Peace be with you.

Peace like a river; an evening paddling down, the river flat and black, chimney swifts swooping down in ashen shadow, clouds of insects wound tight into balls about eye level, the sound of rushing water. All of this a season–no, two seasons–ago. Floating with the current, the brookies and browns and smallmouths slipping beneath undercut banks, disappearing into dark pools to sleep, their shadows impossible to discern, their gills slowing to an ancient rhythm, in and out. Breathe in, breathe out.

Inner peace. The sharpness of a gunshot in the December twilight, sharp and lonesome is the report, the sound racing up the cove and bouncing off these old stone hills and racing back to share. It is a massive sound, close enough to wonder who is hunting so close to the house, but then I remember that we live in a national forest, that out here it might be a fellow stalking a deer, and it might be someone putting down something lame, and it might be just the neighbor shooting down mistletoe. We think of gunfire as anathema to peace, and for a few breaths my afternoon stops in its tracks, my ears perked up, but soon the sounds of the world around me relax, return, and all of that tension leaves.

Peace, a frail, rail-thin figure walking across smoldering ground. Something that doesn’t exist only in the absence of war. As Denise Levertov writes,

                                    But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.

 

Making peace: a pact, a handshake, a hug. One daughter looking at her mother, the other daughter collapsed on the sofa, weeping, wounded in a nerf gun battle, the round dot on her bare arm bright and raw. I’m sorry, the one says to the other, but it’s clear she’s saying it for her mother’s benefit. She knows the tears won’t last. She’s known since she saw her emerge from the womb.

Speaking the words of its making, beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.

Breathe. Peace.

Peace that fell upon Abraham, his knife raised above Isaac. Peace that fell upon Jonah in the belly of the great whale, and Joseph in his prison cell, and David, weeping in his arch, and Solomon with his name. That stilled Mary’s heart. That catapults millennia, the release of the suspended chord.

Some miracles took more faith than could be imagined. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her.

Solve and resolve, a pendulum stretching again and again for its center as it slips by, the natural human thirst for the certainty that God can hide in the most unusual places. A knowing.

Paddling down the river in the dark of a late summer night, even though you might tip over in a torrent of water and never pop out. The million even thoughs. You send the kids off to school, even though. You get in the car and drive away, even though. Jump, even though. Love, even though.

You make it past even though, the spidery awful thought that it always is, if you know.

The peace which transcends understanding, the blessed assurance that guards hearts and minds, the two keeps most vulnerable.

Close your eyes, scream if you must, then: breathe in. Breath out. Even if you’re over the waterfall, even if your stomach plunges, breathe in. Breathe out. What’s there, alone with you in the dark, wet with spray, you can name. It slips the grasp of chaos.

Breathe in.

Amen.