{"id":1375,"date":"2020-09-16T15:42:22","date_gmt":"2020-09-16T19:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redchairblogs.wpengine.com\/holymoly\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2020-09-16T15:42:22","modified_gmt":"2020-09-16T19:42:22","slug":"in-all-its-fullness-may-peace-be-with-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/2020\/09\/16\/in-all-its-fullness-may-peace-be-with-you\/","title":{"rendered":"In All Its Fullness, May Peace Be With You"},"content":{"rendered":"

While in graduate school, I happened to live in one of the most racially diverse zip codes in Chicago. The neighborhood prided itself on this little known fact.<\/span><\/p>\n

Only two blocks west of my apartment was a well-known Jewish neighborhood that had a large synagogue and rabbinical school founded by Russian Jews. Four blocks south of my apartment was a well-known Middle Eastern neighborhood that boasted incredible restaurants. Just north stretched Chicago\u2019s original Koreatown and a few blocks southwest was a Latino neighborhood with specialty grocery stores. If I went further east, I would find a predominantly LGBTQ neighborhood as well as a Vietnamese neighborhood that seemed to have dozens of places to eat pho.<\/span><\/p>\n

I quickly noticed something interesting that would happen to me, depending upon what direction I walked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If I found myself in the Jewish section of my neighborhood, I would be greeted with the phrase, <\/span>Shalom Aleichem<\/span><\/i>. And, if I found myself in the Middle Eastern section a few blocks away, I would be greeted with, A<\/span>s-Salaam-Alaikum. <\/span><\/i>Both greetings mean, \u201cPeace be with you\u201d or \u201cPeace unto you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if every person walking through those neighborhoods was greeted in such a manner or whether it was my long beard and my decent tan at the time that convinced strangers I knew those greetings. But after it occurred almost every day, I decided to learn the proper responses: <\/span>Aleichem Shalom<\/span><\/i> or <\/span>Wa-Alaikum-Salaam<\/span><\/i>, meaning \u201cand peace be yours\u201d or \u201cto you, peace.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In most religious traditions, greeting one another with peace is a common practice. Yet in most religious traditions, peace means more than simply a calm feeling, a lack of conflict or war, or a meditative state of being. Instead, peace means wholeness, wellness, the way things are meant to work, or a return to how all things should be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I think about these greetings as well as this understanding of peace, I want to go around shouting this greeting to everyone I see and praying it actually comes to fruition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

May there be wholeness in your life, may you be truly well and full, may all the things in your life work the way they are supposed to, may things return to how they should be, and may all this be true of our world, too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Next Monday, September 21st, is the International Day of Peace, a 24-hour period devoted to non-violence, to not seeing others as enemies, and hoping for a world to work the way it was designed to work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In honor of this day, the Spiritual Life Center is hosting our annual (and first virtual) Peace Pole Prayer Service. It will be streamed live on <\/span>Facebook<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Twitter<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>YouTube <\/span><\/a>at 2 p.m. this Friday, September 18th. We hope you will join us as we recite prayers and poems, longing for peace in a world that so desperately needs it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And, may peace, in all its fullest definition, be with you. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While in graduate school, I happened to live in one of the most racially diverse zip codes in Chicago. The neighborhood prided itself on this little known fact. Only two blocks west of my apartment was a well-known Jewish neighborhood …<\/p>\n

In All Its Fullness, May Peace Be With You<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nathan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1QIf6-mb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lynchburg.edu\/holymoly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}