We lit the peace candle for Advent a few nights ago.
My wife and I read aloud from our little Episcopal book, standing before our Advent candles, using solemn voices. The dogs were seated around our feet, trying to interpret our human words, listening closely for words like: “Ham.”
The peace candle is important. Namely, because peace is elusive. A lot of people don’t even know what peace is. I’m not sure I do.
Foster homes are full of kids who have never known peace a moment in their lives. Prisons are overrun with the unpeaceful.
Addiction rehabs shelter souls desperately seeking peace. ICUs are chock-full of people pleading for peace.
I wonder what the world would be like if we had more peace. What if stress and worry and fighting and bickering, which constantly run in the background, like an internet browser with too many tabs open, simply vanished?
Who would we be if we had total peace? How many more hours in the day would we have available? Would we finally quit interacting with our phones and start living?
FACT: Every day, an estimated 660,000 motorists text and drive. That ain’t peace.
What about culture? What would society be like during absolute peace? Or is such a thing even possible? Is world peace even a real thing?
Or is peace just a storybook idea, but not physical reality?
After all, our biological and ecological environment is anything but peaceful. Life itself is always moving. All the time. Planets orbit, spin, and rotate. Animals and plants struggle for survival. Living things procreate. They grow, they age, they buy real estate, then die.
Atoms vibrate. Cells divide. Bacteria multiply. That doesn’t sound very peaceful.
Then again, maybe I’ve got peace all wrong. Maybe peace isn’t stillness. Maybe peace isn’t even something we “do” at all. Maybe peace simply “is.”
Maybe peace on earth IS here, right now, and we humans are the only species who don’t put our phones down long enough to notice it.
Maybe all that is required to interact with peace is to reach out and connect with it. Sort of like WiFi, minus the complicated internet password, which must be at least 12 characters, contain one capital letter, one symbol, one number, and the blood of a sacrificial barnyard animal.
Heaven knows, you don’t see peace in our tech-bubble of society. Read the news; no peace. Open social media, read the comments; definitely not peaceful. Watch 24-hour news; no peace. DING! You have 1,239 unread texts.
Recently, my wife and I walked the Camino de Santiago. We had been on foot for 36 days, living out of backpacks, hoofing through the mountains of Galicia, Spain, when we encountered a band of shepherds.
The men were herding a massive flock of sheep several hundred miles. On foot. The shepherds were sweaty, filthy, covered in mud. They smelled almost as badly as their sheep.
We talked for a few minutes, while eating lunch in the pasture. The men passed around a flask of sweet wine. They offered me some. I took a swig and asked the men what made them choose to become shepherds.
“My father was shepherd,” replied one elderly man. “My grandfather was shepherd. Every man in my family is shepherd, since Roman times. Very hard work. Very peaceful life.”
“Peaceful?” I remarked.
“Si,” replied the older man, as he killed the flask. In a thick Galician tongue, he said, “My father always used to say: ‘La paz comienza donde termina la soberbia.’”
I asked what this meant.
The old man screwed the cap on the flask, then turned to face his herd. He smiled and said, “Look it up on your phone, Americano.”