Sabbath Devotional :: Peace Comes to Brood and Sit

Here is a setting of Jesus’ promise to give peace. I love it just now because it doesn’t resolve dissonances in the ways we might expect, it lets us sit for a while in the difficulty of it.

This week, as horrors have unfolded in Israel and Gaza, I have been struck by how much the world pulls us to take sides, make statements, opine loudly. So many organizations have felt compelled to send me emails about their positions, or even explanations for why they do not yet have a position. This cacophony clangs against the cymbal crash of the news; the wars of words threaten to consume what is left of the world.

I’ve asked myself amidst the din how I can make peace, and what “peace” can possibly mean on the lips of someone as removed from the depths of pain as I am, by geography and privilege. I have no answers (of course). But I keep thinking of two of my favorite meditations on the work of peace. First, a poem by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who understood something about pain, and maybe about peace.

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

I love the apparent contradiction of the last lines — “comes with work to do” and “comes to brood and sit.” And that reminded me of a beautiful essay by a friend of mine, about the work of sitting. It reminds me that sometimes the work of peacemaking and peacebringing is to do nothing — to brood and sit.

‘We come over, and sit’

–by Aaron R. (https://bycommonconsent.com/2010/06/29/we-come-over-and-sit/)

I have a been a Bishop now for 18 months and though I don’t like to talk about it online I think that it is important to know if I am to express what I want to say in this post.

Last week the wife of one of my counsellors died. She had been sick for a very long time, and though she had deteriorated quickly in the weeks preceding her passing, it was still a shock to many in the ward.

I have gone through this experience before with another family but I still felt woefully inadequate to comfort and counsel a man, who was not only 45 years my senior, but who also has been a faithful member of the Church longer than I have been alive. I love him and his wife but there was nothing I could say that did not seem trite or insignificant when faced with such overwhelming pain. As I watched him shift between reminiscent laughter and deep sadness I could not patronize nor condescend to offer hollow words of advice. I felt what it is like to despise my youth.

Within the limited scope of my life-experience, few situations have been as painful as the spiritual vacuum that I have felt sitting with him. It is not so much that I felt deserted by God but rather that I had no right to speak about experiences I have never had and could not conceive.

Yet, infantile as it seems, a scene from ‘Lars and the Real Girl’ has offered me great consolation in such circumstances. After the tragic, fatal diagnosis of Lars’ plastic girlfriend some of the women come over and sit, because ‘that is what we do in hard times’. Despite my lack of spiritual insight and my narrow capacity with language, I have been able to visit and to listen. Though I realize that this may not be what people want or expect from a Bishop, I have felt that it is all I can offer under such circumstances.

I only hope that my being-there is enough, because I can always go over and sit.