Episode 10 of the Make Saints podcast: “Peace”
Who doesn’t love peace?
Really. The idea of and desire for peace is so ubiquitous, normal, and altruistic that every pageant contestant can say “world peace” is their dream for the future to a standing ovation. Year in and year out. It is safe enough that they can all say it. It is normal enough that we can assume that we all want it. But in all of this it remains a dream. Something to hope for. Something that is never actually present.
In a sense, we’re all participating in a global pipe dream.
That’s one way to look at it.
Another is to speak of peace as something we all glimpse from time to time. Something that is very much achievable. To the point that we have a relative peace all the time. In this sense, we refer to the moment we’re in as “peacetime”. But such an idea is kind of perverse because it measures, not so much the presence of peace, but the absence of war. We’re really just marking time until the next war gets declared.
In this way, peace is normal. And boring. It’s water when you’d rather be drinking anything else.
Both of these visions of peace are dependent on a simple idea: that real peace as we dream it isn’t actually possible.
This, of course, is both technically wrong and nihilistic.
Peace is possible. We’re just measuring it like pessimists.
We’re acting like either peace is nearly impossible or scarce on the one hand or else it is constant and our everyday in the other. But these don’t jive with how we see the world. Or even how we think of peace in its other connotations.
We have other visions for peace than world peace. We also have inner peace.
In this version of peace, we are naming something important and active—something responsive to the pain and frustration we’re dealing with. When we’re feeling great anxiety, we long for peace to come over us—Now listen to how that metaphor functions. Peace becomes something tangible as it moves and touches your life.
In this vision of peace, we can see it as present rather than the mere absence of violence or pain.
This tension of absence vs. presence is essential to the ancient understanding of how peace works. And to explore that, we need to introduce a word that is older than peace.
Shalom
Shalom brings the bigger picture of peace into greater clarity. Because Shalom refers to a wholeness that comes from the absence of harm and the presence of wholeness. So it is the absence of violence and the presence of peace, absence of injustice and presence of justice, absence of illness and presence of health, absence of brokenness and the presence of wholeness.
Shalom helps us understand that peace cannot be present while injustice reins. We cannot speak of peace for us all while some of us are suffering.
This shows us why peace as absence is a dead end—and one that leads to death. Because with it, losing is always inevitable. This is ultimately the nihilistic impulse. We see no absence of suffering, conflict, injustice, even war. This seems to justify an inevitability of these things, and therefore, a rejection of their opposites.
This kind of pessimistic glass-half-empty view of the world is ultimately a self-fulfilling and self-justifying testimony to our destructive tendencies. It preloads the world with the precise conditions for these inevitable conclusions in which we feel quite justified in holding. In other words, we set up the game to ensure our victory, tell the world that we will win, and then do. How surprising.
There is another factor that we have yet to consider.
We are actors in our world.
We live and do things. And this activity effects outcomes.
So of course we’re actors. But something the absence/presence conversation fails to account for is precisely this. We can change the world.
One of the most fascinating aspects of our world is something like the observer effect. We can change our environment simply by observing it. This is crazy to think about abstractly, where the debates of absence and presence exist only in our minds. But scientists can observe a phenomenon. And then watch it utterly disappear.
This is something that happens frequently in social science. Researchers will observe a phenomenon, name it, and verify it through trials. Then they will publish their results and other researchers will replicate it. And then more will replicate it, but with diminishing returns. And on and on until that original phenomenon disappears.
Seeing a thing happen can change the chances of that same thing happening. It is bonkers to the rigid philosophy of certainty. But it is also utterly expected for those who see our work as building the opportunity for change to take place.
And this may be far more central to understanding what peace really is.
Peace isn’t merely presence vs. absence.
Peace is also Reactive vs. Proactive.
For us to fully embrace the idea that peace isn’t just the absence of war or the desensitized and normalized vision of the world in all its disappointing eventual discord, we need to embrace the notion that our part to play is actually central to the whole thing.
Classifying peace as something absent (and not conversely something present), we are seeing our role as fundamentally reactive. As in “it’s just us reacting to our environment”. This is disempowering and distorting and disturbing. And it ultimately is what passes for intellectual debate about the meaning of life, faith, and our purpose in creation. Just a few billion people living like lemmings for a few seconds in the grand scheme.
On the other is something completely different. We are proactive influencers of our environment. We change it by observing it and manipulating it. So we certainly can destroy it and hurt one another. But we can also heal it and love one another.
Peace from a proactive position is far more likely to be hopeful and just. It doesn’t rely on inevitability or justify those things we genuinely want to change.
In short, peace is something we can make.
And for followers of Jesus, this is what he offers as his vision of our work in the Beatitudes. So it is literally in our job description to be peacemakers.
Each of us and all of us. Together. Changing our world. Like magic.