peace that passes understanding
Peace is a relational, not individual, idea or state of being. What relationships in your life are in need of tending so that freedom and peace might be found?
Isaiah 52:9
Break forth; shout together for joy, you ruins of Jerusalem, for God has comforted their people; they have redeemed Jerusalem.
A long time ago, when I was learning Hebrew, this passage was my homework. Specifically, my task was to translate the word Jerusalem.
The most common translation means something like “the place of peace,” which seems painfully ironic nowadays.
But a second, less popular (and not at all promoted by contemporary translators) is “the city of two peaces.” And I think of what we are going through and maybe I see a way out.
God will dwell in this city when there are two peaces, when the two communities who claim this city as home can live in peace.
The word in Hebrew, Yerushalayim, is plural, as if peace was never something you can experience as one, but as many; as if the name of this city screamed what Fannie Lou Hamer would say centuries later: “Nobody is free until everybody is free.”
Peace is a relational, not individual, idea or state of being. What relationships in your life are in need of tending so that freedom and peace might be found?
—Claudia Aguilar Rubalcava