In search of peace...

As I get older I ponder more, and a lot of the time my ponderings have been about peace.

Now I'm not thinking about peace as in the lack of war but rather peace as the ability to live in the ebbs and flows of time without being overcome. Its the discovery of that personal place somewhere between mindless and never ending involvement in the world and escapism. Its the ability to see things as they are and move through despair to the constant redemption of time and history that is the mandate of humans in a broken world. Compared to that the end of war is probably easy.

And I see very little true peace in the world. Some days it seems like the world is a very mad place where everyone seems to be grabbing for any sliver of whatever they think helps them get through the day. Would a person really at peace with themselves and their faith feel the need to kill someone else in its cause? How could a person with a settled heart trample over others in their pursuit of power? Does one with rest in their soul go from person to person, body to body, thing to thing to keep feeding the emptiness inside? There are people out there who'd sell their children for 15 minutes of air time, follow movie stars and pro wrestlers as if they really mattered, and know everything about their favorite team but never read a decent book. So some days a person with any bit of sanity might actually wish global warming was as catastrophic as the fear industry would like it to be just to stop the noise.

The older I get the less I trust organizations and structures to be instruments of authentic peace. Your company doesn't want you to be whole, they want you to feel the endless urge to do more, to get paid more, and climb their ladder. Governments are made up of people with selfish ambitions who spend endless energy trying to get others to enable them and a global government would just be about enabling a selfish bastard of global proportions and we already have enough of those. Academia often speaks of peace in broad strokes, the world of theory isolated from reality and often truth itself. Even the Church gets caught up in the cultural winds and neglects its core gifts to the emptiness of souls.

Nothing from the top down will bring the lasting peace we humans crave. Something has to change within and then life touches life like one candle touching another and change begins. There is no other way and to the extent we don't get that we'll continue to wander, empty and troubled, through the night.