The 'peace' the gospel brings is never the absence of conflict, but an ineffable divine reassurance within the heart of conflict; a peace that surpasses understanding.
Interpretation
True peace is found not in the absence of conflict, but in the presence of inner reassurance amidst turmoil.
Walter Wink's quote suggests that genuine peace is not merely about avoiding conflict; rather, it manifests as a profound sense of assurance and tranquility within oneβs heart even when facing challenges. It emphasizes that this inner peace transcends logical understanding, reflecting a deeper spiritual or emotional state that defies external circumstances.
In practice
During a meditation session focused on finding inner peace amidst life's challenges.
In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world.
Evil can be opposed without being mirrored. Oppressors can be resisted without being emulated. Enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.
The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.
All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.
Being holiday, the beggar's shop is shut.
If you say that you reject violence when it exceeds the limits imposed by the needs of defense, they accuse you of pacifism, without understanding that violence is the whole essence of authoritarianism, just as the repudiation of violence is the whole essence of anarchism.
However insignificant the minority, and however trifling the proposed trespass against their rights, no such trespass is permissible.
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence β not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be β its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
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