Peace Recap

We missed the week before last, but thanks to our rockin' blog and Adam’s impressive electronic post-it skills, we got to see that you all spoke about being “beautifully angry”. The times in our life, like when we are beautifully angry, that we lack inner peace can be instructive and generative. We can use the feeling of “this isn’t right” to create, to find something new (like new expressions of faith), to help others, and to make our world a teensy bit better.

But what to do when “beautifully angry” just becomes…angry? This week we talked about how all of us have arrived to this point in our spiritual journeys because we have experienced internal turmoil at some point, telling us that something was not right, that we needed to push against the barriers holding us in. Pretty much all of us have gotten here because of a temporary, and necessary, lack of inner peace. Listening to that gut instinct has been helpful. The anger and the turmoil that led us here has been and will continue to be beneficial for all of us in different phases of life – but what happens when what is supposed to be a temporary state starts to settle in and become permanent? How do we locate the switch to turn OFF that inner anger and lack of peace, once it has helped us grow and evolve?

Our value as an agent of peace in the wider world starts with ourselves. We are the most genuine reflection of peacefulness when we are living it out within ourselves.

So, what are our strategies? Do we have any? Some of us (not Ron and I, ha!) are major planners. Do we have a plan to follow Jesus? What are the cluttered attics in our mind that we need to clean out in order to make room for peace? Do we have anything in our lives that we consistently work on to grow spiritually and achieve inner peace, or do we spend our time envying the spiritual lives of others or dreaming of a day when we, too, will get there – without actually “showing up for practice”?

We ended the discussion on Sunday by talking about some of the ways in which we've individually tried to create peaceful mindsets in our lives. We talked about fasting from things in your life that make you angry - the kind of things that are totally avoidable. Hide those intensely partisan folks from your Facebook news feed, don’t read the news (if anything stupendous happens like another 9/11 or Michael Jackson dying, trust me, you’ll find out), stop reading spiritual blogs that make you think too much of how others (or even yourself) are doing it wrong.

Whatever works for you – just fast from it for awhile.

Practice being someone who becomes beautifully angry, and not just angry. Peace isn’t something that’s natural in human beings, I think. It’s something that we work toward, not a goal we ever really achieve.