The comic, Woody Allen, once offered his own interpretation of the prophet Isaiah’s vision of peace: “The wolf shall lie down with the lamb. But the lamb won’t get much sleep!”
Truth be told, we’re probably a little nervous about this vision as well.
After all, this promise of peace was a prophecy uttered by Isaiah some 3,000 years ago, and the world in which we live today seems to us a far more violent place than the land of date palm trees, clear fl owing streams and camels ambling through the desert - the world known to Isaiah. So where does that leave the promise of peace?
Well, extraordinary as it may seem, the world in which we live might, in fact, be a more peaceful place than history has ever known. I know, there is a very violent war going right now in Syria, and its consequences are devastating for many of its people. And violence continues in the aftermath of larger wars, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
There is turmoil, death and destruction in many other Middle Eastern countries and in Africa. And violence initiated by nonstate actors could take place at any time. But, statistically, the world seems to be a safer place than it ever has been.
Harvard Univeristy psychologist, Steven Pinker, makes just that case in his book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (Penguin Books, 2011). He convincingly argues that, in virtually every category of violence - military confl icts, confl icts between hostile neighbors, violence directed at women and children, and aggression against racial and ethnic minorities - the incidences of violence are fewer than in earlier periods.
The reasons behind the decline in violence over the course of history are many - the ascendency of the nation-state and theirgovernment’s capacity to maintain order, the growth of world-wide commerce and the transformation of former enemies into trading partners, increased education and greater interdependency among nations have all moved the world toward peace. The lion might not lie next to the lamb, but the world currently is a safer place to live than ever.
Of course, there is no guarantee the trend toward peace will continue, but as tribalism declines, literacy rates and education improve. As we become more interconnected commercially and socially, there is reason to be optimistic that the world will move - with fi ts and starts no doubt - toward peace.
So, if the world is safer than it was just a few decades past, and probably more peaceful than in any time in human history, why are we afraid? Why don’t we feel safer? Even if we were standing at the gateway into the peaceable kingdom, most of us would still fear the future.
A few Sundays ago, a couple of All Saints’ parishioners and I held worship services at a rather shabby nursing home in Bentonville. Earlier in the day, I had a conversation with a mother of a 4-year-old little girl who - having been to the mall, seen the Christmas decorations and the toys in the stores, and sensed the energy of the Black Friday shopping frenzy - simply could not contain her excitement. Literally jumping up and down, she exclaimed to her mother, “It’s the fi rst day of Christmas !”
It lifted my heart, on the first Sunday in Advent, to see on a child’s face - if not exactly with excitement over the coming of the Christ child - with a childlike appreciation for what it means to enter into a season of hope.
That Sunday afternoon, when I looked around at the faces of the residents of the nursing home, I wondered how they were experiencing the season of Advent. Most of them had reached stages in their lives where the sense of hope and expectation about the future they surely felt in their youth had been replaced by a quieter sense of simply waiting for whatever the future has in store for them.
A dozen or so residents gathered in a musty and overheated hall, poorly-lit withbuzzing florescent lights. An ancient blind woman reached out to touch my face, using her softly wrinkled hands to see and judge me. She smiled when her fingers encountered the fuzz on my cheeks. Teresa, a parish friend and a very talented quilter, sat bright eyed through the service, clearly happy to just be among friends. A man my age, with the drugged and damaged look of too many Vietnam vets, leaned far back in his wheelchair, with the stump of an amputated leg propped up on the table in front of him.
One woman responded to a question I posed to these wheel-chaired congregants about the season of Advent and for what it was they hoped. She said she hoped her son might bring her cat to visit her, but the cat was a little wild and would haveto be transported in a pet carrier. She said, “He will have to be caged - just like I am here.”
Sometimes I feel, that as Christians, we are called to be tight-rope walkers, engaged in this rather precarious balancing act between an expectation of what the future holds and a desire to live in the now, the eternal present.
Jesus told his followers, over and again, that the kingdom of God is already on them. Reconciling the sense of “God with us,” the kingdom that is very near to us - with the hope and expectation of the coming Christ child - is the real challenge of Advent.
We carry our expectations and our fears about the future with us. The world might now be a less-violent place. But when we are startled awake fromour dreams in the middle of the night, the lion and the lamb often are still engaged in mortal combat. The peace we seek alwayslies within.
May the peace that passes understanding be upon you this holiday season and remain with you always.
THE REV. ROGER JOSLIN IS THE VICAR AT ALL SAINTS’ EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN BENTONVILLE.
COMMENTS ARE WELCOMED AT [email protected].
Religion, Pages 9 on 12/21/2013