This is a short, simple entry that is intended to create a post and see how this connects with our web page.
Sunday, in the wonderful peace of Wasson’s Woods, we spent time meditating on peace. It seems like it would be useful to remember some of the insights that came out of scripture and our time together.
Peace, we said, is something we experience as a calmness, or a stillness within. It is, in part, the lack of violence, or to put it another way, what we experience when we reject the sin of violence, when we leave that out of our world. Violence, of course, can be nation against nation, faction against faction, person or persons against person or persons, and person against him or her self. All the violences, from the evil of war to denying our own personhood, are wrong and sinful.
But peace is more than the lack of violence. Peace is, as Archbishop Romero stated in one of our quotes, dynamic. When violence is gone, we have the ability to live fully, to live abundantly, to live into the wonderful reign of our God. In fact peace almost demands that we do so. If we reject violence (whether or not it exists, our rejection of it is important) then we must be working toward the vision of the reign of God.
Lastly, peace is not something we can achieve. It is something given to us by God. “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you,” Jesus said 2000 years ago. It is not that we don’t have peace, we do, but rather that there are things in ourselves that get in the way of peace. What is it in you that gets in the way of peace? Can you let that be washed away by God’s love?
-Pastor Julie