ELECTRIC PEACE

Sometimes we think of peace as a leftover or byproduct: peace is what we get when we are too tired or too old for anything else. We say when someone dies, "Well, at least now he is at peace." Or we may think of peace as a nonfunctional state. There's an apocryphal story about the first President Bush's visit of reassurance to Florida after Hurricane Andrew. The president, as the story goes, visits a nursing home and says to an elderly lady, "Do you know who I am?" The lady replies, "Ask at the front desk, and they'll tell you." So we may feel that peace will come with age. Yet real peace is something extraordinary. Peace comes when there is no disturbance within ourselves or in relationship to our world. This is the infinite peace of the Buddha, the peace that passes understanding of Jesus. This peace is vibrant with energy, potent with alertness and awareness. This peace is filled with tremendous clarity, harmony and order— out of this peace all of the conflicts and divisions of life are resolved.