THE PEACE WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN
Conference, October 13, 1998
Abbot Timothy Kelly, OSB
Some time back a visitor
showed me a picture of a hermit monk whose face and eyes had such a look
of peace that I began thinking about some past experiences of facial looks.
I suppose one of the memories I have is when I was in about fourth grade
and my public school teacher told me to "get that sneer off your face."
I was astounded because I didn't realize I had a sneer on my face. When
I went home I told my aunt about it. She was a teacher in the Minneapolis
public school system. "My teacher told me to get the sneer off my face,"
I told her. Her comeback was simple and direct: "You go back and tell that
teacher that that's your face!" How encouraging for a fourth grader!
Another memory came to mind
as well. It was of a face I saw in September 1986 in the town of Dharamsala
in northern India. When our group arrived in India we were told not to
get caught up in giving money to beggars because so many of them make a
career of begging and probably have more money than the tourists who fall
for their sad looks. One day I encountered a man sitting on the side of
the road, dressed in white and holding out his hand for an alms. I walked
on, giving him nothing. But I had looked at his face and especially at
his eyes. That look stayed with me the following days. Several days
later we were taken in a jeep-like vehicle to another place and on the
way passed by this same man at the roadside. Once again our eyes met, but
because we were in a moving vehicle I couldn't stop. I have never forgotten
those eyes, the look of absolute peace, interior peace.
The man was probably a Hindu
sannyasi, a person who has renounced all, a wandering ascetic. The
Hindu believe that to give an alms to such a one is to gain a blessing
for oneself. To this day I cannot forget those eyes and the peace that
surrounded this man. It is as if I just saw him a moment ago. It
seems to me that it is this peace that we look for, the peace we claim
as one of the mottoes and goals of our monastic life. It is the peace that
Jesus tells us is the gift the world cannot give, the peace he gives to
us. The Hindu sannyasi will discipline his life to the extreme in
order to achieve that peace, and when he does have it the world knows it
in his quiet peacefulness and yearns for the calm that those eyes reveal.
So what does this have to do with us and our Christian and monastic life?
Why do we not seem to experience
that same peace that we believe Jesus gives to us? Much of it has to do
with the way we live. We live on the outside of ourselves and on the outside
of each other. We measure our happiness by what happens to us from the
outside and get dejected when outside reality is not in our control. We
are at the mercy of other peoples’ choices and of events that we cannot
plan, only endure. And so we are not at peace.
To live and exist from the
inside is different. That which is stable and even predictable is Gods
love. We begin, quite literally, at Gods love, for we are by the loving
will of God. Coming to know our beginning is to come to know God and Gods
love. All we need for our existence is already there. It is when we forget
this, when we are unmindful of God, that our selfishness takes over and
we look outside for our meaning, our sustenance, our love.
Getting our own way
becomes crucial because we seek the fulfillment that we think will give
us meaning, and die in our disappointment that finally life does not yield
success. Because we think that realization can await our death bed, we
move on in our lusts, our greed, our intolerance, our hatred, our competitive
ambitions, and barely pay lip service to our declared faith in God. This
is a God who is far from us, but in reality is the God whose love even
now creates us.
We are not at peace because those
around us do not give us what we want, what we say we need. We get even
with them by exalting ourselves over them. We point out for the world to
see the deficiencies of those who do not acknowledge our superiority. We
set the stage and light the fire of multiple holocausts designed to exalt
self at the expense of others’ lives.
As we came forth by the creative
Word of God we were immediately invited to give thanks for the gift of
life and to dedicate our attentive praise to the One whose love is so immediate
and is everlasting. When we instead concentrate on our deficiencies then
we regret that we are not God ourselves and then dedicate ourselves to
becoming what we are not and can never be.
"Thanks for life," we say, "but
you could have done it better." This is when we choose to live on the outside
instead of from within. The Lord Jesus Christ lived from within whether
in the seclusion of the desert or mountain top, or in the busyness of the
temple courtyard or in the midst of 5,000 and more people on whom he had
pity. Yes, he fed their outside needs just as God liberated a people from
slavery and fed them manna in the desert and brought forth water from the
rock. But most of all he fed them with the living Word that comes forth
from the mouth of God, the same Word that created them and calls them to
a peace the world cannot give.
The immediate goal of Christian
and monastic life is to know the peace that comes from gratitude to God
for life, for the love that alone completes us, for the essential contemplation
of God always with us. There is a process of grace that leads one
to this inner peace and a great part of that process has to do with getting
to know oneself, not by the characteristics of temperament or even of ones
rootedness so much as it is getting to know oneself by perceiving ones
own essence as coming from God. When this happens it is a short journey
to getting to know others from with, for they too come forth in their essence
from God, from the same common source. One then knows all of creation from
within as having its source in God, though that which is human is also
in the image of God.
True intimacy is not the
result of knowing others from the outside, and we know others from the
inside only as we move to the inner core of who we ourselves are. Changes
make little difference because what we then see in ourselves and others
is the essence that comes forth from the Creator of who we and all others
are. Then the enemy and the friend are loved alike, must be loved alike,
because to do otherwise would be to reject the very source of our being,
a denial of the One in whose image we are made. The result is peace, a
peace which the world cannot give.
Reaching this goal
is not easy because it involves disciplining and bringing into subjection
the emotions and feelings and thoughts that keep us focused on the external
and changing at the cost of ignoring the internal and unchanging essence
of who we are at our core. The mystical traditions of the great religions
of this world tend to confirm this view as they teach us the value of self-discipline
for the sake of that enlightenment that provides the experience of the
unity of all of creation, of all that is.
Our Judaeo- Christian heritage draws us to our center where we discover
within what we have been taught from without: that we are made in the image
and likeness of God and that humanity in unity is the image of God in creation.
Because our focus has
been on the external and we have ignored the inner unity that is ours we
have through sin and selfishness lost it. The salvation from that death
is in the resurrection of Jesus who now by his Spirit-poured-out has touched
us from within and brought us in him to the unity that restores humanity
to the image and likeness of God which results in the genuine intimacy
and peace that can come only from inner living.
back to November - December main page