What are we all looking for? If we start by being honest with ourselves—unless we’re completely consumed by our own ego—most everyone would accept the same definition. It would all come down to three words: unshakable inner peace.
That unshakable inner peace comes from God, of course. But how we get there, how we find it, varies considerably according to our beliefs, lifestyles, and attitudes.
So let me dial back just a little bit. What does it mean for us to be at peace? For the purposes of today, let’s say that being at peace means not being in turmoil. It’s being OK with things—not necessarily in a state of bliss, but managing well. You’re on the plus side of whatever heavy things you’re carrying. You’re not discontent with the world overall.
But are we all there? Not everyone is. Most of us aren’t. So where would you put yourself in this category? Where would you like to be?
Often, we look for downtime—prayer time, relaxation, meditation, all of the above—to try and dial down from whatever might be a heightened state. I’m not necessarily talking about being anxious, but you know that feeling when you’ve just had enough with something. Your day at work, whatever. And so we’re looking for lots of different ways to try and relax.
Relaxing is one way into this process. Relaxing with deliberation, using some of those tools I mentioned. A lot of what we end up doing, of course, is separating our normal, perhaps stressful life from our prayer life or our relaxed life. We are more aggravated under one set of circumstances than another.
In the ideal world, of course, whatever we’re doing during our normal life—whether we’re at school or working or retired—we don’t want to be in turmoil, annoyed, angry, or discontent. So how do we get some of this peace to spill over into those situations?
Perhaps some of those situations are unavoidable, but we can have better ways of dealing with them. When we’re faced with the things that aggravate us, we can engage—hopefully through dialogue—and resolve whatever it is. This usually involves more than one person, although sometimes that internal dialogue with ourselves can be just as challenging as when it involves someone else.
Once we have that resolution, we do get that very smooth “aha moment” of inner peace. Forgiveness has occurred. Reconciliation has happened. It’s palpable, and it isn’t just for our soul—physically, we can feel it as well.
There are literally thousands of books in the world, since the beginning of time, trying to give us ways to cope more with the everyday, with whatever lot in life we’ve been given and whatever we make of it. Leaning into the contemplative, into the place where peace can happen in our everyday lives—this is the goal.
As a retreat director, this is one of the main reasons that people come on retreat. They want to go quiet for a while. They want to renew and refresh, reconnect with their inner self and with the supreme being, God. And even those that don’t necessarily believe in a supreme being still want to meditate, quiet down, relax, and look for the same peace that all those following religious paths are seeking.
But what about the separation of our prayer life or our peace-seeking life from our regular life? This is one of the things that causes them to be separated—the fact that we think about them differently. “This is my prayer time. This is my break time. This is my weekend. This is my vacation.”
We want to have the pleasure of being OK with the world in our everyday life. Part of that is not trying to separate it. We can’t have one face to deal with the rest of the world and another face when we want to have conversations with God. It doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t work.
Brother Lawrence, an 17th-century French monk, wrote about “the practice of the presence of God”—where every moment of every day, even in the most mundane and boring of tasks, becomes a celebration of the presence of God.
I’m not suggesting that we’re going to be able to dial in the spiritual characteristics of Brother Lawrence as we’re driving down the freeway getting cut off. But we can do what he invited us to do: be aware of the presence of God all the time, not just when we have time to pray.
This was the revelation that the monks in his monastery had. When they were praying at set times, they realized Brother Lawrence was always praying—because he was always aware of the presence of God in all things. In the dirty dishes and laundry he was moving around the monastery. In the cleaning of pots and pans.
Perhaps this awareness would help us bring some of this peace into our own daily lives. What do you think?
Reflection and image Copyright 2025 Michael J. Cunningham OFS