“Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!”
Jesus uttered these words in lamentation over Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago (Luke 19:42), but his words still apply to many of us “even today.” Sadly, many of us still don’t know the things that make for peace.
Thomas Merton, over the course of his life, came to know a great deal about those things, and he shared many of those insights with us in the books he wrote about the spiritual life. One of his key insights was that “we are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” He was right on target. True and lasting peace has both a horizontal dimension (peace with our fellow human beings) and a vertical dimension (peace with God).
Regarding the horizontal dimension of peace, Merton spoke of a “contagion of conflict” that can arise when we are not at peace with ourselves:
A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him.
Our inner turmoil tends to spill out into our relationships to the detriment of those relationships. And where does much of that inner turmoil come from? From not being at peace with God. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to be at peace with other people over the long term if we lack peace within ourselves, and we cannot be (and remain) truly at peace within ourselves if we aren’t at peace with God. At the most fundamental level, all of the “things that make for peace” flow from being at peace with God.
And how can we be at peace with God? St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans, “We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1). Baptism into the body of Christ brings us into the peace of God (Eph 2:13–18; Gal 3:26–28; 1 Pet 3:21), and the other sacraments help to sustain us in that peace or restore us to that peace, including the sacrament of reconciliation, in which God grants the penitent sinner “pardon and peace” through the ministry of the priest (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1449).
We dwell in the divine peace only by giving it away, by sharing the divine love and peace with others.
Along with the sacraments of the Catholic Church, prayer is also an essential component of keeping ourselves centered in the divine peace. Prayer, especially contemplative prayer, was one of the major themes of Thomas Merton’s writings. Merton described contemplation as finding the place deep within yourself where you are, here and now, being created by God and sustained in existence by God. Finding that place and returning to that place on a regular basis via contemplative prayer helps keep you connected to God, resting in his peace. It also connects you to all other human beings and, indeed, everything else in the cosmos, all of whom and all of which are also being sustained in existence by God from moment to moment.
Scripture refers to this state of resting in the peace of God at this center deep within ourselves as “abiding” with God (Ps 91:1–10; John 15:4), which literally means to dwell with God, to make our home with God. We’re all searching for home in this life, and resting in God in contemplative prayer can give us a foretaste of our ultimate home, the home for which each of us was created: our eternal home within the divine life of God.
But Scripture also tells us that “abiding” with God requires that we take action. We need to follow God’s commandments; we need to strive to love as God loves (John 15:4–17; 1 John 2:3–6, 2:28–29, 3:24, and 4:11–18). God’s commandments are not capricious; they are designed to guide us toward our intended destiny, toward our ultimate home in him. They are designed to teach us to love as he loves, so that we might share as fully as possible in God’s life, love, and peace.
That’s why the Bible, in multiple places, connects our keeping of God’s commandments with our experience of the divine peace. The psalmist promises us, “Great peace have those who love [God’s] law; nothing can make them stumble” (Ps 119:165). God, through the prophet Isaiah, admonishes his people: “O that you had listened to my commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river” (Isa 48:18). And St. Paul reminds us that there will be “glory and honor and peace for every one who does good” (Rom 2:10).
The sacraments of the Church and an active prayer life can help us stay rooted in the peace of God, providing us with a firm foundation of peace in our lives, a peace from within which we can then step out into a world that is often far from peaceful. Once we’ve found the peace of God, we can’t remain in that peace by clinging to it; we dwell in the divine peace only by giving it away, by sharing the divine love and peace with others.