So sometimes I will wake in the early mornings and the words won’t leave me alone. Back in early October, musing over the world events of that week, I wrote a piece, “This is a Time to Get on Our Knees.”
It ran this past week. Right after it ran, life went nuts at home, with multiple squabbles amongst my children that seemed to pop up like thunderstorms. The demand of my own words came to life and I found myself constantly churnning through prayers, “Holy Spirit help! Holy Spirit help!”
It kept happening until I found myself on my knees, exhausted by the squabbles I could neither stop or contain that persisted.
On Sunday, my Lenten service involved going to practice for Good Friday. My heart struggled to focus for the two hours we spent rehearsing. That evening I practiced my piano and everything came out in the notes. So did tears. I knew even as I struggled with the last ten measures of the first movement, that all of this was a prayer. It was the first time I made it through the whole first movement in its entirety, and I couldn’t share the victory because I’d have had to explain why my face was covered with tears.
One of my sons growled about the fights and wanted to in a sense, defend my honor and demand the squabbling parties resolve their differences. I told him no, because his father and I knew, we needed to just weather the storm.
“Love, all love is sacrificial.” I told him.
God hears those prayers and answers, and peace settled and the fights evaporated over the next day. The piano vigil for peace and the grace of tears brougth me deeper into Lent than I’d managed via the journey thus far. Like all wisdom that comes from scripture, from God, the words sound beautiful until they must be lived, and then, they’re both beautiful and damn hard.
Likewise, peace is both beautiful and hard. It will require sacrifice, surrender (of the demand for revenge), and struggle. People will have to decide to trust, and to be generous, and to work to earn trst with those injured by the war that has gone since October. Peace is worth the effort and the struggle, the risk and the hard reality. It is the beautiful fruit of cooperating with God’s will when the whole world tells you otherwise.
Peace, true peace, is a fruit of love, of loving one’s neighbor as one’s self, and viewing even those with whom one has serious diagreements, as one’s neighbor and worthy of love.
We can pray with everything, but it is also recognizing how to cooperate with grace that determines in part the fruit of those prayers. Knowing when to speak and when to just let your heart be pierced is a form of responding to grace.
It’s beautiful and hard and necessary. It’s why we need to be on our knees more.
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