Peace in the New Year

 

Peace in the New Year

December 31, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

I write these words on December 31, 2021. Tomorrow we flip the page in the calendar. The change of the year’s number is purely artificial. It has so significance in the natural world; yet we’re so used to our calendar, and the time when the year’s number changes is so traditionally the time when we both look back at the year that is ending and forward to the year about to begin that it feels right to do some of that here. 2021 was not an easy year. It was filled with problems, so many that I can’t possibly mention all of them in this piece. Here are some of them.

The COVID pandemic that began in 2020 still comes at us in waves, often with a new variant of the virus that the scientists haven’t had time fully to analyze. Millions of morons still refuse to be vaccinated against that virus that has now killed over 800,000 people in this country. That’s more deaths than the country suffered in the Civil War, in which Americans were killing other Americans. Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. The best thing about that is that Donald Trump was not inaugurated for a second term as president. Yet Trump whipped up a mob and sent them to the Capitol to try to stop the Senate’s certification of Biden as president by force. He continues to claim that he really won the 2020 election, won it in a landslide even, and that somehow someone stole it from him, never mind that there isn’t a shred of evidence that that is true. Two-thirds of Republicans believe Trump’s lie. In 2021 it became clearer than ever that he has made the Republican Party an anti-democracy cult of personality.  American democracy is under attack in a new, frightening, and potentially successful way. Republicans in states they control are passing laws intended to reduce the number of votes cast by people of color, for majorities of those people do not tend to vote for Republicans. They are gerrymandering congressional districts to gain control of the House of Representatives though they represent only a small percentage of the American people. The Democrats have the trifecta in DC. On paper they control both houses of Congress and the White House. Yet a couple of Democrats in Name Only are preventing Biden from getting all of his legislative agenda adopted. Those DINOs are keeping the Senate from passing desperately needed voting reform that would, at least to some degree, thwart the Republicans’ effort to make voting undemocratic at the state level. They haven’t done it yet, but the conventional wisdom is that the US Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, which has been settled law for nearly fifty years. Things on the national level in this country are as depressing as hell. The one bright spot in 2021 (other than Biden’s inauguration) was the rapid availability of several COVID vaccines that the government made available without cost to the person receiving the vaccine.

Things weren’t great closer to home either. Washington state’s governor Jay Inslee has done a fine job of managing the state’s response to the COVID pandemic. Still, the pandemic continues in Washington state as it does elsewhere at least in part because so many intellectually limited people won’t get inoculated or even wear a mask in public. For me personally it is a very good thing that everyone in my family—wife, son, daughter, son-in-law, and all five of my grandchildren—have been vaccinated against the COVID virus. So have all of the people of the church my wife serves as pastor, but keeping a small church going when the people cannot gather together for worship and fellowship has put a strain on her that has affected her mood through much of the year, and not in a good way. I guess the good news is that neither of us has contracted COVID, but the pandemic definitely has restricted our activities outside our home. All in all 2021 has been a difficult year, and I haven’t even mentioned all the bad things about that I need to mention.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, and we are getting the obligatory New Year’s greetings and wishes for 2022, mostly from commercial outfits online. It is common for people to hope for peace in the year ahead. I too hope and pray for peace in year that dawns tomorrow. Yet the prospects for peace seem faint at best both internationally and domestically. Russia threatens to invade Ukraine. China threatens to invade Taiwan. In the US there is much talk about a coming civil war that may break out because Donald Trump’s fascistic followers won’t concede that they lose elections quite legitimately. There is a great deal of potential violence out there in the world.

Other difficulties abound as well. Climate change continues unabated because wealthy countries like ours refuse to foot the bill for doing something meaningful about it. We call ourselves the richest nation in the world, yet we continue to have an unconscionable number of unhoused people and still have no universal, tax funded health insurance system. We’re the only so-called advanced country that doesn’t. Our culture has succumbed to the siren song of military force, the only purpose of which is to inflict death and destruction on other people. We spend an unconscionable among of money on the military. We claim that our armed forces defend our freedom when in fact they do no such thing. We call everyone who is or who has been in the military a hero though few of them have ever done anything heroic. Peace out there in 2022? The prospects do not look good.

Most of us didn’t have much peace in 2021. We live with a lot of fear or at least with a lot of anxiety. The pandemic scares us. So do global warming and the prospect of domestic violence engendered by Trump turning the Republican Party into his cult of personality and the willingness of so many people to believe his lies. Many of us are anxious about our personal finances. We’re told the economy is in good shape; but you can’t live on the minimum wage, and so many employers offer no more than that. We worry about what’s happening to our children when they have to do school at home on a computer rather than in a classroom with an in person teacher.

We feel powerless. We can’t change any of these things ourselves, and our national political climate has become so reactionary that the politicians who might be able to solve some of them don’t even try to do it. After all, we might have to make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. Instead we keep cutting their taxes because those wealthy people have bought our politicians with campaign contributions and perhaps in other ways as well. None of these disasters is likely to change in 2022. Both world peace and inner spiritual peace seem to be well beyond our reach.

If we are to have any peace at all in 2022 we must begin by fostering peace in our own souls. But how do we do it? That’s where religious faith comes in. They book of Isaiah contains a fine statement of how we do it. We read these words that the prophet addresses to God:

 

Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace—

     in peace because they trust in you.

Trust in the Lord forever,

     for in the Lord God

you have an everlasting rock. Isaiah 26:3-4.

 

Wonderful, isn’t it? We find peace by trusting in God as our everlasting rock.

Yet we still have to ask how we go about gaining peace by trusting God. To answer that question I’ll start with the wisdom of the sages of all faith traditions. They know that peace in the world must begin with the inner peace of individual women and men. To me learning to trust God is the key to that inner peace. We can cling to God, trusting that our beliefs about God do not deceive us and that God will never fail us. That way lies inner peace. Any number of spiritual disciplines are helpful in creating that inner peace too. They can strengthen our trust in God. Prayer is of course the most foundational spiritual discipline. It is perfectly appropriate, even necessary, for us to pray for peace in our souls and in God’s world. Yet many people of faith in many different spiritual traditions have discovered that silence is a much more powerful kind of prayer than is talking. In silent prayer we can stop talking and start listening, listening for God’s still small voice of peace and reassurance. Give it a try. It takes practice to turn off the inner voice that is always chattering at us, often in destructive, judgmental ways rather than constructive, loving ones. With practice silent prayer grounds us in God and brings us inner peace.

Okay, but what about peace out in the world? As what I’ve already said suggests, peace in the world comes from the inner peace of the people. To gain that peace one essential step is that we must admit and accept the fact that there is much out in the world that we cannot control. We must learn what the saints know, that our call is to work for God’s realm, not to complete the journey there. We do the work though we know we will never see its completion, not in this life anyway. After all, this is ultimately God’s world not ours. Far too often Christians, maybe progressive Christians like me most of all, think we can transform the world on our own. Then we become cynical and lose faith when we discover that we can’t. The Buddhists know better than most Christians that the way of peace is the way of letting go. Not let go of the work of peace and justice, let go of commitment to the outcome of that work. Buddhist sages like Tich Nhat Hanh teach that it is precisely the inner transformation of individuals that will transform the world. Jesus taught the same thing. See, for example, the story of the exorcism of the demon named Legion at Mark 5:1-13, in which a possessed man gains inner peace when Jesus exorcises Rome and its legions out of him. Inner peace really is the way to peace in the world. We gain peace in our souls and foster peace in the world when we pray, meditate, and trust in God. All that may not seem to be enough, but it is. We think it isn’t because we haven’t yet given up commitment to the outcome of the work of God’s realm in the world.

So what will 2022 bring? There is no way to know, at least not in any detail. The signs don’t look good for deeper peace and broader justice in the world. All of those ills that I mentioned above will still be there. Yet we can still hope and pray that the omens are wrong. Then we can do whatever we can, trusting always in God’s help, to bring peace and justice to reality in the world while we give up being committed to seeing the ultimate outcome of that work. We will certainly face challenges in the year ahead. We may not know the specifics of those challenges, we just know that there will be some. Perhaps there will be many. We may be challenged, but we know how to cope with challenges—prayer, trust in God, and inner quieting. Those things will do more to bring peace to our souls and to the world than anything else we can do. With trust in God we’ll get through 2022 as we have now gotten through 2021. I wish you (and myself) success in finding peace in the year ahead. May it be so.