After an early morning viewing of the sun rising over Lake Superior in Grand Marais, Minnesota, I was on a quiet walk back to our campsite when my friend recommended Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Father Jacques Philippe. She described it as life-changing.
At the time, I had never heard of this French author, but he soon became a personal favorite. While every single one of his books has been a great companion for a holy hour, the one I read first was his treatise on having peace of heart. And, if you let it, this book can indeed change your life.
This short, easy-to-read book is divided into three parts.
Part One: Interior Peace, The Road to Saintliness
It may seem like an odd place to start talking about peace, but Philippe’s opening words emphasize our powerlessness: our total incapacity to do anything without the help of God. His goal here is to speak to the power of abandonment and receptivity, to encourage us to let go of the control that we think we hold, and instead become docile to the Holy Spirit listening to how God desires to act within us. One of my favorite lines in the book is a beautifully painted word picture:
Consider the surface of a lake, above which the sun is shining. If the surface of the lake is peaceful and tranquil, the sun will be reflected in this lake; and the more peaceful the lake, the more perfectly it will be reflected. If, on the contrary, the surface of the lake is agitated, undulating, then the image of the sun can not be reflected in it. (p. 5)
This helpful image reminds me to hurry less and sit still more. It is only then that my heart is fully open and attentive to God’s voice, and in turn, I am better able to be a mirror of His goodness and love.
Philippe is not naive to the reality that we all have struggles, but he urges us not to give too much power to our annoyances and frustrations. If we are looking for the peace that the world offers, it will be short-lived. Of course, God does not expect us to go through life without hardship. We were promised hardship. In fact, the Lord will even stir up our consciences if we are in need of repentance and a return to Him.
Phillippe explains: “We cannot truly be at peace as long as our hearts have not found their unity and our hearts cannot be unified until all our desires are subordinated to the desire to love God, to please Him and to do His will” (p. 17).
Unifying our desires with the Lord’s requires detachment and abandonment, and this can take time to grow in. But He is patient with us!
Part Two: How To React To That Which Causes Us To Lose Peace
This section begins with common reasons for which we might lose our peace—for example, apprehensions about the future or the fear of lacking something we desperately want such as a spouse, a child, or a specific job. This fear of lacking is something I often struggle with, so I need Philippe’s reminder that:
It is not by making certain calculations and preoccupations that one is going to find a solution [. . . ] Man is never assured of obtaining anything, and everything which he holds in his hands can easily slip from his grasp from one day to the next; there is no guarantee on which he can count absolutely. (p. 24)
Worry will get us nowhere, and yet, that is where the evil one will try to hold us. The serpent from the garden breathes behind our ears, tempting us to think (just like he did with Adam and Eve) that we know better than God and so we should put our trust in ourselves rather than our Creator. This is where we lose our peace.
Philippe paints another word picture to help us better understand why we struggle to trust in Divine Providence:
As long as a person who must jump with a parachute does not jump out into the void, he cannot feel that the cords of the parachute will support him, because the parachute has not yet had the chance to open. One must first jump and it is only later that one feels carried. (p. 28)
We need to jump in order to experience that we are held.
To know that we are held we must spend time in prayer and contemplation. We won’t want to jump until we know and trust the One who promises to carry us. For “[t]he heart does not awaken to confidence until it awakens to love; we need to feel the gentleness and the tenderness of the Heart of Jesus” (p. 35).
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Part Three: What The Saints Tell Us
Rest assured that this obtaining of peace is a grace and not something to be hurried after or grasped at. Even the Saints had to work on practicing patience and stillness. Philippe gives selections from different Saints about peace.
Juan de Bonilla wrote: “Just as a city is not built in a day, do not think that you can achieve, in a day, this peace, this interior calm, because it is within you that a home must be built for God, while you yourself, become His temple. And it is the Lord Himself Who must handle the construction” (p. 85-86).
Saint Francis de Sales explained, “Peace is born of humility,” and that “[i]f God makes you fall, as He did with Saint Paul, whom He threw to the ground, it is to raise you up to His glory” (p. 89, 91).
Venerable Francois-Marie-Jacob Libermann said: “To worry, to hurry in carrying out the good desires that He inspires in us is to spoil the work of grace in us and to draw us away from our perfection. Let us not try to be perfect immediately; let us undertake our accomplishments with calm, with a peaceful fidelity to that which He demands of us” (p. 105).
Will you open your heart to receive the peace that God has for you? Are you ready to take the leap from your own sense of control and into Your Maker’s providential care?
Susanna Parent is a regular contributor to the BIS blog, speaker and a freelance writer. While a Wisconsin native, she now begins her mornings brewing French press coffee in the home she shares with her husband and children in the Twin Cities. When the sun sets, you’ll find her with friends enjoying a glass of red wine, preferably outside underneath twinkly lights. When not exploring all that the Twin Cities has to offer, she is indulging her wanderlust spirit by brainstorming their family's next new adventure. You can find out more about her here. Read all of Susanna's posts here.
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