Sabbath Devotional :: Peace on Earth, Good Will to Women . . . Part 2

Our MWEG Proclaim Peace podcast this year has focused, from two dozen different angles, on the concept of finding and making peace personally and globally. For the devotional last week and today, I’m going to present the collected wisdom from this year’s interviews on two questions. This week: how do you find peace? We have many different answers (some edited for brevity/clarity), and I invite you to add your own at the end.

What are one or two ways or places that you find peace? Personally, where do you find peace? What do you do? Where do you go?

1 Emma Addams: The easiest answer for me is at the piano, because I’m a musician and that’s where I feel the most home. I sit down at the piano, I get to engage in a creative process. It’s a very personal and spiritual endeavor for me. I think another place that I feel peace, which I never would have said even a couple years ago — at this moment in time, my family scripture study is a place of peace with my children. These things are kind of hard won, it is a peaceful point for me in my life right now because it hasn’t always been. We’ve had a decade plus where I felt like it was a little bit of a battle. And so the sweetness of the current state that my family is in, the sweetness of the willingness that my children are currently showing, is the contrast with a very long period of unwillingness. It’s short, and it’s beautiful, and we just started the Book of Mormon together as a family this week. My youngest is entering Young Men’s, and he got out his scriptures, and he put them by his bed, and he says there’s something about them — this is the first time he showed his own desire to do it, and it’s indescribable. It’s just the most wonderful feeling in the world.

2 Jennifer Finlayson-Fife: I look to do things that are good, because when I do good, it actually is a reminder that good is real. And there is good around us, because when it is you can become aware of the dark and the dark can feel consuming. The antidote to that is to do good, because you are an agent and can make the world better and can shape not just another’s experience, but your own experience. And I really look for beauty. I listen to classical music and [find] beauty in nature and beauty in other people. The good that I see clients do, courageous things, touches my soul. It helps me remember that courage and doing the right thing is so important. So it’s just both creating it and looking for it and holding onto it. And I I love my husband and being next to him gives me peace too.

3 Clair Canfield: I sometimes thought about how peaceful I feel when I’m alone in solitude and nature and also sometimes how peaceful I feel with other people — it seemed kind of contradictory. And I think what I came to, is that I feel peace when I have a place of communion, whether that communion is with myself or a higher power in my own solitude. Where I can explore what it means to truly connect in those ways with myself or with my higher power. And also when I can in deep ways, commune and connect with other people. Those are places where I’ve felt really deep levels of peace.

4 David Pulsipher: For me, peace is when I’m aligned, or our society is aligned, with the will and the heart and the mind and spirit and soul of God in one way or another. The most important thing in my personal practice has always been to find time and space where I can refocus and recenter myself, to reconnect and re-commune with God because like most people in the world, I’m just constantly being distracted from that. And it’s when I get away from that that the conflicts within me and the conflicts around me disturb me. But when I am centered, when I can find a place in my heart, and can take the time to really focus and meditate and direct all of my soul to have my heart drawn out to the Lord. That’s when peace returns, and until my next distraction, that’s where I find it. And I have never been disappointed. It is always there. And even though it keeps happening, I’m always surprised at how readily it is there when we turn to it.

5 Emily Taylor: So many things. I walk in my mountains. I love my dog. I spend time with my children. I meditate and imagine conversations with God. That probably most of all. I’ve recently increased in my capacity to imagine a true discussion with Heavenly Father, which is something the prophet talked about recently. Rather than praying to a concept, I feel like I’m praying to an actual being. Like some of the passages we talked about, when I receive pure truth, I know that my chance for peace is increased. So I want to be as close to those sources as possible. Even listening to beautiful music. I try to fill my life with as many [good things] — I have pictures all around this room of my loved ones, beautiful places and memories. I have good chocolate. Everything that I can do with my different senses, but the heart is to be connected to my true identity. And that I imagine someday returning to my Father and feeling comfortable with him. And I know that I can’t do that just by myself, but those are the sources of my greatest peace.

7 Eboo Patel: Is there an LDS practice of this [ritual prayer beads]? Do you have prayer beads? [I say]: Ya Allah, Ya Allah, Ya Allah, Ya Allah, that’s the name of God, or the Prophet Muhammad, Ya Muhammad, Ya Muhammad, Ya Muhammad. Sometimes I’m not even saying it consciously, but because it’s so ingrained in my being, I’ll just move my fingers and I know that something in my being is chanting that mantra. So that’s very peaceful. This is what I do regularly and all the time. But what I really try to do also is I try to take roughly half the summer off. And I try to get away a couple days every month, which doesn’t actually really happen. It probably happens once every quarter, like three days on my own with a limited agenda. Very, very useful. Long walks, occasionally binging Netflix, but just letting my brain and body decompress.

8 Michalyn Steele: I’m tremendously grateful for the ordinance of the sacrament and for the opportunity to be renewed and in covenant with the Lord each Sabbath, to leave there the things that have disturbed my peace, and hope to bear a song away. And I find peace in the scriptures and in prayer. And it’s peace that often passes understanding, not as the world gives. The world is not that capable of giving peace. In the world, you’ll have trouble, right? There is war and contention and ugliness and despair on every side, but I find peace in the power of an eternal perspective, and knowing that the Lord loves all people, that he has a plan for me and for each person, and that even though there is so much that is distressing, that like the principle of joy, you can find it even in the midst of trouble and turmoil. And that’s miraculous to me. I think it’s a spiritual gift from the Savior, which we can seek and He will give.

9 Annie Bentley Waddoups: I personally find peace often in a place where I can use myself, but know where I’m going. I think about what peace isn’t. So when I am restless, because I’m not sure what to do, the way I find peace or restore peace is coming back to who I am and what the meaning is. So ultimately the gospel of Jesus Christ, but in a very pragmatic way, it’s recalibrating where I am and where I’m going. I can find it anywhere as long as I have those things in mind.

10 Emile Kayitare: Right now, I’ll say I find peace from the work that I’m doing, especially when you are helping vulnerable people. There is joy that comes when you see the change and improvement and transformation in these families and their kids. So I think that joy that comes in me and I feel happy, so it brings peace. And I feel good that I have been able to do something good. So that’s what brings peace to me.

11 Becca Kearl: This is related to one of the key components of dialogue, if you boil it all the way down, it’s about time and intention. And so the times where I feel the most peace is where I have set aside time and I have some kind of intention, whether it’s being out in nature, whether it’s asking questions or contemplating things, whether it’s being with my family, that when I set aside time and have some kind of intention, I just, I feel at peace no matter what I’m doing.

12 Eva Witesman: Where I find peace personally is in prayer communion with my God through the spirit. So I find peace in communion with God through the spirit, but I make it by chasing storms of conflict.

13 Sarah Perkins: I think for me, one of both my greatest sources and my greatest evidences of hope and strength is my kids. I think there have been times in my life when I’ve been very afraid of people or when I’ve been very cynical about the trajectory of the world. In my PhD program, I studied 20th century literature around the book of Job. So that’s like the Holocaust and the lynching. It doesn’t get much more bleak than that. But then, shortly after starting my PhD program, I had this little baby. And then he started growing up and I had to teach him about the world and what the world is and what it looks like and what it will be. And I found myself telling him that most people are trying really hard to be good. Most people, almost anywhere you go, you can find helpers. You can find people really working hard to bring light and kindness and goodness into the world. And I think in that way, my child reflected back to me the hope that I actually already had, and that I had to have, because this one precious world is all that I have to give my kid. I think we betray our own hope in the faces of our kids. And as I’ve watched this little boy grow up, I’ve worked on writing the Book of Mormon storybook, which was really sort of a love song to him. I think I’ve become pretty convinced of the reality of a God who made a very good world and who loves that world and the people in it. And I really, really believe in heavenly parents who created men and women and who said that they are very good and who ask us, all of us, to find God in each other’s faces. And that’s work, and it’s not easy, and it’s long, and it’s exhausting, building Zion and peacemaking and trying to root out injustice without destroying the life of your neighbor. It’s very complicated, but it is holy, and it’s work that I am so grateful to be involved in and that I hope my boy will carry forward, too.

15 Thomas Griffith: When I do find peace, which is not always, I think it’s because there are two things that I believe. And I’ll try and capture it in two quotes that have been meaningful to me. The first one comes from C.S. Lewis. in his greatest sermon, The Weight of Glory, where towards the end of the sermon, he adds this phrase. It says: next to the blessed sacrament itself, next to the communion, next to the sacrament of the Lord’s suffering, next to that, our neighbor is the holiest object presented to our senses. But that’s where real holiness resides. And it resides in the emblems of our Lord’s suffering, and death and resurrection, but also in that person next to me. So when I can get myself in that state of mind, with that understanding, I’m more likely to feel peace. And then I’ll combine that with David Bentley Hart’s description of the Christians who put together the New Testament, as he was describing what was motivating them. Why were they doing what they were doing? Why did they write the things they write? Why did they do the things that they do? He said, they believe that history had been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing could stay as it was. All terms of human community and conduct had been altered at the deepest levels. I believe that God has acted in history and is now acting in history. I believe he acted in history through the life, death, resurrection, and ministry of Christ. And I believe he’s acting in history today through the restoration of the gospel. That gives me a sense of peace. It’s good news, right? That ultimately, Christ is going to win. As Elder Holland says, this is the church of happy endings. And I believe that. I believe in God, Heavenly Parents and a Savior who, in Elder Kearon’s words, are relentless in their pursuit of each of their children. And I don’t believe that they’ll be satisfied until each of their children has had a full opportunity to understand the nature of reality, freed from the effects of the fall and society and all the things that make us see through a glass darkly, that all of their children, once they see the true nature of things, will embrace it. I believe that. I’m an optimist in that way. When I meditate on those things and then try and act out those things, I do feel peace. I do feel alignment with God, and I feel alignment with my brothers and sisters around the world.

16 Julie Rose: It is actually once or twice a week when I am with the teenage girls in my congregation. I am a Young Women’s president, and if you had asked me three years ago if this would have been a calling that would bring me peace, I would have looked at you as if you were sowing disinformation and intentionally trying to ruin my life. But if I think about peace as those moments when I feel like I am able to see myself and see others through the most Christ-like loving lens, being with the young people in my neighborhood, these young women, seeing the way that they care and love one another and the way they’re working so hard to be the very best that they can be, and I am just overwhelmed every time I encounter them with this sense of seeing them as these celestial daughters. And that is the place where if peace is being able to really feel and see the world and myself through the love of Jesus Christ, it’s in those moments.

17 Thomas McConkie: There’s relative peace, and there’s what I might call absolute peace, the peace that passeth understanding. At a relative level, I seek peace by getting out the tablet and putting on an episode of Bluey for my four-year-old so I can just take a breath and chill out. You know there’s relative peace and there are moments where if we’ve had a really hard day to turn on some K-drama on Netflix or whatever our guilty pleasure to just give ourselves some grace, and it’s okay. But if all we ever do is go for the superficial relative peace like I’m just trying to self-soothe, then that’s not long-term sustainable. I believe the soul really yearns for absolute peace. It cries out for it. And that peace is more than willing to receive us. I’ll offer a bit of a visual here that comes from a theologian, a writer, a scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. who was a Jesuit priest who lived halfway into the 20th century. But he had a really unique way of thinking about Christ. And as a scientist, he wanted to make sense of, who is Christ and what is this phenomenon? And he imagined it as the Omega Point. One of the names he gave Christ was Christ Omega. And we don’t hear that terminology in Latter-day Saint theology, but I find it quite lovely, this Christ Omega. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, but the Omega, it’s conceived as this energetic node, like a North Pole. And the energy is love itself. And that divine love is working on all of us right now, just like a magnet needle points north, Christ’s love is this omega point and it’s drawing on us. And when I pause, the one, two baby steps that are actually gigantic steps in some ways, it’s everything. But to notice that throughout the day we tend to really get in our heads, got a lot of energy, a lot of blood flow up here. And to take a pause it’s as if we’re taking an elevator two stories down and just really feeling our awareness and presence in the heart. And the heart, we can think of it almost like this antenna or this sensitive instrument that just immediately picks up this signal of Christ’s love, this energy, that’s this Omega point that’s exalting us and drawing us all up into him. If I let go of any thoughts about that, but really just feel that buoyancy, that exalting divine love working on me, even now, in the same way, if we’re bouncing around and holding a compass and trying to find our way to a trail or out of the woods, the compass needle can’t stay put. But if we just slow down for a moment and let that compass needle go, it just knows where north is. And I know in my heart that there’s just something so awesome that’s just working on me and all of us. And I have deep trust in that. I find absolute, boundless peace in that, knowing in my heart that that’s true.

18 David Pulsipher: I’ve been thinking about not just the peace that occurs in families and in small groups, but this kind of larger peace that occurs. I have found, and this should come as no surprise, that I find peace in Christ, I find peace in the Prince of Peace, and this week in particular as my heart has been drawn out and more towards Jesus Christ than maybe ever before. I have found peace, and not only within but I have experienced a sense of peace about the world, about the community, about the future. Christ brings hope and with that hope comes a very deep peace about the ultimate trajectory of our culture. of humanity, of where God is ultimately going to lead us as we allow him to. I have a great sense of peace about the future despite all of the challenges that we’re facing as a world, and it comes entirely through the Savior.

20 Elray Henriksen: I’ve been really blessed in the Community of Christ with a spiritual director that I connect with once a month. And we review the month and we look at how am I tending the holy within. And I think that this way of engaging also with scripture gives me peace. There are insights to scripture that can transform and cleanse the inner vessel in that sense. And so I tried to do that, centering, finding the quiet center within. And it’s either through meditation or or mindfulness especially, but prayer that is informed by scripture, and also informed by this inner pursuit of what that means to have peace within. And then to let that also transpire in my relationships with people, because I don’t think that inner peace is sufficient it has to participate in the transformation of the world, contribute to some level of improved relationship, or what we would refer to as just and healthy relationships between myself, between me and God, between me and others, and between me and creation.

23 Grant Madsen: This is the role of faith in my life. This is where the peace comes, and like the serenity prayer says: the one thing I can control is, to some extent, my own heart. And whether I choose to live in a place of resentment and anger, or whether I choose to live in a place of peace, where it’s not easy. Peace is incredibly hard to achieve, at least for me, on a personal level or a social level. And I believe even on the personal level, conflict can be productive. I’ll say it this way: I know a guy who would say to me all the time, when I pray, I am in truth, all else is dogma. And I think there is something in that, when you pray or when you search for connection to God, you can find peace.

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:7

There are as many answers as each one of us. Where do you go to find peace?

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Anita Cramer Wells is the faithful root senior director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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