In most of my posts, I’ve certainly seemed a pessimist, targeting the great problems of our age: moral decay and profound illiteracy in particular. As I’ve presented matters, modern men have the moral sensibilities of either self-righteous twelve year-olds or perverse twelve year-olds. Not options which are particularly attractive. Reading skills have decayed to the point where even those with large vocabularies and the ability to parse complex grammatical structures can’t distinguish between given truths (of logic or of Biblical revelation) and the conclusions to complex speculative arguments. Few there are who understand even their own beliefs, or the history of their beliefs, well enough to put a complex text in context.
What are we to do? Are we to simply hunker down, admitting it’s likely that we’ll take another two generations or so to hit bottom and then we might not even rise again? Hunkering down would be difficult at best for the disorder of this world would invade any conceivable refuges available for larger numbers of human beings. External order would be likely to corrupt any internal order which might develop by efforts of family and friends, local community or church community.
But a Christian has no right to be truly pessimistic just as he has no right to be triumphalistic. The world is not evil just as man is not inherently and inevitably depraved. But the world cannot save itself in the sense of coming to a moral conclusion. Nor can we men save ourselves by achieving the immortality that most great thinkers and spiritual leaders have always sought, often wrongly seeing man as being immortal in and of himself.
We insist on interpreting our lives and God’s story as a whole in terms of ideas and images which were once plausible but have decayed into superstitions. And we modern Christians not only produce strange images in place of the empirical realities of God’s Creation, we also tend to follow the likes of C.S. Lewis in elevating magic over empirical investigation of God’s Creation. Such ways will prevent us from finding even hints of the true peace of Jesus Christ, He who created this world along with His Father and Their Spirit. The same Triune God who continues to create this world, an empirical world subject to investigation and contemplative wonder. Not an occult world.
This world of galaxies and rattlesnakes is being born, a birth not to be completed in its own time and under its own terms. Men also are being born under similar limitations, but we can also abort this birth by our own actions and our own failure to act.
Birth is a painful and violent process, though some births are certainly less so than others. It’s hard to see how peace can be secured in the midst of the conflicts caused by this birthing process. Some might be lucky enough to live during relatively calm periods, that is, periods when the earth has good climate conditions and few earthquakes, periods when the sons of men are at peace and are minding their local business.
Peace is hard to bring about, even hard to define. I speak not of the peace of a corpse — that is inertness. I speak not of the peace of human politics which often proves to be nothing but a truce while weapons are being developed and soldiers trained.
I speak of the dynamic peace of a true world or a true person. In my book, “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, I defined both worlds and persons in terms of three attributes: unity, coherence, and completeness. This is a limited and tentative definition for sure, providing at best some necessary but not sufficient conditions. And it should also be qualified, of course, to account for our creaturely nature. The qualification is simply that we can have such attributes though they seem divine, by pagan standards, simply because it is still God who brings us into existence, each and every instant, and it is still God who also carries out those secondary acts-of-being which shape us.
And we must come to peace with the world as God created. To be sure, we can only know the world by way of limited facts and human speculations. We should be at peace with our descent from apes if that is the empirical truth. It is God who guided the evolutionary descent towards humanity, from amoeba to worms to toads to shrews to monkeys to human beings.
From here, I’ll by-pass the theological and philosophical complexities and move on to speak of spiritual matters. Peace is to be had. A tentative and imperfect peace to be sure. But a true peace for all that. A true peace that is but a hint of the perfect peace to be enjoyed by those blessed souls who will be resurrected to live with the Lord Jesus Christ for time without end.
How is this imperfect peace to be achieved? Well, the bad news from the human perspective is that we can’t grab hold of it, only God can give it to us. The good news is that God seems to give a measure of this peace to all who seek it in good faith, though some of his greatest saints live in torment and spiritual dryness for long periods — Mother Teresa of Calcutta lived in such a state for nearly her entire adult life.
How do the rest of us go about seeking this imperfect peace? Easy enough — in principle. We prepare for a life with God. We worship Him faithfully, at least once a week as was the true point of the so-called Creation stories of Genesis. And we try to reach a state of humility and gratitude during our worship service, whether Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant or Jewish. We are reverent, silent during the holy moments in whatever worship service we attend.
We pray daily. We should pray both by a regular routine, perhaps starting the day with a simple, “Good morning, God,” followed by the Shema or the Lord’s Prayer. In the evening, a similar routine, with a short examination of conscience would be appropriate. We should also reserve some time, a few minutes a day and perhaps a longer session once a week, to simply sit quietly in the presence of God. There are various ways to achieve a quiet state though neither Christians nor Jews should be worrying about techniques to the extent of some of the followers of Oriental religions. This is not to deny the importance or utility of techniques. The Christian and — I believe — Jewish position is that techniques should be transparent. Techniques help us to quiet down but the point is to be open to God, to sit quietly.
Most would say that we are trying to listen to God. I have more of a Thomistic viewpoint: we do not listen to God so much as we learn to both speak and listen with Him. Most of all, we learn to think with Him, to live in His presence so that He has filled us up, ultimately to complete us but only at our resurrection.
For a sacramental Christian, Catholics and Orthodox and maybe some Protestants, there is more to say because the sacraments also play a role in bringing us into the Presence of God. When we eat the very Body of Christ and drink His Blood, we allow Him to infuse our very being with His Presence.
When we try to understand God’s world, we are trying to move with Him as He shapes and sustains that world. If we try to understand the original act of Creation of this world, we even try to create along with Him. This is in the same sense that a three year-old girl moves behind her mother and imitates the actions of making a cake. These childish acts seem to please God. Such acts make us more aware of God’s presence and teach us to have faith in God, the all-powerful God Who created this world, the all-powerful God who has promised to take care of His friends.
To the extent that we can see true peace in this world, we see it in the faithful way in which martyrs have accepted torture and death rather than betray their God. We can see it in a tormented woman like Mother Teresa as she devotes her entire life to caring for God’s children, helping them to feel a measure of the love and peace she herself couldn’t feel.
And this is what I speak about in the book I’m currently writing, actually re-writing from a draft completed nearly a year ago. That draft was as ‘philosophical’ and as dense as my one published book — “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, but I intend to write “The Peace of Christ” as a simpler book, a spiritual guide rather than an intellectual exploration.