The Last Circle

Inner Peace As the Necessary Beginning Point

Today’s post is an excerpt from my novel What Can’t Be Hidden and explores one character’s realization that inner peace is essential for relational and communal peace. Here it is:

I'm the one who admitted to being the sick system, Ochi thought. I'm the one who said I take it with me everywhere I go. I've been so preoccupied with everyone else's ills and wrongs and misgivings that I built up a wall around my heart. And if I can't even look behind that wall and change myself, how do I expect anything around me to change? If there’s something toxic behind that wall, does it not flow outwardly into everything else? If there’s pain behind that wall, how could it not be felt by those around me? If my anger and resentment and pride reside behind that wall, they’ve had to affect my relationships with those closest to me? Maybe Patrida isn't at peace because I'm not at peace. But how can anything penetrate this wall I've constructed around my heart?

"You see it this time. I know you do," Sophia called out for the last time as she hobbled toward her son.

"You know, a person can spend so much time on the other side of these circles," Ochi said, "without ever going inward, without ever having to go deeper. That's me. I thought I knew what peace was, but I had no idea."

"So true, Ochi," Sophia said. "Peace is not something a person can create or manufacture from the outside. Peace can only exist within you."

"That's what's so surprising to me, I guess," Ochi confessed. "I've spent so much of my life believing peace was something outward that we needed to strive for as a community, that if we agreed to it, then it must be true. I mean, we lived by the motto Peace through Strength in Patrida, yet not a single one of us knew what peace was. Isn't that crazy? We believed we were the ones living in peace, yet there you sat for all those years confined behind four, dark walls, and you were the only person in Patrida who had found it."

"And it was this peace, Ochi, that allowed me to come back to you," Sophia said, slowly kneeling next to him. "Peace is not an ideal for which we strive. When it is an ideal, it is only a word on our lips or an idea existing in our heads. But when peace resides in your heart, it becomes your lived experience. Peace becomes the way you begin to see and relate to the world. That is the key to our relationships. Relationships can only begin to heal when peace resides within each person. And a community will only begin to heal when our relationships are at peace. But for a circle to expand and include others in that peace, it must begin as the smallest of circles around one's heart."

Question

1. How might the peace you cultivate within begin to foster forgiveness toward those who have hurt you?

Peace,

Brandon