Hallowed Ground

 

     Gettysburg Battlefield

Whatever the trouble, whatever the battle, it happens in a stillness. You are not the battle. You are the stillness.

We get a glimpse of this stillness when, for a little while, the guns stop firing. Have you ever visited the hallowed ground of Normandy or Gettysburg? There is such peace, such sacred stillness where the battle once raged. It's why we come to visit. We feel the stillness and say, "Ah, this is what we must have been fighting for."

But is the stillness created by bloodshed and pain? Or is it a stillness that was always there, and can now be briefly sensed in the cessation of struggle?

Peace is not won by fighting, but by surrender: surrender to the Presence that is always already here. Our world's survival depends on whether all of us, on both sides of the battle, learn to find the stillness of our true nature, without killing for it.

Perhaps we imagine we must leave the field of conflict to find peace, go somewhere quiet to taste the stillness. Wouldn't life be sweeter on a mountain top? In the Bhagavad Gita, this is how Arjuna feels. But Krishna imparts a secret: peace is not for the recluse. Peace is for the spiritual warrior right in the midst of conflict.

At the base of every stormy wave is the silent depth of the sea. Even when the sky is filled with clouds, driven by monsoon winds, space is motionless and clear. A mirror seems crowded and busy with reflections, yet is actually empty and still. Sub-atomic particles furiously spin from nothing. We call their dance the universe, but they are just vibrations of an all-pervading vacuum.

According to scripture, God is the Being "in which we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). How many of us really taste this Being of whom we are made, embrace this Presence in whom we move, breathe the One who breathes us? 

Our first duty is not to save others, but to awaken this Being in our being, the I within our i, the breath of our breath. As warriors of peace, our first duty is to meditate.

Before we create one more battlefield, let us touch the hallowed ground of our own Being.