Peace Exists Only Where Suffering Is Briefly Not Happening

An Advent meditation on suffering, incarnation, and the peace that does not avert its eyes

Advent Meditation

For some reason, I keep thinking about Miss Congeniality. Throughout the film, she’s obstinate about the beauty contest, scoffs at its sentimentality, until in the end, she wins, and while crying, says, “… I really do want world peace.”

So do I.

But damned if it doesn’t feel like a fever dream. An idealistic, immature notion in a world as fallen as ours. I know it’s not possible as is. The fundamental flaw of third-dimensional earth is that something must always die for something else to live.

Even when life feels calm, ordered, and well tended, catastrophe still arrives. People become ill. Marriages end. Friends die. Jobs disappear. Homes are lost. Sometimes the will to continue goes with them. This is life in a stable modern civilization — with stocked grocery stores, running water, no raging gunmen factored in, and the luxury of calling this peace.

Beyond it: Jews celebrating Hanukkah gunned down yesterday. Students at Brown taking final exams when a gunman opened fire. Women and children trafficked. Persecuted Christians in Africa. Civilians killed in wars worldwide. Billions of sentient mammals confined to factory farms. No accounting balances. Nothing cancels out. We count the dead, we bury what we love, we wait for morning — and still the night remains.

Peace exists only where suffering is briefly not happening.

Leonard Cohen might say here, “You want it darker?”

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Suffering is my theme. It’s what kept me from God for years. I used to be even angrier. I could not reconcile my belief in God with this suffering, and honestly, I still can’t. I have so many questions for God. Why, if you can create this, do you allow this suffering? If it’s a flaw in your operating system, wipe it and reboot. Intervene. Make it stop. These aren’t rhetorical questions. This is my deepest prayer, stuck on repeat. In quiet moments, it terrifies me.

Here’s the unsettling truth: Scripture doesn’t give a satisfying philosophical answer. Not really. It doesn’t explain suffering — it inhabits it.

The Bible doesn’t offer world peace. It offers God entering a world without it. It offers a child born under an empire’s boot. A refugee family fleeing violence. A Messiah executed by the state. A resurrection that refuses to erase the wounds.

Christianity does not claim the world will behave; it only claims God shows up anyway, apparently undeterred, knowing full well how this goes.

The peace we’re promised isn’t the Miss Congeniality fantasy — a sentimental desire for global harmony while beauty queens wave from a glittering stage. It’s the kind of peace that walks into darkness and stays there long enough to transform it. Advent peace is not naïve. It’s not childish. It’s not “everything will be fine.”

Advent peace says:

The world is broken. God comes anyway.

You will suffer. You will not be alone.

Evil is real. Still, light enters the world.

“A bruised reed he will not break,

and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”

— Isaiah 42:3

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The older I become — and especially after this year of demolition and rebuilding in my own life — I understand peace less as a global fantasy and more as a structural reality in the soul. Something that takes shape slowly. Something built plank by plank. Not an escape from suffering, but a way of not being destroyed by it.

Peace is the inner architecture that allows you to keep living in a world that won’t be fixed today or tomorrow. It’s the quiet that shows up in the ruins and says, You’re still here and God is there with you. Keep going.

And here’s the real twist: I think world peace may actually start in those ruins — in the small, stubborn refusals to participate in cruelty, apathy, or despair.

A month or so ago, I took my sister to school so she could ride to the airport with colleagues and not leave her car. On my way home, I saw a stray dog standing alone in a field at 99th Avenue and Camelback. I was in the middle lane during rush-hour traffic, and by the time I turned around, the dog was gone. I filed a report with Glendale Animal Control and hoped someone else had stopped. Still, it stayed with me. Had I waited too long? Could I have done more?

That was Monday.

Friday night, I picked my sister up from the airport to take her home. As we turned onto a quiet street in Sun City, a small white dog came running toward the car. I turned around slowly, headlights sweeping the road. My sister and I scanned the street until we saw her — tiny, white, wearing a collar — darting beneath a parked car.

I stopped. We both jumped out, trying to corral her. She slipped past me and ran down the street, where a woman stood frozen at her screen door.

“What are you doing?” she called.

“There’s a little white dog out here,” I yelled back.

“That’s my dog,” she cried, running toward us.

I pointed behind her house where the dog had fled. Moments later, she scooped her into her arms, sobbing. The dog had slipped out hours earlier while she took the trash out. She had been waiting by the door, hoping and praying.

I took my sister home — to her dog.

A few days later, I drove down that same street and saw the woman walking two dogs — the white girl we’d seen, the other scruffy brown and black. We waved and chatted briefly. The world had not been fixed. But something had been restored.

I don’t know what happened to the first dog. Faith lives in the space between what we never know and what we are given to see. The balance of uncertainty and grace. Like life itself — tragic and simple, often unresolved, occasionally redeemed.

In the end, here is where I land:

Peace is a stray dog reunited with her human. Peace is a home repainted, simplified, softened after chaos. Peace is a body that stops bracing for impact. Peace is finding your spiritual home in an unassuming Presbyterian church you passed for years without noticing — and discovering the quiet fidelity of its people.

Peace is not the world remade. Peace is the person remade within the world.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace