Several years ago I heard a pastor define peace, the shalom of God, as right-functioning—everything working in harmony as it was meant to. That description, so counter to the “Silent Night” idea of peace, resurfaces in my mind every advent season when we reach the week of Peace.
I have heard some terrible sermons on peace. Most sermons about anxiety and depression make my anxiety and depression worse. In the mixed messages I’ve heard, one repeated theme seems to be that I can choose to be peaceful. I’m going to give you a little insider tip here: that doesn’t work. Maybe for some people, but not for me, and not for most people I know who struggle with mental health.
The relationship between artists and the church has frequently been a tenuous one. The church often doesn’t understand art, and we artists bristle and pout when misunderstood. As an alumnus of a Christian university, I have seen the morass of this relationship up close and personal.
In the past several years, church has grown increasingly difficult for me. Some days just being in a church building sends my anxiety levels through the roof, and I have never managed to choose myself out of a panic attack. But if shalom is right-functioning, peace is less about what I feel and more about what I do with what I feel. And if Christ has come to carry our sorrows and suffering, right-functioning means letting him do that. It may seem strange to wrap sorrows and anxiety in a bundle together, but I find that most of my anxiety stems from past sorrows; my subconscious mind fears for my safety in religious settings because parallel situations have damaged me so deeply in the past.
I long for a day when church brings the presence of God for me, but for now, church provides a playing field for me to practice shalom. Now, to be blunt, I’m terrible at letting God carry my suffering, partly because it’s such a vague concept. “Turn it over to God” sounds lovely but doesn’t seem at all practical. I try to visualize it like a game of hot potato. When a sermon illustration nails me with a hot potato of anxiety, I recognize it as a scalding lump of sorrow that I am completely incapable of dealing with myself. So much of our pain comes from sin, whether our own or others’, and the weight of sin-caused suffering is as impossible for us to carry as the sin itself. And so I lob the hot potato of pain to God. I still get stinging fingers out of the bargain, but the potato isn’t my problem to deal with.
I wish I could say you throw the potato once and move on, but I tend to find myself throwing the same potatoes over and over. Much like sanctification, peace is a process. Sometimes I wonder why I should put myself back in the narrative of a community that so often completely misses the value of what I do, especially when the institutions that hurt me most ought to be the epitome of shalom. For those of us who have experienced the failures of faith-based organizations firsthand, the call to offer beauty in the place of brokenness pushes just about every button we have.
Yet Christ continually extends grace to his church and works to refine her, and we the church are responsible to be a part of this refining shalom process. For me, practicing shalom looks like going to church on Sunday, catching a lot of hot potatoes of anxiety, and hopefully throwing a few more to God this week for him to handle than I did last week. For others, practicing shalom looks like Elijah in the wilderness, stepping back from the clamor and dysfunction to eat, sleep, and wait for a still, small voice.
I find myself drawn back to the words of the prophet Jeremiah, calling the people of Israel to plant gardens in Babylon and to seek the good of the city. Even in exile, God called his people to offer beauty as the best path to restoration. All throughout Scripture, God meets humankind in beauty: in the garden of Eden, the tabernacle, the temple, in wondrous visions and choirs of angels. And artists offer beauty as an intrinsic part of who we are; we bleed out an inner need to beautify the world around us.
In the last five years, I have experienced a dissonant lack of shalom, the sinking feeling that “this is not how things are meant to be.” But I think the church’s path to shalom lies in beauty, and so I continue to plant my gardens.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.