Activating Peace

"May you become in practice all that you are in potential. May the love that informs every cell in your body permeate every thought in your mind."  

Thomas Ashley-Farrand 

I came across this quote this morning.  I find it encouraging, and I pray you will as well.  I am thinking that the idea of working for peace is off track.  There is only peace.  Everything else is a reaction. Therefore, the only way to "work for peace" is to become the peace that is inherent in all of life.  It really is more of a revealing than an achievement.  

   

This week Tyler and I watched the movie, "Gandhi".  Gandhi's story is large, much like India herself, and difficult to contain in a three hour movie.  I liked the movie and certainly Ben Kingsley's portrayal of Gandhi was masterful.  However, I believe that a weakness of the movie is that it did not highlight that at the heart of Gandhi's life was a complete surrender to the teachings in The Bhagavad Gita ( Sanskrit for The Song of the Lord).  He truly was able to renounce the trappings of the world and allowed the text to come alive in him.  "The Gita has been a mother to me ever since I became first acquainted with it in 1889...But you must approach Mother Gita in all reverence, if you would benefit by her ministrations."* 

I have always found strength in Jesus' words in John 14:27:  "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."  Both Jesus and Gandhi knew the world to be a pretty unreliable source of peace.  Peace is of God, and is God, and God is always offering peace to us no matter what is going on around us.  May we accept this gift, and then live it in the world.  Then, we, too, can turn from being reactionaries to "actionaries," ones who through our very lives bring peace.     

  

*Gandhi the Man, How one man changed himself to change the world, Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, 2011, p.127  

  

photograph:  San Leandro, April 2020