Searching for peace. This is not the first time, I am sure, that you have heard this phrase. We are all searching for peace: inner peace, world peace, peace with our past, and especially, peace with the things that we cannot change and must accept. One of the purposes of faith is to seek inner peace, a feeling of serenity and completeness that we all long for. Seeking this peace and trying out spiritual practices does not require being religious. There are diverse ways to be spiritual and to search for peace and hope. Personally, in times of turmoil, I have turned toward scriptures and hymns. They give me a sense of calm that I have not been able to find elsewhere.
In my second year at McGill, one weekend I went home and spent time with my high school friends. That night, I noticed as I had many times before that one particular friend was missing. I didn’t ask anyone or make a comment about it; it was just an observation. Later, I ran into my friend’s little sister. I asked her what her sister had been up to over the pervious couple of years and why didn’t I see her out on the usual scene. She told me that during her first year of university, my friend had taken up an interest in religion and spent more time connecting with it. She found that as she learned more and delved further into scriptures and prayers, she felt something that she had never felt before: an intense feeling of peace. During that time, she decided that she didn’t need some of the more frivolous, superficial things and activities that had made her happy before. She had now truly found something that she could find nowhere else.
I am not saying that we all must be like my friend, or like anyone else for that matter. And I’m certainly not saying that friendship and social time are not important or can’t nurture us spiritually. What I am saying is that we should all search for that spiritual connection that gives us what we are looking for, no matter what that may be, because spiritual peace really is possible to experience, and it is worth the effort of the search.
Originally published in the November 2001 (Vol. 2 issue 1) issue of Radix, "Searching for Peace."
