must also forgive others. I start with this because unless we believe we can be forgiven we are not inclined to forgive others. Absent forgiveness there can be no peace.
From FDNY chaplain Fr. Mychal Judge, who died on 9/11:
Lord, take me where You want me to go;
Let me meet who You want me to meet;
Tell me what You want me to say; and
Keep me out of your way.
For many in roles of service to others, even those who do not believe in a personalized deity, there is a sense of a mission beyond ourselves. Fr. Mychal expresses this in the sense of following a call, of being willing to risk the encounter with others. Peace can only grow insofar as we risk going outside of ourselves. We must approach each such encounter with the humility that we seek a greater purpose, call it God if you want, and we must let go of our own egos and connect with something that is greater than ourselves. Only beyond our egos is peace possible.
Perhaps the most famous Christian formulation of this was by Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
St. Francis lived in the 13th Century. Some 17 centuries earlier the great Chinese sage Lao-Tse offered this:
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
Peace starts with each of us, within each of us. It is something we all seem to seek. As one raised in Judaism, I remember well the blessing from Numbers 6:24-26
The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.
We ask for peace from the Lord, we seek it from others, and yet it must begin within each of us.
And we cannot wish for peace only for us and ours. Our desire for peace must be universal. We see this in the ancient Vedas:
Loka Samastha Sukino Bhavantu.
Loka Samastha Sukino Bhavantu.
Loka Samastha Sukino Bhavantu.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti
May all the beings in all the worlds be happy.
May all the beings in all the worlds be happy.
May all the beings in all the worlds be happy.
Om Peace, Peace, Peace.
Those who have struggled with addictions, chemical and otherwise, have almost certainly had occasion to pray the Serenity Prayer, usually credited to the American religious figure Reinhold Niebuhr, himself not quite sure if he had ever encountered something similar. In the form he first presented it, it reads like this:
God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
We must understand that not all things are subject to our will, to our best efforts. Taking on everything, including those things not within one's power or ability, rarely leads to peace - one becomes frustrated at one's failure. Like some of the earlier prayers, this contains a note of humility.
HUMILITY or perhaps better written as humility - the word seems to reject bolding and CAPITALIZATION. It is a recognition of our individual limits. By myself I can do little, even as I must do all I can.
In recognition of my need for others, if I maintain humility as I reach out, as I seek their forgiveness by willingly offering my own, I help sow and nurture seeds of peace.
There are many wonderful quotes on peace, that if not directly prayers, certainly are relevant to this meditation. Let me offer a few found at The Quotations Page
Thich Nhat Hanh:
Every day we do things, we are things that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our life..., our way of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment, we are alive.
Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru:
Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, words that are always important:
If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Peace cannot occur as an action external to ourselves, it requires something within, a something that will enable us to reach out without fear. Thomas a Kempis put the order like this:
First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
I struggle with Peace. Perhaps that is why so often I offer the word as the final offering in what I post. I do so in recognition of my need for peace, my fervent desire for it, for myself and for others, and the simultaneous recognition of how often I fail, I say the unkind word, react in anger or in hurt - say, think and do that contrary to peace.
And yet I do not despair. I think of the words of our Declaration - the pursuit of happiness - and recognize that Peace is not a state, but a destination towards which we can constantly move further, within ourselves and in our actions with and towards others.
And I also think of my favorite tale from the Desert Fathers, those early monks in Egypt and Nitrea. It is this exchange (and Abba means father in Aramaic)
Abba, what do we do here in the desert?
We fall, we pick ourselves up, we fall, we pick ourselves up, we fall, we pick ourselves up.
It is a journey, one on which we will often fall, fail to meet our own standards of what is right. But as the Abba says, we do not get discouraged. We pick ourselves up and proceed onward . . .
Please allow me to end this meditation with poetic words I have so often offered. Allow me to provide context. The title of the poem from which they come is "Little Gidding" by Thomas Stearns Eliot, raised in the US, a graduate of Harvard, who spent his adult life working and writing in England. Little Gidding is well-known to those who know Anglican church history. Nicholas Ferrar has a connection to the place from which I write, Arlington VA. He was an early member of the Virginia Company from which the colony at Jamestown came, at one point serving as its deputy. After an episode of the plague which followed serious financial issues for his brother in particular Ferrar and his family retired earlier than they planned to a rural area, at Little Gidding. Ferrar was ordained to the diaconate, but understood he would never become a priest. He organized a conventual life, with regular rounds of prayer. As Eliot writes of the place in the poem, "You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid."
In the poem Eliot also invokes the words of Julian of Norwich, an anchoress (enclosed woman) who died in the 2nd decade of the 15th Century. Her most famous work is Revelations of Divine Love. In that work she has a vision of God that includes these words:
Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.
Perhaps this reminds you of the words of a later Englishman, William Blake, who wrote in "Augeries of Innocence"
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Methinks the imagery of Blake and Julian is connected, a deep understanding of our interconnectedness, of the smallness of the vastness and the vastness of even the tiniest part of the creation to which we are all connected. Perhaps that brings to mind the Buddhist concept of interbeing? In whatever form it takes, the understanding of this kind of connectedeness, however we arrive there, is a necessary building block of peace.
Eventually Julian's understanding deepens and she offers the thought from which Eliot draws:
Sin is behovable, but all shall be well
And now for the Eliot, from the end of Little Gidding. Eliot writes of a journey of exploration. For the purposes of this meditation, think of that as the pursuit of peace with which I began.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Peace.