Yet, Isaiah, in spite of the tumultuous times he lived in, seemed to have received that inner peace, the peace which God gives us. He explains how to receive God's gift of peace in another famous quote: "You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you." (Isaiah 26: 3). So, we can ask ourselves, what is a steadfast mind?
A steadfast mind is a disciplined mind, a mind which focuses on prayerfully trusting God, a mind which does not allow itself to be overwhelmed by passing emotions or passing material things or passing fads. Another description of this focused, prayerful attitude would be "mindful vigilance." When our mind deliberately focuses on God, we will gradually learn to see God in all things and all things in God. We will keep evolving into having a higher consciousness of God, Who is Love, and is always at work in us, in everyone around us, and in our entire world. For a Christian, this is putting on the mind of Christ.
This kind of mental discipline and focusing on God is extremely difficult in our modern "wired world." We are constantly being deluged with new information - and disinformation. We are often physically present but we have wandering minds that are restless, bored, impatient, and inattentive. We lack focus and self-control. We are controlled instead by our electronic devices, or by material things, or by our jobs, careers, and what other people think of us. We can no longer control what needs to be controlled - ourselves. Is it any wonder that inner peace is elusive?
Clinging to material things or to emotional things like anger, hurt, or power destroys inner peace. Peace only comes if we can focus on God, and on the NOW where God is continually bringing new life into being. Peace only comes when we consciously choose to take time to ourselves for silence and prayer - every day.
St. Teresa of Avila was gifted with this inner peace of God. She said, "God alone suffices." She did NOT mean that we are children without responsibility, that God "does it all." Sr. Ilia Delio says, "Teresa's insight reflects a person open to newness and creativity. The sufficiency of God means that in every new encounter, choice, or decision, God is there."
Delio tells a story about St. Francis to illustrate. One time when St. Francis was traveling with Brother Masseo, they came to a fork in the road. Masseo asked Francis which way to go. Francis told him to "shut his eyes, turn around three times, and then open his eyes. After that strange request, Francis asked Masseo what direction he saw. That is the direction they would go."
Delio says that "our modern, left-brain. closed-system thinking would analyze Brother Masseo's dilemma by asking numerous questions: Will this path take us where we need to go? What if we get lost? How will we know it is the right way? We seek to control every aspect of life even though we know that, on the quantum level, life is uncertain and uncontrollable. In our left-brain efforts to control, we become unconscious of God and of our connectivity to the whole of life.
"Teresa's 'God alone suffices' means that God is in every direction. The direction itself is not important; it is oneness with God that makes the direction meaningful. Prayer becomes living prayer when our field of consciousness is not in a thousand different places but the one place of God; it kindles the consciousness that we are not alone, that we are loved, so that whatever we do and wherever we go, the people we encounter, the snow that we trudge though, the rain that soaks us, or the obstinate person at our table, are all part of God loving us....Love is not something we do; love is what God does to us when we encounter each concrete moment of reality as gift." (from "Making All Things New.")
We often think that if we can control the world around us, we can control suffering. But suffering always finds us. In fact, one of the most luminous women of the 20th century who practiced continual mental vigilance, continual focusing on God, was a young woman, Etty Hillesum, who had absolutely no power and whose life became almost total suffering. Etty (1914-1943) aimed for a higher consciousness, a disciplined mind focused on God and inner peace in the midst of the violent atrocity of the Holocaust, in which she eventually perished at the age of twenty-nine. Born in the Netherlands, she experienced a religious awakening while horrified by the persecution of Jews in Amsterdam. She was deported to Poland and died at Auschwitz. While never becoming specifically a Christian, she was nourished by the Bible and spiritual writers during her ordeal, developed a deepening faith in God, and is considered a mystic.
Delio says that Etty learned that "we must be able to experience something pleasurable without holding onto it, and we must be able to experience the most intense forms of suffering without going to pieces or passing it on to someone else." Etty had to train her attention so that it would not get "stuck" in desire, or fear, or horror at what was going on around her or what was happening to her. She learned to be even-minded in pleasure or pain, aware of suffering on one hand, and unquenchable faith in meaning and beauty on the other. During her stay at the transit camp at Westerbork, she wrote,
"The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down for a chat, the sun is shining on my face - and right before our eyes, mass murder... The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension."
Etty disciplined her mind, focused it on God, every day:
"Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes."
Or, again she said,
“God is not accountable to us, but we are to Him. I know what may lie in wait for us....and yet I find life beautiful and meaningful.”
Because of Hetty's continual prayerful work to put on a focused, disciplined mind, she was able to live in the flow between immense suffering and daily moments of beauty. "One moment she would tend to a dying mother lying on the cold, concrete prison floor with her children standing nearby, and in the next moment she would marvel at a small buttercup pressing through the cracks of the same prison floor. Instead of trying to push out suffering, she opened to it lovingly, leaning into it, because she realized that sadness too was part of her being." (Delio)
In the Jan. 26, 2010, edition of "The National Catholic Reporter," John Dear writes of Etty's years-long spiritual journey:
"Her transformation unfolds, and she records a slow emergence of astounding inner freedom. From hatred to love, withdrawal to engagement, violence to nonviolence, resentment to forgiveness, feeling hopeless to hope. She could no longer "live with the kind of hatred so many people nowadays force upon themselves against their better nature.
"With new inner resources, she learns to take her "quiet room" with her wherever she is, even into the barracks and, one presumes, later to her death. She achieves, she writes, "a state of complete equilibrium," even in the most horrendous moment of Nazi occupation.
Etty wrote, "All disasters stem from us. Why is there war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbor. Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love....Yet there is love bound up inside us, and if we could release it into the world, a little each day, we would be fighting war and everything that comes with it."
Etty knew that only having a peaceful inner self could transmit peace into the violence of the outer world. "I must fling myself into reality time and again...feed the outer world with my inner world and vice versa." She had learned, like Isaiah, like Teresa, like Francis, that God preserves us in perfect inner peace when we prayerfully train and focus our minds, like Christ's, on trusting God and God's constant outflow of peaceful love into the world - through us. Because of her gift of inner peace, her conscious rooting of herself in God's Love, she was able to tend to the needs of her suffering family and friends without giving in to despair.
If we think of the "mind of Christ" as one's continuous, loving, prayerful focus on God, on trust in God, of wanting to be God's peace for the world, then, Christian or not, Etty put on the mind of Christ. Delio observes, "Etty put on the mind of Christ in the midst of human violence and destruction. She shows us that a new world is possible even in the face of war and suffering; for where the mind is, there lies one's treasure."
Etty reminds us, heroically, about inner peace: