What verb do you use with Faith?

People ask, do you have faith? Presumably they mean in something. Doesn’t that question seem lacking in ambition? It’s the “Yes, I believe in something and that something doesn’t require anything at all from me to take care of me,” answer to living life. It’s lazy.

Faith requires a far more active verb than simply holding. The verb that best suits Faith is keeping. We keep faith with the things we believe by doing work that models that in the world. If we believe Peace to be the utmost possibility, how can we, why would we keep from delighting in it, being grateful for it, pointing it out to folks when it shows up, and practicing it so that others might consider participation? 

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Living a Peacemaker’s Life

Becoming a Peacemaker is an honorable goal. As with every goal, there’s quite a bit of work to be done before you are really living into Peacemaking. (Keep reading! It gets more encouraging!) You don’t have to have completed all the work before beginning your Peacemaking — but it’s a good idea to engage with all of the components I detail below so that your style of Peacemaking becomes a natural expression of who you are.

Each of us finds our own way into Peacemaking. Writing about Peace set me on the Peacepath. As many of you may know, I have been writing daily musings for 12 years now. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Since October, I’ve also been reading them on TikTok, so if you’d rather listen, find me there at Tiktok/annkeelerevans. My current musings explore what comprises a Peacemaker’s life. They are reflective exercises on principles and values – the components I consider central to Peacemaking. I now have a list of fifteen components which are detailed below. They are mostly in the order I think makes sense to consider, but you may find you’ll want to reflect on them in the order that is most meaningful for your Peacemaking.

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Locating Myself in Nature Through the Seasons’ Turnings

“Outdoorsy” is not an adjective I’d use to describe myself. And yet… Some of my most cherished memories are of being outside in Nature.

Perhaps we’ve conflated the notion of the outdoors with the activities of outdoors — suggesting that being out of doors impliess doing rather than, at least some of the time, being. 

The other day, I had to do a writing exercise that entailed listing 100 favorite memories. It was remarkable how many of them took place outdoors. There were a couple memories of running in the rain and cross-country skiing, now long in my past. But my list also included plenty of times writing on the beach or on the lip of a canyon, recollections of reading under a tree or alongside a creek. And oh! Outdoors winter hot-chocolate!

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Balancing Peace

Thursday of last week was the Autumnal Equinox. The Equinoxes are times of balance. I remember how excited I was when I was told that on the Equinoxes you could balance an egg on end. A couple years later, I learned you can probably always do that as long as you do it carefully, but I thought it was such an apt metaphor. You move from Summer and fall off the edge into Autumn.

Autumn is the season of the celebration of the Great Harvest. Canada is much closer to nature than the US as they hold their Thanksgiving on October 10. Up North, they’ll be pulling the pumpkins out of the fields by then, all ready to be baked into pies. Luckily for us in the US, the pumpkins store well!

This is a season of sorting — what can be used now, what can be saved, what should go back to the ground, and what can be shared out among our neighbors. It’s a time of making amends for our short-comings during the year. It’s a time of forgiving others who also came up short. And it is a time of giving thanks for all that has enriched our lives. 

What gives us sustenance? What gives us Joy? What can we share with the world? How have we fallen short in sharing, or celebrating, or acknowledging another’s humanity.

These are big questions. Asking these questions brings us a deeper understanding of real scope of a year and what its different seasons can mean to us. Not following the eight turnings of the year, most of us have no idea that there are responsibilities that fit the changing seasons. I love following the agricultural calendar for that reason. It’s so important in all of our interactions in the world to ask not only our first question, which is generally what do I get from this, but also our second — what is my responsibility?

Peace is always about responsibility.

Peace is breathing out and breathing in, a receiving and a responding. On this equinox, we gather all these beautiful summer days into our memories and let their bounty spill over into the changing, colorful season.

How do we do that for ourselves, and at the same time make room for others? How do we balance our needs and desires with the needs of others?  How do we take not just what is ours but not more than what we need in order to fulfill our responsibilities of caring for others?  Finally, for our own health and well-being, how do we balance our lives, loves, and work around the balancing of the seasons and the daylight within which we have to work?

Salaam, Shalom, Peace. Blessed be.