Isn’t it ironic that the one species pursuing peace is the one causing war? And it is perhaps the ultimate irony that many times we fight wars to finally achieve peace. War rages throughout the world in every form imaginable, from spousal abuse to nuclear weapons, and it is far too easy to point outward at causes and triggers and justifications for it. It is nowhere near enough to look outside ourselves for war. We are capable of abolishing plagues, performing in-vitro fertilization, cloning, space travel and wonders too many to mention, but peace eludes us. Where we are, peace is not. As the old comic strip Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” What is it within us that drives us to war? Is that a little closer to solving the riddle of omnipresent, on-going war among the most highly-evolved species on Earth? Or the only species created in the image of God? Higher nature, lower nature. Spiritual
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nature, physical nature. Perhaps it’s not conflicting ideologies, policies, governments and religions, perhaps it is nothing outside other than ourselves. We may say we want peace, but we want other things that make peace impossible. What could we want that might make peace within ourselves and with others difficult? Money, power, position, promotion, more, a person, other than what we have, what someone else has, privacy, control, admiration, that, this, a change, that candidate, this policy, that method, community growth, community as is… the list is, unfortunately, endless. Buddha did not have good things to say about desires. Jesus said we desire and covet and don’t have because we don’t ask, and when we do ask we don’t receive because we want to spend it on ourselves. If your physical nature is at war with your spiritual nature, good luck being at peace within your family, let alone with your neighbor, and certainly not with neighboring nations. People can only be at peace with each other when they are at peace within themselves. When peace reigns
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