“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you” (John 14:27). To enjoy the peace of Christ, then, we need to unlearn our worldly ways of thinking about peace. So often we think of peace as a kind of absence: the absence of conflict, the absence of responsibility, etc. Certainly there is something to be said for seeking the resolution of conflicts and freedom from onerous burdens in our pursuit of peace. However, the peace that Jesus offers is not fundamentally a matter of absence, but of presence.
Further explaining what his peace does and does not entail, Jesus says:
Behold, the hour is coming and has arrived when each of you will be scattered to his own home and you will leave me alone. But I am not alone, because the Father is with me. I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world (John 16:32-33).
There will be no absence of conflicts in the apostles’ future, much less of responsibilities. Strikingly, the only absence that Jesus foretells is the absence of the most basic of human consolations, his friends. His peace, however, is not contingent on any of these earthly factors. The peace of Christ consists most fundamentally in the presence of the Father, who is never without his Son or his Spirit.
Certainly there are many good things in the world that we can and ought to pursue. However, even were we to lack everything else, if we possess God himself, if we enjoy the indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our hearts, we possess all that we need to enjoy profound peace. This fact is the foundation of consecrated life: “The vows, detachment from all that is not God in order to give one’s self wholly and without half measure to Him, announce and demonstrate to the ‘world’ that God alone is sufficient, that His love and His service can fill a life and infuse it with joy” (J.M.R. Tillard, The Mystery of Religious Life, 18).
Throughout the history of the Church, men and women have sought out monasteries, i.e. places of solitude, precisely to live more deeply the truth that we are never alone. Of course this is not everyone’s vocation. Nevertheless, in these trying times we have all been called to a similar solitude. In the cloister of quarantine, Jesus is calling us to find profound peace in his presence, despite the absence of so many otherwise good things, and to live more deeply the truth that he is with us always, even to the end of the age (cf. Matthew 28:20).
✠
Photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. (used with permission)
