Why Peace Is Not a Luxury: Spirituality, Justice, and the Truth About Inner Freedom

A reflection on spirituality, suffering, and why inner freedom has never been dependent on perfect conditions.

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Recently, I spent a peaceful weekend at a class reunion with my seminary peers at Wesley Gardens, a beautiful, spiritual retreat center outside of Savannah, GA.

As I sat on the banks of Moon River, taking a rest during a prayer walk, it struck me that there is a quiet but persistent idea moving through our culture right now: 

That spirituality – “authentic” spirituality, deep peace, transcendence – is only available to those whose lives are stable, resourced, and relatively free from hardship.

The idea is that you need the right conditions, the right environment, or the right circumstances to find peace.

That until then… peace will have to wait.

But I do not believe this is true. In fact, I believe the opposite is closer to the truth.

As a Black woman living in the United States, as a descendant of enslaved people, I come from a lineage that did not have the luxury of waiting for the world to become just before turning toward the sacred.

Spirituals, prayer, cosmologies, and embodied faith were not escapism for my ancestors.  They were technologies of survival and transcendence.

They were how people endured what should have broken them.

They were how people remembered who they were, even when the world denied it.

And this is not unique to only my lineage.

We see it across time and place:

• Monastics who voluntarily renounce comfort in order to encounter the divine more directly

• People living in war-torn regions who, even in the midst of devastation, find moments of surrender, clarity, and prayer

• Communities with very little material security who cultivate deep faith, connection, and inner anchoring

As I reflect, I can clearly see that there are people with everything who are restless.

And people with almost nothing who are at peace.

So peace cannot be what the world gives, it must be what we remember. It must be what we courageously claim as our birthright.

This does not mean that injustice is not real. It is.

It does not mean that systems of harm do not impact our bodies, our lives, and our possibilities. They do.

But it does mean that we must be careful not to make peace contingent on the transformation of conditions that we do not fully control. Because if we do, we will be waiting a very long time.

Perhaps forever.

Peace is not just the reward for a just world.

It is the foundation from which a just world becomes possible.

Thinking this way requires a reversal in thought.

Why? Because Most of us have been taught:

Fix the world… and then you can rest.

Repair the systems… and then you can breathe.

Change the conditions… and then you can feel whole.

But what if this is backwards?

What if the quality of our presence – our groundedness, our clarity, our capacity to remain connected to something deeper than fear – is actually what makes transformation possible in the first place?

At the spiritual retreat, one of my beloved elder seminary peers shared how much she was grieving the state of the world.

As a White woman, she spoke of generations of effort in her family – abolition, justice work, activism – and the pain of feeling as though, despite all of it, the world remains deeply broken.

I felt the truth of her grief deeply, and I also felt something else rise in me, just as clearly and it’s this:

I will not wait for the world to become what it has never been in order to access what has always been available within me.

Not because I don’t care about the world, but because I do. I realize that if I tie my inner state to the condition of the world, I risk losing the very ground from which I can show up with integrity, compassion, and power.

And let me be clear. This is not bypassing. This is not avoidance.

This is discipline and devotion.

This is remembering who I really am and where my power really lies.

The truth is: the  world may remain unjust in many ways. And still, something within us is untouched. Still, something within us is available. Still, something within us can be cultivated, stabilized, and extended outward into how we live, lead, love, and act.

Peace is not the prize at the end of the work.

It is the ground we stand on while doing it.

And it has always been here.