“In meditation we catch ourselves waging violence on parts of ourselves. This is the seedbed of War. All violence is the act of acting out our own violence toward our own heart.”
— Jim Finley

I’m doubling-up this week, to catch up with some Advent meditations for you. This one is about PEACE, typically our second week of Advent.

Every year during Advent, the juxtaposition of our human-created wars clashes with the Christmas message of “Peace on Earth, Good Will To All.”

There is the horror of Gaza….the cruelty of terrorists, the brutality of the Israeli government…
There is the war between Ukraine and Russia…
There is regime change in Syria…

And in the midst of these real-world events, we Christians foolishly light a Candle of Peace.

Peace is not only a theme of Christians and Christmas, it’s also a major theme of all three Abrahamic faiths. Last week, I was honored to be part of a tri-faith blessing —to stand alongside a dear Imam and Rabbi friend— as we each brought a blessing from our own traditions.

The occasion was the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our city, to its credit, took the occasions to declare its commitment to human rights.

On that day, I was reminded how all three faiths…Islam, Judaism, and Christianity…have peace as a core value. We all three proclaim “Peace Be Upon You.”

In Hebrew: “Shalom Aleichem.”
In Arabaic: “Salaam Alaikum.”

And in Christianity, one of the very first things the resurrected Jesus does in the Gospel of John is to say a form of “Peace Be Upon You” to his own trembling Disciples in that Upper Room.

Many scholars believe that although the Bible was written in Greek (“Eiríni”), that Jesus was likely saying “Shalom Aleichem” to these friends of his.

Of course, we don’t need to look far to realize that human religion itself often fails to embrace the full meaning of its own teachings on Peace. Too often, Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used their faith to Otherize and divide humanity against itself.

So, this gets me back to the Jim Finley quote at the beginning of this essay. Jim was a Disciple of the great Thomas Merton, perhaps our greatest American Christian Mystic. I’ve had the great honor of being on retreat with Jim before.

I find this quote to be one of the most spiritual challenging, and deeply true insights I’ve ever heard:

“In meditation we catch ourselves waging violence on parts of ourselves. This is the seedbed of War. All violence is the act of acting out our own violence toward our own heart.”

Maybe you’ve tried to meditated before…or praying quietly…and you just can’t get your mind to settle? Has this ever happened to you?

Of course it has…and the honest truth is: It happens to just about everybody. We can be shocked, when we first take the journey inward, how LOUD the various voices are inside our heads…how QUICKLY the distracted thoughts come….

Finley suggests that our-selves are at war with them-selves and we human beings do all sorts of things to avoid this inner conflict.

We self medicate with substances or with distractions. We “tune out” and dull ourselves with screens and externals. But! More lethally, we can turn the violence we feel in our hearts OUTWARD, manifesting in the horror of war; but also in the horrors of much other violence in our world.
As the modern expression goes, “Hurt people…hurt people…”

The LGBTQ community is filled with people who have tragically been at war with themselves. God made them perfect, just as they are, but too often they internalize messages of self-hate. And! Tragically, sometimes Queer folks who haven’t come to terms with their own identity can be some of the most harmful anti-gay “crusaders” in our culture!

Women often turn their own inner struggles INWARD in self harm. It seems commonly assumed that Men turn those struggles OUTWARD, and can become homicidal. But, they also turn it inward in suicide far too often.

Jim Findley is absolutely right…outer wars…conflicts in the world…have their genesis in INNER conflict within each human heart.

When the love-children of the 1960s sang, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me…” they were right. It has to begin with us…inside our souls.

But what I’m saying today is: Almost all of us undersell just how challenging that inward journey can be. It’s not all unicorns and rainbows. It’s hard, painful work.

As a pastor and activist committed to the hard work of peace, I feel I must hold in tension the desire for peace, and the continued truth of how much trauma there is out there in the world.

Hurt people really do “hurt people,” and there is a lot of accumulated suffering the culture.

Fore example, ever since the election, I think of the many shocks for poor people over the past few decades…so much trauma they are carrying….the mortgage crisis…the opioid crisis…the pandemic…inflation…
Is it any wonder they feel sense of despair?
That they might say “what the hell,” and vote for Trump?
Or, that they might be in such pain that they cheer Trump’s desire to CAUSE pain to others?
Or, that they might cheer the cruel assassination of a health care executive?

Or, as we look at Israel and Gaza, I will say again what I’ve said before: There are very few social groups carrying more generational trauma than Jews and Palestinians.

And for those cheering the regime change in Syria…please remember that our own American government traumatized the new rebel leader there…keeping him one of our prisons during the Iraq War. Let us pray that he has processed this trauma.

Again, I’m not seeking to get into a cultural debate about Trump, the poor, Gaza, or Syria. I’m suggesting that behind it all is sometimes generations of accumulated trauma.

So, is it hopeless…this search for peace?
No…it’s not…

But my goal today is to speak a hard truth that peace is a hard slog. True peacemaking takes a kind of spiritual self-awareness that is often in short supply in our world. It takes the ability to step back and realize the hole…the conflict…we all have in the middle of our hearts.

Songwriter Bob Franke once wrote of a moment of his own self-realization in his song, “For Real.”

“It’s lucky that my daughter got her mother’s nose
And just a little of her father’s eyes
And we’ve got just enough love that when the longing takes me
Well, it takes me by surprise
And I remember that longing from my highway days
Though I never could give it a name
It’s lucky I discovered in the nick of time
That the woman and child aren’t to blame
For the hole in the middle of a pretty good life
I only face it ’cause it’s here to stay
Not my father nor my mother nor my daughter nor my lover
Nor the highway made it go away…”

Our Whataboutism culture will always push us to look at the externals, or blame somebody else.

In the Christmas story, Zachariah —the Father of John the Baptist— offers a beautiful speech that perhaps can help us in this search for peace:

“Because of our God’s deep compassion,
the dawn from heaven will break upon us,
to give light to those who are sitting in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide us on the path of peace.”

Did you catch that?

The “path to peace” starts with God’s own COMPASSION toward humanity. Compassion means to “suffer-with” another. And our world needs both more compassion among peoples, even as we all need more self-compassion inside our own souls too.

The Christmas story is a story that makes manifest the depths of God’s compassion. God so loves the world that love in manifest in a child born to a young Mother, in a poor part of the third world.

God doesn’t manifest through Jesus in a palace, or a board room, or a gate community. God comes in the midst of stable cow dung, and bleating, babbling animals. Jesus and his family will be political refugees for his young life; once again intersecting powerfully with modern issues of our day.

This is what Zachariah mans by the light of heaven and illuminates the path to peace. Far from being a pristine path, the path to peace is illuminated by the kind of inner spiritual wisdom available through a deep embrace and understanding of God’s compassion.

When the angels sing “Peace on Earth, Good Will to All,” this the depth of what they mean.

And this is what WE mean, when we light a Candle of Peace during Advent.