The Path to Peace

Chapter 3, Part 2 from the Art of Unlearning

This is the second half of the chapter on peace. Please read last week’s post first (You Want More? Then You Want Peace)  if you missed it, to put this chapter in context. It’s a long one for a blog post, but it reads better when it’s all together. I’m eager to get your thoughts on this one.

The Path to Peace

If you would experience rest, personal peace and that blessed settled conviction that all will be well even if all aspects of your life seem to be spinning out of control, I invite you to review nineteenth-century writer Henry Drummond’s magisterial essay Pax Vobiscum (“peace be with you”). Drummond lays out Christ’s “recipe” for rest and personal peace in a practical and insightful step-by-step journey.

In Drummond’s mind, gaining peace is like baking a cake: there are certain ingredients that need to be mixed together and put through a certain process. When you do that, a cake (peace) results.

1. The first thing to understand if you want to gain rest is that “restlessness has a cause.”[i] Makes sense, right? To have rest and peace, we must first remove restlessness. There’s a spiritual condition that results in restlessness, and a spiritual condition that results in restfulness. We have to attack the cause of restlessness if we want to enjoy true and lasting rest.

What makes us restless? The desperate pursuit of everything mentioned in the early part of this chapter. We have to unlearn restlessness if we want to learn restfulness. You won’t find restfulness and peace while pursuing things that naturally breed anxiety.