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Different from all merely natural peace, however perfect, is the peace emanating from the saints: this blessed harmony entirely sui generis, this flowering of the supernatural life implanted in them by Baptism; this soaring peace resplendent with Redemption and ringing with the note of victory over the world, which could never arise from their mere participation in the intrinsic harmony of values but alone from their harmony with God the thrice Blessed.

Peace through our being “sheltered” in the living God

In close connection with the peace of such communion with God, we perceive one more mark of true peace, which is a state of “being sheltered” proper to the soul that rests in the living God. In contradistinction to the metaphysical precariousness of the state of man left to himself, to the anxiety that must fill everyone who draws the full consequences from the concept of a world without God, to the fearful unrest oppressing one who has awakened to the metaphysical situation of man unreconciled with His Creator—and knows “how terrible it is to fall into the hands of the living God”—he who is redeemed by Christ experiences that he is sheltered in God.

The world of values, the realm of impersonal ideas, cannot relieve us of the unrest that arises from our anxiety in facing the dark gate of death, from our concern about everything we love, from the irremediable insecurity of our fate. But he who takes shelter in the infinite love of a personal and almighty God may say with the Psalmist: “But I have put my trust in Thee, O Lord. I said: Thou art my God; my days are in Thy hands” (Ps. 30:15-16). He knows that God loves all those who are particularly dear to him infinitely more than he could love them himself; that “the very hairs of their heads are all numbered.” He has received from Our Lord’s mouth the words: “Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom” (Luke 12:32).

Indeed, let us imagine even a condition in which no evil would threaten us any longer and in which we might eternally contemplate impersonal values; a condition like dwelling in the heaven of Ideas which Plato puts before our eyes. Such a mode of being would still cany with it an ultimate note of forlornness and anxiety. In this apersonal world, we should still be abandoned to ourselves and closed up in our finiteness. We cannot be sheltered as finite persons, except in an infinite Person, who alone can fully comprehend us and lift us from the state of dereliction that is inherent in our finiteness. Only a personal face-to-face relationship with the infinite person of God can make us participate in infinite being. The almighty God alone can thus hold and sustain us so that we may say to Him: “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.”

Deep peace may yet be disturbed by lesser disharmonies

So much, then, for the essence and the aspects of true inward peace. Every living member of the Mystical Body of Christ, aware of Redemption and in the state of grace, possesses this true peace. Yet, although to the redeemed is given peace in the basic metaphysical sense, on the plane of their human existence they still may be inwardly torn and experience disharmonies.

Only a false response to our metaphysical situation can deprive us of peace essentially; but various false attitudes to purely creaturely things may still disturb the harmony and damage the peace of our souls. Even though the adequate basic response is firmly established in the concept and the conduct of out life, its victorious extension to all single departments thereof and the concrete realization of everything it implies will still mean a further ascent to higher religious levels. This is precisely the course we must follow in the process of our transformation in Christ; a course which also implies a strengthening and a qualitative enhancement of the basic response itself.

So long as we do not live integrally by Christ and in Christ, we may possess metaphysical peace to a certain