The notions of peace and tranquility run through the readings we’ve heard today.  The peace and tranquility that God brings into our lives.  The image of the shepherd is important here.  In the Old Testament reading, Jeremiah calls out the wicked shepherds who scatter and cause fear in their flocks.  The prophet also foretells a good shepherd who will gather the flock together and expel all fear and trembling.  In the Gospel, Our Lord has pity on the crowds as sheep without a shepherd, and he invites the apostles to come away from their troubles and rest a while.  St. Paul identifies the Lord Jesus Christ himself as the source of an absolutely new and unprecedented kind of peace: Peace to those who are far off; Peace to those who are near.  He doesn’t just resolve conflict: he is the one who can put all conflict to death.  Our Lord is exactly whom King David was referring to and foretelling when he said those magnificent words, The Lord is my Shepherd: this psalm, which paints perhaps the most tranquil and peaceful picture in all of human literature: In the green pastures he gives me repose; beside restful waters he leads me; he refreshes my soul. 

To accompany this beautiful imagery, both Sacred Scripture and our Catholic Theology provide us with a great deal of insight about what this peace truly is.  True peace is so much more than an absence of conflict.  St. Augustine described peace as being the “tranquility of order.”  There is so much depth of meaning in just those few words.  Peace isn’t just any old kind of tranquility.  Peace is not just a truce, or an uneasy ceasefire with all the people you don’t really get along with.  Peace is the tranquility of order: of everything being in proper order in your life, of every one of your relationships being in order, being as it should be.  Everything in its right place and its right proportion.  Everything right.  This is really what the peace of Christ is all about.  And it’s what we all want.  It’s what our hearts are built for.  We’ll never experience it fully in this life.  This isn’t heaven: it’s something we have to look forward to.  But we do have the joyful opportunity to experience some measure of this kind of peace while here on earth.  And we do, ideally in many ways over the course of our lives.  We might feel it at times in the love of the family.  We might feel it in our really good friendships.  Ideally we will feel it here most of all: as we worship and pray to the one who is the Source and Prince of Peace. 

This kind of peace is always a gift from God, but we can and should try to foster it however we can.  There are obvious ways, like trying to live in harmony with other people, having a well-ordered life, giving the greatest amounts of our time to the most important things.  But there is a secret.  There is a way to get true peace into your life, a way that most people in our world today don’t know about, or at least haven’t experienced much for themselves.  There’s a special teacher of this peace that we can learn from, really like none other.  And that teacher is silence.  Silence is one of those things that most of us modern people have almost none of.  Our lives are so filled with noise; a constant stream of input, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep.  We have a tendency to go from looking at our phone, to the TV on in the background at home, to the radio in the car, to the earbuds in at work, and so forth.  If we want our hearts to settle, we have to turn it all off.  Not forever.  Not even for an entire day; not even for an entire hour.  But my advice to you, if you want deep peace to enter your life and find a home in your heart: give yourself at least a little bit of silence every day, free from any input or output.  Leave your phone in the other room; take your watch off (I promise the world won’t slip out of its orbit while you’re gone).  Even just 10 minutes, at whatever time of day works best for you: with no book, no phone, no nothing.  Just let your thoughts go where they may; let your mind quiet down; let your heart settle. 

I often remind people that 30 seconds of prayer is infinitely better than 0 seconds of prayer.  The same is true of silence.  You don’t have to become a hermit to experience the joy of silence.  But you can accept that same invitation which the Lord gave the apostles, to come away for a moment and rest a while.  10 minutes a day of resting in silence with the Lord, can be lifechanging.  Don’t be surprised if it’s uncomfortable at first.  But when you create that space, that’s where God can speak to you.  That’s where a peace that the world truly cannot give, can enter your life and transform your heart.  You can become a person who is defined by that peace, who carries it with you, even after that sacred silent time, during the entire rest of your day, for the entire rest of your life.  You can be a person, even when you are walking through one of the dark valleys of life, even if death himself is casting his shadow upon you, still: goodness and kindness can be with you, all the days of your life; and you can dwell in the house of the Lord forever.