There it was, right on schedule, just as it has always appeared October 9 of every year since 1981.  In honor of her late husband John Lennon's birthday, Yoko Ono Lennon had placed a full page ad in The New York Times, saying, simply, "Imagine Peace."
     It's a lovely sentiment, really, one with which all of us, I think, would agree.  We all want peace, peace in our homes, peace in our nation, peace in the world, peace in our inner being.  We all would like a planet permanently free of strife, conflict, and war.

     At the same time, we all recognize that we will probably never experience such a thing.  But our human inclination, that thoroughly human inclination to always want more than what we have at the moment, spurs us on, spurs us on to try.  As a Hebrew psalm (Psalm34) puts it, encouragingly, "Seek peace, and pursue it."
     Lennon's desire was for global peace, and he did what he thought he should do to ensure that it happened.  Apart from supernatural intervention, however, genuine peace will always elude us.  We cannot tame ourselves totally, we cannot order the world to perfection.  We live imperfect lives in an imperfect world, seeing, as the apostle Paul put it, "in a mirror darkly."  We see it, but we don't; taste it, but not really.  It's the inevitable outcome of human fragility.
     So, over thirty years since Lennon's passing, what can we do?  Many things, but perhaps the most seminal and important, from my standpoint, is to acknowledge who we are:  creatures in need of a creator.
     We'll never have peace, genuine peace, until we understand we can't create outselves.