Let us strive for peace and not simply preach it...

This past weekend at Holy Mass, a Deacon at Our Lady Immaculate Parish in Athol, Massachusetts preached on forgiveness and peace.  This is the same Deacon who disrupted the Rosary I was praying just prior to Christmas Mass.  The same Deacon who found it necessary to confront me with an insulting and sarcastic attitude in an attempt to humiliate me before others.

Peace?

Make no mistake about it, I have forgiven this Deacon.  But we must give more than lip service to peace.  We must strive with the help of God's grace to obtain peace in our own lives.  Such is the fruit of prayer.  Dr. Dietrich von Hildebrand explains that lack of peace separates us from other persons.  He writes that lack of peace, "..makes us unable to attend to other persons according to the will of God.  And so, inasmuch as it renders us egocentric, our lack of peace also causes us to offend against charity." (Transformation in Christ, p. 389). 

Dr. Hildebrand continues, "Meekness is but the actualization of this inner harmony on the plane of our relationships with others: the shaping of all our reference to, and treatment of, our fellow men by the principle of a spontaneous, unhampered, overflowing charity.  This dependence of meekness on patience and true peace makes it doubly evident that true meekness is unattainable for anyone who does not live through and in Christ." (p. 419).  "Meekness,' explains this great philosopher, "..bears mainly on our behavior towards our fellow men.  It is specifically opposed to two sets of qualities: first, to everything brutal, uncouth, coarse-grained, and violent; secondly, to all modes of hostility, to the subtly or pointedly venomous as well as to the massive or rabid form of hostility.." (p. 401).

Meekness does not, of course, mean the passive toleration of all wrongs as Dr. Hildebrand explains.  Nor is it a "dull acquiescence in the dominion of sin" (p. 420).  The Church's authentic peace is ever at war with everything which falls under the dominion of sin.  See here.  We kill the error and love the one who errs as St. Augustine put it.  Interficere errorem, diligere errantem.

The person who is truly meek and seeking peace will fight when it's time to fight.  But he or she will not exhibit a hardened or cramped attitude toward others.  Such a person will certainly not seek to sow discord.