Introspection: Seeking Peace

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Seeking Peace

Don't be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks.  Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7 (CEB)

I got a feeling I just can't shake
I got a feeling that just won't go away

You've gotta just keep on pushing
Keep on pushing
Push the sky away

From "Push the Sky Away" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

In years past, I would spend some time between Christmas and New Year's Eve looking back on where the past year had taken me and figuring out where I might be headed in the new year.  After the last couple of years, I am no longer inclined to spend much time looking back.  Once again, I will stay up late tonight and watch the ball drop in Times Square, not to welcome a new year with hope but to bitterly make sure that the old year comes to an end.

For me, 2021 has been another year of disappointment, disease, dread, and death.  For a while, after the COVID-19 vaccine became widely available, it appeared as if life was returning to normal after a strange and difficult year.  Unfortunately, new variants of the virus have continued to emerge, and right now I'm concerned that the measures I've been taking to protect myself might not be very effective.  After losing my father last year, I lost both of my grandmothers this year, one of whom died from complications with COVID-19.

One thing I've realized in the past month is that I don't have very much peace in my life.

For me, peace is dependent on my circumstances.  If something in my life goes wrong, I will remain a nervous wreck until I believe everything is going to be alright.  Since things always seem to be going wrong, especially in the last couple of years, peace is in short supply in my life.  There are people in this world who seem to have an abiding peace, a peace that transcends their circumstances.  They don't seem to worry about anything, even when things go horribly wrong.  They simply trust God with everything that happens.

St. Paul, in his Letter to the Philippians, encourages his readers not to "be anxious about anything" but to instead "bring up all of [their] requests to God in [their] prayers and petitions" so that they may experience "the peace of God that exceeds all understanding."¹  I do not believe that Paul was just being glib when he wrote these words.  He wrote these words while he was in prison, unsure if his future held freedom or execution.²  Somehow, amid his bleak and uncertain circumstances, he had an abiding peace.

Paul is describing a kind of peace I do not currently have.  I know that there are people in this world who do have this kind of peace, so I believe that it does exist and that it must be available to me as well.  I think that, in the new year, I need to seek peace.  Right now, there are many things that are not to my liking and beyond my control, so my sense of peace must not be dependent on my circumstances.

Lately, I've started praying a certain prayer written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.  This prayer, which is often prayed in recovery communities, is commonly called the Serenity Prayer.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.³

The Serenity Prayer is all about accepting life as it comes and trusting God amid it all, which are two things I do not do well.  Brian Zahnd likes to say that "the primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want him to do but to be properly formed."⁴  I'm hoping that, if I keep praying the Serenity Prayer regularly, I will be formed into a person who accepts life on its own terms and trusts God with whatever happens.

I suspect that the abiding peace that some people enjoy, "the peace of God that exceeds all understanding" of which St. Paul speaks, might be a hard fraught kind of peace.  I suspect that the people who possess such peace have already been "through many dangers, toils, and snares"⁵ and have found God to be faithful.  In other words, they probably had to learn how to trust in God amid the difficulties of life.  To achieve true peace I will have to "accept hardship as a pathway to peace," as Niebuhr notes in his prayer, and I will have to be patient with myself as I learn to trust in God amid hardship.

Obviously, I hope that the new year will be better than the previous two, though I'm not feeling very hopeful at the moment.  Whatever lies ahead in 2022, may we all have the grace to accept what we cannot change, courage to change what we need to change, and wisdom to know which is which.


Notes:

1. Philippians 4:6-7 (CEB)
2. Philippians 1:19-26
3. Wikipedia: "Serenity Prayer"
4. Brian Zahnd.  "You Are What You Pray."  BrianZahnd.com, 05/27/2013.
5. From "Amazing Grace" by John Milton

The photograph of the water droplet is used courtesy of Pikrepo.com.