“Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I was born as a post-war baby. I grew up in a world that was so different from the one I live in now. My father was a Minister of Religion, and I spent my childhood living in a row of small rural villages. The first two I remember were in the countryside and included land that once was needed for the Vicar's horse. It gave me plenty of room to wander and explore the beauty nature holds for us. I was too young to appreciate the implications of post-war poverty. However, as the years passed, I enjoyed the increasing wealth and technology that came with the 1960s and 1970s. Also, the social changes, that included questioning of religious faith and practice.
We live now in a society that has lost much of its religious/spiritual focus. Instead, as the philosopher, Otto Meredith suggests, "People search for peace in the external world because pleasures are in the external world". People certainly have a preoccupation with entertainment and social media. There is nothing wrong with that. However, focusing solely on the external world - and what others may think of us for example, or being irritated by the noise of the neighbour's TV or music - is not really helpful in the long run. The reason is that we are still left with our own inner stuff that has a habit of rising and occupying our thoughts especially during the middle of the night!
Certainly, a peaceful environment helps to cultivate a sense of peace, as William Wordsworth noted in the familiar words of his sonnet:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away.
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away.
Wordsworth was responding to the Industrial Age of 19th-century England. His concern was people were losing their connection with nature and reflects his view that people need to be in touch with nature if they wish to progress spiritually.
His words can easily apply to us as well. We, too, can soon lose our ability to see and treat creation with awe and wonder. It takes time and energy if we wish to spend time in nature. A simple love my wife and I have rediscovered is the joy of walking along our local beach or exploring the walking tracks beside our local streams, or on our neighbouring Mount Taranaki.
This wisdom is shared by most religious systems. Behavioural psychologists also tell us that learning to be happy and content with one's self is the best way towards dealing with the causes of stress in our life and will help us achieve a sense of psychological or spiritual calm.
St Teresa of Ávila (1515 – 1582) discovered something very similar. As a young woman, she entered a Religious Community and being of noble birth she initially enjoyed the comfort and social life appropriate to her station in life. However, in time she tired of that and in her book, The Interior Castle, she records her personal spiritual path and journey of faith. She describes how there are many kinds of peace and how often a sense of 'lack' accentuates the absence of peace whether it be food, or money or friends or entertainment. As long as we seek peace from outside ourselves we will always experience disappointment and dissatisfaction.
At present, I am using reading Megan Don's readable and inspiriting book "Meditations with Teresa of Avila". In her short reflections based on St Teresa's writing, Megan invites and guides us into ways we may learn to allow the whole of our being to experience and melt into the arms of the Eternal source of peace that already resides within us:
"Peace belongs to us as we belong to it: it is ours to eternally abide in".
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