The Risks of Practicing Peace

The Risks of Practicing Peace

Deepening Our Understanding of Peace

I speak not for myself but for those without voice ... those who have fought for their rights ... their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.
-Malala Yousafzai

As we continue to deepen our understanding of what it means to practice peace, we realize that sometimes this practice will call us to move beyond our current level of comfort. When we seek to bring peace and healing to a conflicted relationship, this process will likely involve conversations that initially may be uncomfortable. Our attempts to bring peace and healing in our world by directly addressing instances of injustice and marginalization will require us to step outside our “comfort zones.”

In our Living Compass wellness programs, we teach that in order to grow, we need to risk moving out of our “comfort zone” and into our “growth zone.” We talk about how the growth zone is always outside of and beyond the comfort zone. That is why all growth is initially uncomfortable. As people of faith, God is always calling us to grow beyond the places where things are easy and comfortable. Choosing to stay safe, to ignore God’s call to grow, may give us a false notion of being at peace, but upon deeper reflection, we will eventually see that this peace is superficial; it is not the more profound expression of peace to which God calls us.

Malala Yousafzai, whose quote appears above, received the Nobel Peace Prize for the “struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” You and I do not need to aspire to such global recognition for our efforts to practice peace, but we do want to aspire to have the courage to practice peace even when it stretches us beyond our comfort zones.

Making it Personal: Can you think of a time when you risked moving out of your comfort zone and risked practicing peace in a situation or relationship that made you anxious? Is there a particular situation right now where God is calling you to grow in your capacity to practice peace?

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Check Out Our Advent Podcast

Throughout Advent the Living Compass podcast has two 5-minute episodes each week that expand on our theme of Practicing Peace. You can listen in any podcast app, or by clicking on the button below.

Peace Deeply Rooted in Faith

Peace Deeply Rooted in Faith

Deepening Our Understanding of Peace

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
-Thomas Merton

This time of year, Christmas tree lots appear in every city and town across our country. Millions (more than 35 million) of trees are cut and sold each year to adorn homes, churches, and offices.

A month from now, just as they are turning brown and losing their needles, all of these trees will be tossed to the curb. Cut down and no longer connected to their root systems, the trees cannot live, which seems an apt metaphor for deepening our understanding of practicing peace.

As Christians, our desire and efforts to practice peace need to be deeply rooted in our faith and our relationship with God. If our efforts to ­practice peace are cut off from this rootedness, they will most likely wither.

Thomas Merton makes this point in the quote above. The state of our peace with others and with ourselves will directly reflect the state of our peace with God. In order to strengthen and extend branches of peace to others, we first need to water and deepen the roots of our faith and our relationship with God. If we are struggling in our efforts to practice peace with others and with ourselves, we are wise to pause and reflect on the current state of our peace with God.

Making it Personal: What are your thoughts about the quote from Thomas Merton? Do you see a connection between your spiritual life and your capacity to practice peace? Does the metaphor of our spirituality being like the root system of a tree speak to you?

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Check Out Our Advent Podcast

Throughout Advent the Living Compass podcast has two 5-minute episodes each week that expand on our theme of Practicing Peace. You can listen in any podcast app, or by clicking on the button below.

Peace Is More Than the Absence of Conflict

Peace Is More Than the Absence of Conflict

Deepening Our Understanding of Peace

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives.
-John 14:27

For many, peace is often thought of as the absence of conflict. While there may be partial truth to this, it is a limited perspective. For example, when a pianist performs a beautiful piece of music, we wouldn’t say that what makes it beautiful is the absence of wrong or poorly played notes. We would know that what makes the performance beautiful is the presence of timing, phrasing, and the seemingly effortless playing of complex notes and chords.

The peace that Jesus offers to us and calls us to live into is not just the absence of conflict, but is the active and abundant presence of love, justice, reconciliation, and compassion. As a pastoral psychotherapist, I often work with couples who report that they feel distant and estranged from each other, while at the same time indicating that they never fight or disagree. They clearly are not satisfied with a peace that is really only a lack of conflict. They are seeking a deeper peace, one that is characterized by connection, love, and a willingness to be vulnerable with one another.

Jesus speaks of a deeper understanding of peace when he calls us not just to love people who love us, but also to love our enemies. It is important to note that he is not calling us only to have no conflict with our enemies, which we could do simply by distancing ourselves from them. Instead, he is calling us to actively practice and create a more profound, more authentic love and peace with the people in our lives we find the most challenging. As Laurie Brock wrote in Sunday’s reflection, “The peace of God is not the peace of humans.”

Making it Personal: What do you think of the idea that peace is more than the absence of conflict? What is your response to John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give as the world gives”? Do you ever feel challenged or uncomfortable with this deeper understanding of peace to which Christ calls us?

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Check Out Our Advent Podcast

Throughout Advent the Living Compass podcast has two 5-minute episodes each week that expand on our theme of Practicing Peace. You can listen in any podcast app, or by clicking on the button below.

Deepening Our Understanding of Peace

Deepening Our Understanding of Peace

Theme for Week One

The peace of Christ moves us into new places. This holy peace requires that we change and move, not stay stagnant.
-Laurie Brock

I’ve lived near rivers most of my life—the Mississippi, the Alabama, the Kentucky—and they continue to create remarkable places for me to explore on my days off. Waterfalls, wildlife preserves, and wetlands all hold a bounty of God’s beauty.

They also hold within them power for destruction. Too much rain, too many people building in floodplains, and too confident a belief we can control nature with levees and locks, and these same beautiful rivers become unhelpful and even destructive forces.

Which is why, on a Sunday I was on vacation, as I gathered to worship in a small church overlooking a meandering river, I questioned the hymn writer’s words as we sang, “I’ve got peace like a river in my soul.”

I’ve seen peaceful rivers. I’ve sat on riverbanks and watched the sun drop slowly into the waters of life and been awed into silent prayer. I’ve listened to water tap softly against a limestone palisade bank. I’ve marveled at the rampant, almost aggressive life that lives under its surface waters.
And I’ve seen rivers that churn and whip across boulders to carve out grand canyons. I’ve touched the gooey water in swamps and watched bugs scamper across their surface while gators guarded it all.

Rivers move and twist at their rate, carving out paths for millions of years in their changes and shifts. Their waters are red, muddy, and clear, sometimes all in the same river. They trickle and rage, meander and dominate, create, destroy, and recreate.

“Peace like a river” challenges my thinking about peace. I want peace to be an easy state, free of any discomfort and anxiety. And it is, at times.

But the peace of God is not the peace of humans. Too often human peace comes at the expense of silencing or ignoring disparate voices. We want calm and quietude without the work of shifting and changing our own souls. We want plowshares and pruning hooks without the labor that comes with beating our swords and spears, these tools of war, into instruments of nurture and peace. And we want someone else to do the work.

The peace of God is transformative. It changes us from those who would use oppressive power to a people who nurture and tend. The peace of Christ moves us into new places. This holy peace requires that we change and move, not stay stagnant.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the trust that God can transform conflict into reconciliation. Peace is not calm because the disparate voices are silenced, but the courage to stand within the waters of righteous anger, hear the wails of suffering, and work for change. Peace is crossing from the bank of oppression to the side of justice, and having the faith to walk in the shifting sands and strong current that would make us turn back, except that God call us to cross to the side of love … every single time.

Advent sits us in the holy darkness of peace and waiting and invites us to search our souls for how we experience peace. Do we settle for human peace that swords and spears inflict? Or are we as Christians willing to have this peace of God, this calm, meandering, raging, and daunting peace like a river, in our souls?

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Check Out Our Advent Podcast

Throughout Advent the Living Compass podcast has two 5-minute episodes each week that expand on our theme of Practicing Peace. You can listen in any podcast app, or by clicking on the button below.

Peace Like a River

Peace Like a River

The First Sunday of Advent

Reflection By The Rev. Laurie Brock

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
-Isaiah 2:4

I’ve lived near rivers most of my life—the Mississippi, the Alabama, the Kentucky—and they continue to create remarkable places for me to explore on my days off. Waterfalls, wildlife preserves, and wetlands all hold a bounty of God’s beauty.

They also hold within them power for destruction. Too much rain, too many people building in floodplains, and too confident a belief we can control nature with levees and locks, and these same beautiful rivers become unhelpful and even destructive forces.

Which is why, on a Sunday I was on vacation, as I gathered to worship in a small church overlooking a meandering river, I questioned the hymn writer’s words as we sang, “I’ve got peace like a river in my soul.”

I’ve seen peaceful rivers. I’ve sat on riverbanks and watched the sun drop slowly into the waters of life and been awed into silent prayer. I’ve listened to water tap softly against a limestone palisade bank. I’ve marveled at the rampant, almost aggressive life that lives under its surface waters.
And I’ve seen rivers that churn and whip across boulders to carve out grand canyons. I’ve touched the gooey water in swamps and watched bugs scamper across their surface while gators guarded it all.

Rivers move and twist at their rate, carving out paths for millions of years in their changes and shifts. Their waters are red, muddy, and clear, sometimes all in the same river. They trickle and rage, meander and dominate, create, destroy, and recreate.

“Peace like a river” challenges my thinking about peace. I want peace to be an easy state, free of any discomfort and anxiety. And it is, at times.

But the peace of God is not the peace of humans. Too often human peace comes at the expense of silencing or ignoring disparate voices. We want calm and quietude without the work of shifting and changing our own souls. We want plowshares and pruning hooks without the labor that comes with beating our swords and spears, these tools of war, into instruments of nurture and peace. And we want someone else to do the work.

The peace of God is transformative. It changes us from those who would use oppressive power to a people who nurture and tend. The peace of Christ moves us into new places. This holy peace requires that we change and move, not stay stagnant.

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the trust that God can transform conflict into reconciliation. Peace is not calm because the disparate voices are silenced, but the courage to stand within the waters of righteous anger, hear the wails of suffering, and work for change. Peace is crossing from the bank of oppression to the side of justice, and having the faith to walk in the shifting sands and strong current that would make us turn back, except that God call us to cross to the side of love … every single time.

Advent sits us in the holy darkness of peace and waiting and invites us to search our souls for how we experience peace. Do we settle for human peace that swords and spears inflict? Or are we as Christians willing to have this peace of God, this calm, meandering, raging, and daunting peace like a river, in our souls?

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Check Out Our Advent Podcast

Throughout Advent the Living Compass podcast has two 5-minute episodes each week that expand on our theme of Practicing Peace. You can listen in any podcast app, or by clicking on the button below.