The Path to Peace

It proved to be a brief interval in my life. Three months and four days to be exact. It began like this: I arose at 5am on March 26,2009. Popping out of bed as if moved by a force beyond myself, I switched on every light in the room, peered toward the ceiling and began to speak to God. "God," I said, "let's just lay all of our cards on the table. I don't trust you! I never have trusted you! I WANT to trust you but I don't know how. If you would give me a step method, I would follow it to a "t". But, apparently step methods are not in your m. o. So, if you want me to trust you, then you are going to have to enable me to do it because I give up!"

Immediately the weight of 37 years of life lifted and I'm sure there must have been an audible voice that said, "Finally!" In those moments, I knew that I had spent my life forcing my way. I had tried to be obedient to God but somehow I believed that had to handle everything. The way that I had chosen to live had been the furthest thing from peace and yet in those early March moments peace was what I knew.

The months that followed would leave me utterly giddy. I wasn't doing, planning or charting any course necessarily. In the weeks that followed, people learned that I was leaving my job and their questions that normally would have either flustered me or for which I would have had a clear solution were posed: what are you going to do? where will you live? how will you survive?

My response? I don't know but God will take care of it. God will take care of it and I believed that so wholeheartedly that the only emotion common to my days was peace.

God did take care of it. From that March morning, two weeks later my home went on the market. I resigned a week after that. One month later I had two offers on my home neither to my liking. With a realtor freaking out over my rejection and adamant rejection, I waited. God would take care it. I left my job and three days later the house was under contract for the specific amount that I wanted. When we make a choice to trust God, he unfolds the way and peace ensues.

Peace is the stage of consciousness that follows on the heels of joy. Only one in 10 million people at any given time will experience true peace. True peace is lasting. Think of Mother Teresa or Ghandi. These both reached the stage of peace. It is a level of transcendence where any perspective on self fades to the past and one's thirst is but for God. Often, the people who reach this stage become ascetics. Some claim roles of spiritual teachers, others work quietly behind the scenes for the betterment of the world. The mind ceases to have the incessant need of conceptualization and rationalization. Everything simply is and the one who lives at peace is one with all things. Life is a flow.

Clearly my little interval with peace (which ceased by the way--I'm trying to reclaim it!) was not even a taste of what true peace is. That peace is experientially unfathomable to me and I imagine to most of us that is the case. Yet as we press forward in our lives, bent on making, forcing and crafting our ways, at the very least should this not be our goal? Shouldn't our objective be to so seek the divine will of God so purposefully that our individual selves fade to the background of our existence and God's being is channeled through the vessels of our souls? Imagine the mark that we each could make if we lived that way! I have to believe that God can take care of it, that God can bring us peace. Our job is to be willing to get ourselves out of the way enough to trust the uncertainty of God's path. May our paths lead us to peace! Amen.