Understanding peace
Yes, we need to understand peace first before we can live it and, more importantly, spread it around. We need to know what it truly is, what it requires, where it comes from, how to sustain it, etc.
Nowadays, many people mouth the mantra of peace. That, in itself, is a good development, except that such passionate desire for peace should be accompanied by an earnest effort to know what it really is. There, unfortunately, are many misconceptions about it or at least shallow understanding that cannot cope with the challenges and trials of our day-to-day life.
Peace, like anything else that is of true value to mankind, can only come from God who gives it to us through Christ, the Son of God who became man to save us from our sin and our doom. Peace, which characterized the life of our first parents before the fall and thus they enjoyed it effortlessly, can only be attained by us now after some struggle, following Christ's example.
That is why it can only be had if we get it from Christ our Redeemer, who won it for us through the cross. He himself said so. "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." (Jn 14,27)
There, we have in a nutshell where to look for if we want true peace. It's not a peace that comes as a result of human effort alone. It has to come from Christ who actually gives it to us abundantly, but which we have to receive and keep faithfully. The problem is that we often mess it up, and follow our own version of peace.
In that famous Latin line about peace, "Opus iustitiae pax" (Peace is the work of justice), a major distortion is made because justice is understood mainly as human justice, relying simply on our legal and judicial systems, our culture and other social norms.
It's an understanding that does not go far and deep enough to reach its true source who is God as revealed to us in full by Christ. It simply depends on our human consensus which can go in any which way, depending on the changing circumstances.
And so with the foundation of peace and justice unclear or mainly rooted on shaky grounds, peace and justice remain elusive, and can even produce the opposite effects while pursued under their name. It's truly ironic!
Thus, in the psalms, we can read the following: "Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with you, which frames mischief by a law?" (94,20) Christ himself also warned us about this: "A time is coming when the one who kills you will think he is serving God." (Jn 16,2)
We need to be truly identified with Christ to have peace in ourselves and in everybody else all over the world. It is a peace that comes as a result of reconciliation. It therefore involves repentance, conversion, struggle, that Christ has shown to us by embracing the cross and dying on it.
The cross of Christ is all at once the summary of all our sins as well as the supreme act of love of Christ for us. It is both the tree of death and the tree of life. It's where all the malice of man meets the tremendous mercy of God. Christ is asking us to carry the cross also with him. Only then can we have true peace that comes from Christ.
This is the peace that cannot waver even under the severe assaults of trials, difficulties and failures. It is the peace that involves a certain abandonment of everything in our life in the hands of God, even as we do our part of dealing with them.
We have to learn to receive and keep this peace that Christ gives us. We might have to pause from time to time to make this truth of our faith sink deeply in our consciousness and be the guiding principle of our life.
This is the peace that leads us to joy. They actually go together - "gaudium cum pace," joy with peace, as one prayer in preparation for celebrating the Mass would put it.
But let's remember that the peace that we enjoy here on earth can only come as a result of some interior or spiritual warfare, the warfare of love, the real love versus the many forms of false love.
It is this peace that we have to spread around, convincing everyone of its true nature, source, resources, purpose, etc.
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