The Slow Way: Advent and Peace

Real peace is an invisible and powerful presence that transcends sentimentality.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

“O peace, bless this mad place:

Silence, love this growth.”

- Thomas Merton, from “Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing”

For the second year in a row, I put lights on the porch outside my house. I braved the 26 degree Sunday afternoon after Thanksgiving, wore my fluffy ear muffs, and climbed a ladder. And I did it for me. My house will be winning zero awards for light decoration, but every evening, when dusk starts sneaking in at 4 pm, I slip outside to plug in my candy cane colored extension cord. And, I’m telling you, it brings me more joy than I can say to see those lights snaking up the banister to my front porch, twining around the rail. I can’t believe I spent years of my adulthood not hanging lights.

There are many reasons why I never put up lights until last year, but I can sum it up with this: I was waiting for someone (read: my husband) to do it for me. I was assuming that what I needed was a complicated climb on the roof to hang lights with a nail and hammer, which I didn’t trust myself to do. But, the truth is, all I really needed was a string of lights and porch rail (and maybe some tape). I was passive about this thing I wanted, when all along I was completely capable of doing it myself.

It’s the second week of Advent, the week we are invited to focus on peace. And as I’ve wondered about peace this week, I’ve come back to this simple idea about my porch lights: I wanted lights, but it took my choosing to participate actively in the work of hanging those lights to find the delight I had imagined. I think peace is like that, always active, rarely passive.

I wrote an entire chapter in Blessed Are The Rest of Us about peacemaking, living as servants of peace, and still I’ve spent this week attempting to define peace in my own mind, asking myself how to articulate an idea that feels bigger than the words we use to talk about peace. We all know that peace is more than the absence of violence. It’s not simply a passive notion, an avoidance. Peace is always the presence of something: goodness in the space between us. And if that’s the case, then our Advent invitation is to pursue the arrival of that good presence. To wake ourselves up to our belief that Christ in his coming creates more goodness, an active rightness that is available to our relationships with others and with ourselves.

Honoring Advent during this season leading up to Christmas is a way of rejecting the culture of sentimentality and consumerism that rules this time of year. Advent leads us to something truer than traditions and surface level chatter about goodwill. We are quick to talk and sing about silent nights, about a migrant couple mistreated on the road searching for a place to give birth. But we are slow to see the migrant couple just down the road from us, in need of safety right here and now. We are quick to imagine the “heavenly peace” of a divine baby, but slow to do the hard work of making peace for the babies in worn-torn places. We love to think of Christmas as bringing spiritual life to the world, but are slow to imagine how God longs to inject divine life into the places of real human suffering all around us. And isn’t the suffering of the world a direct result of the absence of peace?

Real peace is an invisible and powerful presence that transcends sentimentality. That’s the invitation of this second week of Advent: To move beyond the saccharine sweetness of the Christmas season, and allow ourselves to ask what peace might actually require in our relationships, in ourselves, and in this violent world.

In Jeremiah 6, the prophet speaks of God’s wrath against Jerusalem, insisting that the people of Zion must flee coming violence. This is a warning to them, that judgment is on its way. I’m not one to sit in the prophetic wrath passages for long. I have too many questions and not enough answers. But this passage—despite my discomfort with language of judgment and wrath—holds wisdom that has stayed with me since I first read it.

The voice of God points out “the wound of my people,” and places judgment on the priests and prophets, who God says have been careless in the treatment of the people’s gaping wound. The leaders and guides are saying, “‘Peace, peace,’ / when there is no peace.”

Sometimes that’s what we’re doing in the holiday season. Dressing up the violence between us, the violence within our community and within ourselves, and saying: “Look! Here is peace!” But, in reality, we are still lacking the peace we’ve been waiting for. To quote our girl Taylor Swift: “Bandaids don’t fix bullet holes.” Did she know she was harkening back to Jeremiah? Peace is not the surface treatment of a gaping wound. Peace requires cleaning the wound, stitching it, and allowing time and regeneration to do its healing work.

If peace is the active, invisible work of goodness, then it is something God is always creating. Something we can receive and then bring to one another. Something we plant and tend.

There’s another Old Testament prophet who speaks not of judgement but of redemption, of being released from captivity, healed from the gaping wound. In Isaiah 52, the people of Zion are told to wake up, to shake off the dust of their captivity, to remove the chains around their necks. And then the voice of God talks about peace, not as vain sentimentality, but as a word coming from the lips of a messenger, arriving on the mountains with news that transforms everything. Those who bring peace, real peace—these are the beautiful ones.

In his poem, “Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing,” Thomas Merton describes peace as something that can convey blessing. As if peace itself is a being. He’s thinking about the work of the natural world in the midst of winter. How even in the silence of the brown twigs, their appearance seemingly lifeless, there is invisible growth.

“O peace, bless this mad place:

Silence, love this growth.”

Peace can bless, silence can love, and growth can be invisible. This Advent, I’m reminding myself that there is invisible life in the darkness. And that invisible life is exactly why we can prepare our hearts for the coming of God. Like Merton wrote, peace blesses our madness. And it happens through Jesus, the multiplier of peace. The one who teaches us to do the hard work of making and serving peace, not glossing over, not sentimentalizing.

We, who find in Jesus our messenger of peace, the one on the mountain who brings good news, can look to the messenger to find our calling. We get to bring peace, to open our souls and our relationships up to the work of living in service of goodness and rightness, no longer satisfied with Baby Jesus sentimentality, and invited to join in the muscular work of blessing “this mad place” around us, believing that even in the silent darkness, peace is at work and we are part of it.

A Slow Practice

This week let’s spend some time meditating on Isaiah 52:7-10. As you read it, allow yourself to stop every two lines and listen to the presence of God. Is there an image that comes to mind as you read? Pay attention to what rises to the surface for you, and name it in prayer.

As you begin, pray this breath prayer:

Breathe in: Here I am

Breathe out: Bring good news

How delightful on the mountains

Are the feet of one who brings good news,

Who announces peace

And brings good news of happiness,

Who announces salvation,

And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”

Listen! Your watchmen raise their voices,

They shout joyfully together;

For they will see with their own eyes

When the Lord restores Zion.

Be cheerful, shout joyfully together,

You ruins of Jerusalem;

For the Lord has comforted His people,

He has redeemed Jerusalem.

The Lord has bared His holy arm

In the sight of all the nations,

So that all the ends of the earth may see

The salvation of our God.

Read through as many times as you need. Ask Holy Spirit to give you a word or phrase to take with you today. And when you’re done praying, write that word or phrase down somewhere so you can keep it close this week.

A Few Things:

• If you or your church are looking for poems to aid in your Advent or Christmas services, my series of Advent poems are available for churches to use. I simply ask that you give me credit and publish them with this copyright: © 2024 Micha Boyett. You can find them in previous Slow Way Letters: here, here, here, and here.

• If you prefer to listen to the poems, you can find them in these episodes of The Slow Way Podcast “Mary: A Girl In The Stars,” “How He Entered,” “A Story of Sacred Friendship,” and “Darkness.”

• As always, my book Blessed Are The Rest of Us is available wherever books are sold, but you can find at 40% off the price of other booksellers at BakerBookHouse. Just use the code SLOWWAY at checkout. (This deal ends in the new year! So get your copies while you can!)