Peace, like love, is a many-splendored thing. It's one of those words everybody knows the meaning of but no one can define, one of those "I know it when I see it" things.
The word originated with the ancient Romans, who defined peace, pax, as absentia belli, the absence of war. That's a fair working description of social peace, political peace, and there are those in today's world who would be pleased to settle for that.
But not all non-peace involves physical fighting and death, and peace is much more than the absence of external conflict.
Peace is an abstraction, like beauty or art. Being at peace is psychological and subjective, an inner emotional state of being in balance, harmony, freedom, fulfillment, and contentment. It is being content with what you have, what you are, with what is. It is believing life is going like you think it should go, without stress or tension
Imagine life arranged in three layers. The top layer, made of solid lead, is I want; the bottom layer, pure helium, is can't have. The bottom layer tries to come up; the top layer prevents it doing so. The top and bottom are kept apart in the middle layer.
That's where we live.
The pressure on the middle layer is stress; tension is the effort to keep the pressure as minimal as possible. No condition in human experience can be called absolute peace; it can be understood or described only in comparison to un-peace. Peace is maintaining a tolerable balance between conflicting elements. Peace is a low reading on the pressure gauge, not a zero reading. Peace cannot be thought of apart from tension and stress.
Is it possible for anything alive to exist without stress or tension? I think not. And don't say Jesus did it. Scripture says he wept and is quoted as saying "now is my soul troubled." Not exactly at peace.
Political peace requires individuals with personal peace who possess all they believe to be true, good, necessary. If such persons exist, I would go to great lengths to meet them.
A peaceful world could be created only by inner-peaceful people. People without inner peace will not allow inner-peaceful people to coexist in the same space with them.
Imagine you are on a quiet Colorado prairie on a bucolic afternoon, overcast just enough to look un-squinting at the sky, the kind of day the song "It's So Peaceful in the Country" was written for.
A falcon floats flapless on invisible thermals, adding an exquisite touch of grace and beauty.
Ahhh! This is the way things are supposed to be! Your soul soaks up the surrounding serenity. Things are in harmony in your little corner of the cosmos. Life doesn't get better, any more peaceful than this.
The remarkable bird with eyes which can see details of a square foot of ground surface from a mile high lays its wings back and dives earthward at 200 miles an hour. A wayward sparrow seeking supper has recklessly wandered from the protection of a scrub oak thicket to the edge of the open range.
It never knew what hit it.
This is the way life is; the laws of the cosmos are working in harmonious balance. Is it the way life is supposed to be? Is this peace? The answer would probably be "yes."
Unless you could ask the sparrow.
Absolute peace unmarred by stress, tension, or conflict is an ephemeral fantasy, a factual falsehood, a wishful device employed by some religious people and some politicians to give them something to bemoan, a cause to champion, a wrong to set right.
The closest rational creatures can come to finding peace is to recognize and live in reality, and to use their mental, moral, and physical resources to make reality as peaceful as possible.
Could that be what is meant by "the peace of God"?

Editor's note: W. Jackson "Jack" Wilson is a psychologist, an Episcopal priest, a sometime academic and a writer living in Colorado. He writes with humor, whimsy, passion and penetrating insight into the human condition. And in Pushkin, Russia, a toilet is named in his honor.

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