Advent Blog: Peace
“The Only Way Through Is Through”
Rev. Barbara Lea Callaghan
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth” Luke 3:4b-5
We often have fuzzy ideas about peace. Maybe we think of peace loving hippies, The Beatles, or a kumbaya notion of everyone just deciding to get along. Peace can seem like something we talk about but never really expect.
Christians can also be guilty of over spiritualizing peace. We try to will ourselves to feel peace, which often involves putting aside, or avoiding, the places of conflict in our hearts and in our lives. I call this a spiritual by-pass. We over spiritualize our way into trying to make things ok. But it can only last so long.
In particularly perfectionistic cultures we also try to fake it til we make it, lest anyone see that things aren’t actually so great for us. We can easily live as if peace is the absence of tension, or the absence of whatever we label as “negative.”
But, peace in our communities and even the world begins with cultivating peace in our own lives. We quite literally must be the change (thank you Gandhi). And we will not find peace by bypassing hard things and calling it faith. We can only find peace by facing what we need to face. We can only find peace by walking right through the middle of whatever it is. Cultivating peace in our lives is courageous work, and it calls us to have a healthy helping of grace and patience with ourselves as we do it.
Most certainly cultivating peace calls us to make room in our lives and our hearts to even begin to hear ourselves. This is all part of preparing the way. It’s all part of making the crooked paths straight. The quote from the prophet Isaiah that the Gospel of Luke uses in the scripture above doesn’t say, find the already developed road and take it. It doesn’t say use the most well worn path that others have made. It says you need to make the way, go right through the middle. You can’t avoid the crooked paths or the mountains and valleys. But as you go right through them they will be transformed, and so will you.
Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash