Prayer and Peace
June 27, 2011
“Our
hearts are restless,” Augustine tells us.
The restlessness at the heart of human life
is a spiritual condition marked by innate yearning for
“more.” We are not
satisfied; we are not whole; we are not
at home.
When Augustine adds, “until our hearts rest in You,” he
reminds us that God alone is our peace and that we will come to
know peace only to the extent that we can bring our human heart
and spirit to rest in God.
Augustine’s use of the foundational image of rest casts
light on our dispersed nature, the anxiety and desperation that
drives so much of human activity.
The desire for rest, for peace, speaks to the ultimate
direction of our inner strivings and yearnings.
Try as we might to find wholeness and satisfaction
“without”, the peace we seek reveals itself in our orientation
to a Mystery that transcends desires and demands for partial and
passing gratifications.
Our deepest desire for “home” is authentic.
It is spiritual, the deepest quest of the human heart.
But where is
that home?
And what does it mean in the fullest sense of the word to “be at
home”? The homes we
have already known are only pointers.
The loves we have already lived prefigure a greater love
and consonance.
Jesus says, “My peace
I give unto you.
Not as the world gives give I unto you.”
Accordingly, the completion of our desires occurs in a
realm beyond what the world provides.
This series of reflections has considered different
dimensions of peace: the transcendent peace that comes “from
above”; peace of mind, which has to do with our need for
stability and inner well-being; and our need for peaceful
relations with others.
In each case peace is not a final point that we can
attain; rather it is progressive, something we keep working
toward and that can grow.
Once on the path to peace, we will find that the need and
desire for it increases.
The gift of transcendent peace is infinitely capable of
expansion. Even in
Eternity it will continue to grow, just as the love of God,
according to Dante in his
Paradiso, is destined to grow forever.
Imagine a form of rest that is ever more restful and
peaceful!
Similarly, the desire for peace in our relationships with
others increases with our awareness of human fragility and
vulnerability.
Staying in relationship challenges our best intentions, our
compassion, and our hopes — all of which threatens us with the
loss of peace. The
hard work of relating is fraught with the possibility of loss
and regression, of falling back to a more isolated and lonely
state of life.
Nevertheless, these same risks and the efforts required for
relating to others deepen us day by day and put us in touch with
the irreducible desire we have to be united with others.
The painful experience of loss may turn out to be a
blessing if it further awakens us to just how deeply we crave
good relations with others.
We want peace and happiness for ourselves.
Whether we realize it or not, we also want to feel that
our beloved friends, relatives and acquaintances are also being
blessed with abiding peace regardless of the circumstances they
currently may find themselves in.
Our aspiration for peace on all levels is facilitated by
spiritual practice.
Thich Nhat Hanh, who has written extensively about human
progress in peace, emphasizes Buddhist teachings on the
interconnectedness of all life.
If all of life is interconnected, our striving for peace
will necessarily be inclusive of all creation — we are all in it
together. Practice
leads to presence, as in the following instruction in
Peace Is Every Step:
“Breathe, you are alive!”
Just breathing and smiling can make us happy, because
when we breathe consciously we recover ourselves and encounter
life in the present moment. (9)
Hanh comments that adding a smile to our
breathing “affirms our awareness and determination to live in
peace and joy”: A smile is a silent power that can “calm us
miraculously and return us to the peace we thought we had lost.”
(6, 7)
Spiritual practice thus affects our embodiment in the
world, the way we give and receive form in the everyday
circumstances of our lives.
Practice also ensures that we will keep our feet on the
ground even as our spirits strive to search out the mysterious
ways of God in human experience. In theistic faith traditions
the practice of prayer relates us to God’s Spirit, opens our
minds and hearts to the always-and-already-(t)here presence of
God. The believer’s
consciousness grows in the awareness that he or she is already
known by God, and thus is connected to the Lord.
As we read in Psalm 139 (“Domine, probasti”):
Lord, you have searched me and you know me;
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You yourself created my inmost parts ...
My body was not hidden from you,
while I was being made in secret
and woven in the depths of the earth. (verses
1, 12, 14)
Finally, there is the prayerful pleading
of verses 22 and 23, in which we discern the deep connection
between intimate interrelationship and the attainment of peace:
“Search me out, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my
restless thoughts. . . . Lead me in the way that is
everlasting.”
Prayers relating peace to the contingencies of everyday
life can be traced all the way back to the dawn of written
scriptures. The
following “Invocations” are drawn from
The
Upanishads, mankind’s
most ancient written spiritual documents:
May the Lord of day grant us peace.
May the Lord of night grant us peace.
May the Lord of sight grant us peace.
May the Lord of might grant us peace.
May the Lord of speech grant us peace.
May the Lord of space grant us peace.
These prayers reflect the concerns of
spiritual people in all cultures and eras of human history —
they express our irreducible yearning to be led “from the unreal
to the real, from darkness to light, and from death to
immortality.” (Eknath
Easwaran, God Makes the
Rivers to Flow, pp. 30-31)
Throughout history ordinary women and men as well as
exceptional witnesses have prayed and worked for peace.
In small but noteworthy ways they have contributed to
mankind’s dream of freedom and peaceful co-existence.
In the last century, after experiencing considerable
personal turmoil in his life as a Jesuit priest, scientist, and
spiritual thinker, Teilhard de Chardin placed his hope in God by
praying for a peaceful end to his productive but at times
conflict-ridden life.
With humility, he prayed that the process of diminishment
might be accepted as a grace and that death itself might be
received as an act of communion.
When the signs of age begin to mark my body
(and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is
to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born
within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly
awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all
at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and
am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown
forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God,
grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my
faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibres of
my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my
substance and bear me away within yourself.
(The Divine Milieu,
p. 57)
