Christ’s Parting Gift
CHRIST’S PARTING GIFT
Odd things turn up when you are moving. Last month when we packed up the things in the old house and came to this one, I found a slip of paper with my mother’s handwriting on one side and Mrs. Kershaw’s on the other. One day back in the fifties my parents were going for the day to Hartford, Connecticut (from New Jersey), to visit my aunt in the hospital. Mother wrote a note to leave for Mrs. Kershaw, the dear old lady who would be coming that day as usual to help with housework.
“Please get anything you want from the refrigerator to eat. If you have time perhaps you could roll out some brown sugar cookies. The house is clean so there is nothing to do in that line. . . .Thanks so much. Have a good day. Lovingly, K. H.”
Mrs. Kershaw wrote on the other side, “The Day’s Doings,” and left it for my mother. Mother is pretty good at throwing things away (lots of people are poor at that), but she also knows what is worth saving. When I read over the scrap of paper I thought of our beloved Mrs. Kershaw. I have written about her before—a widow, stone-deaf, a godsend to our home, utterly without guile or self-pity, unfailingly cheerful, who quite as a matter of course gave herself to all of us all of the time. Her list seemed exactly the paradigm I had been looking for. I wanted to write about peace. Peace is one of those abstracts we refer to rather often, but seldom with much real comprehension. “The Day’s Doings” helped me to get hold of what peace is.
The Day’s Doings:
1. put my soiled clothes to soak
2. had my breakfast
3. washed clothes
4. prayed for all and Alice’s recovery & home safe
5. washed up dishes
6. made a fruit cup good for all
7. wrote to [her son]
8. just opened my mail, came 10:30 A.M.
9. making cookies, rolling in paper
10. getting nuts ready for top of cookies
11. resting and prayer for all
12. fixing pie filling and crust
13. resting and lunch 2 P.M. I feel lost without you to eat with.
14. washing up
15. resting and reading
16. prayer
17. making Jell-O
18. washing up. No more eats.
19. baking cookies and pie
20. washing up kitchen floor last. 6 o’clock, not a soul here. I didn’t even see a stray dog. Yet happy.
Here was a life without conflict. That is what peace is. It could be argued, of course, that she had it easy: a few little undemanding household tasks to perform, a nice house in which to perform them, people who cared about her, her basic needs met. Plenty of people in this world have that and more, but would give it all for five minutes of peace—the peace that characterized the life of our little old lady.
If she had wanted to look for causes for self-pity or depression, she wouldn’t have had to go far. She was old and frail, slightly crippled with arthritis; she could not hear a single sound; she had a son who almost never called or visited her; she had lost her husband; she had very few of this world’s goods. But she went through her daily routines with gladness, punctuating them with prayer. She had the peace of God, which is just as Jesus described it—“nothing like the peace of this world.” It was his parting gift to the disciples and to any who will simply take it. “I give you my own peace” is what he said.
I was thinking of all this as I sat in the living room of the house we have just moved into. My books and notes were spread around me on the sofa, my clipboard was in my lap. In front of me was a vast expanse of Atlantic Ocean, framed to left and right by the fading colors of autumn woods and, at the foot of the slope between them, the raw and ragged edge of New England—a great jumble of giant rocks, bleached by the sun, clean-scoured by wind and tide. The sea itself, miles and miles of it, danced, glittered, and flashed. (“Coruscated is the word,” my brother Tom Howard said on the phone when I tried to describe to him what I could see. He’s been my thesaurus since he was about five.)
There was nearly perfect silence all day long. I could hear no traffic on the road. Occasionally I heard a plane, circling northeast to land at Boston’s Logan Airport, or the soft thub-thub of a lobster boat’s idling motor. I heard the lonely cry of seagulls and the thunder and sigh as waves broke and retreated, but it was a day full of peace. I reveled in it. I thanked God in every way I could think of.
But someone I love is in the hospital today, waiting for a diagnosis which, judging by the symptoms we know of so far, could be a grave illness. The kind of peace afforded by the quiet house set in such matchless beauty is not really enough. It is not enough for my heart.
In the same talk in which Jesus spoke of his peace, just before he left his disciples to return to the Father, he said, “You must not be distressed and you must not be daunted. ” How, Lord, can I possibly obey a command like that when trouble—serious trouble—stares me in the face? What does peace mean now? Is it merely a feeling of calm? Does it mean to be soothed or comfortable? Is it a vague sense of well-being?
I don’t know anywhere to look for answers but in the same old Book. The Old Testament sense of the word peace is, among other things, perpetual prosperity, security of tenure, health, and freedom from annoyance. The list almost seemed a mockery. It would certainly be a mockery if we could see no further than natural things. The man who sees only those has a “carnal” attitude, Paul says, “and that means, bluntly, death.” A spiritual attitude, on the other hand, means life and inward peace. The New Testament explains much more about this inward kind. It comes from God. It is a gift, the fruit of faith. It passes understanding. It is Christ himself. “He is our peace.”
The peace of God means the absence of conflict with the will of God. It means harmony within, concord with his purpose for our lives.
Mrs. Kershaw was not merely adjusted to herself or her circumstances. She was, in the deepest place of her being, reconciled to God. She never took a sedative or a tonic in her life. Like the weaned child spoken of by the psalmist, no longer frantic for satisfaction, she was at rest. If you had asked her her secret, she would no doubt have given a little shrug and a little chuckle. The sweet old wrinkled face would have looked up quizzically. She would not have known what to say. She simply did what the Christians of Philippi were told to do: “Don’t worry over anything whatever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God, which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus.
To make peace with a country or a person or God requires a transaction. To have peace, as people sometimes say, unless it is merely the sense of well-being that commonly goes with getting what you want, must mean that a transaction has taken place. One’s will, along with everything else, has been offered up. Peace is the divine answer to our Yes, Lord.
Colossians 3:15 suggests that the peace of Christ is the “arbiter” of our hearts, ruling out all faithless response to trouble, all distress, anxiety, fretfulness, frustration, and resentment. It establishes order. Those who accept the grace of this gift know tranquillity which can withstand all assaults, a stillness unbroken by the world’s noise, and a repose in the midst of intense activity repose which a nerve-racked world cannot possibly give. For only Christ himself, who slept in the boat in the storm and then spoke calm to the wind and waves, can stand beside us when we are in a panic and say to us Peace. It will not be explainable. It transcends human understanding. And there is nothing else like it in the whole wide world.