Peace, a reflection.
What is peace to you?
Is peace to be found in the absence of strife, in the absolution of torment, or even in the stability of one’s soul? Can peace, if it were a concept, a state, or an ideal awaiting realisation, be fulfilled in today’s world, in our world?
My question, deliberately broad, seeks to uncover the varying shades of meaning we attach to what is unequivocally a simple word.
When I think about peace, my mind invariably wanders not to specific incidences in the past, but to a poem encountered in my early years as a student. Edwin Brock’s dry and unaffected rendition of the atrocities sustained over the course of humanity in his poem ‘Five Ways to Kill a Man’ was particularly sombre. His emotionless tone contrasts starkly with his exploration on the ignobility of war and violence between mankind. From Golgotha to Hiroshima, Brock traces history’s arc with the sharp scalpel of a scribe and reveals, in the pauses and the breaks, man’s pursuit of an elusive peace.
This returns us to a traditional understanding of the word peace, as sculpted from the Latin pax, which means “a pact or settlement to deter or end hostilities.” We inadvertently bind ourselves when we measure and consider peace solely within this definition, as periods of non-war and non-violence.
I like to expand our understanding of the role of peace beyond the domains of history, military and politics. If peace is to be defined thoroughly, and not fleetingly pinned down through a worn set of examples, then it bodes well to reach for a wholesome meaning of the word. And I find the Hebrew word illuminating.
Peace is a word derived from the Hebraic word shalom, itself derived from a greater concept encompassing wholeness, completion, and perfection. Shalom then, broadly speaking, includes these four ideals:
1. “Perfect Well-Being”
The first shade expressed in the Hebraic term suggests that peace emanates outwards from the personal, the physical. That peace is centred in the health of one’s inner self checks our desire for external controls and outward handles.
2. “All Necessary Good”
Peace ensures that sustenance of all that is good. It is not blind to evil. It is surely not the freedom to exploit, terrorise, or rob others without fear of retaliation or interference.
3. “All Spiritual Prosperity”
This suggests that peace involves a life that is rich not just in the accumulation of things, but in thoughts and ideas that makes contact with the divine.
4. “Freedom from Fears and Agitating Passions and Moral Conflicts”
In the poem “Pax” by D H Lawrence, he manages to touch the ineffable notion of peace in concrete images, and is worth to reproducing in full:
PAX
All that matters is to be at one with the living God
To be a creature in the house of the God of Life.
Like a cat asleep on a chair
at peace, in peace
and at one with the master of the house, with the
mistress
at home, at home in the house of the living,
sleeping on the hearth, and yawning before the fire.
Sleeping on the hearth of the living world,
yawning at home before the fire of life
feeling the presence of the living God
like a great reassurance
a deep calm in the heart
a presence
as of a master sitting at the board
in his own and greater being,
in the house of life.
Peace to me then, bears resonance in a soul that is grounded and founded in the notion of love as the root of all good. Our contemplation of peace and its relevance in this day and age should incorporate, and be shaped, by a fuller understanding of its word.