There are not many books that I have gone back to for multiple reads, but one that I have and regularly recommend to others is the small but profound Searching for and Maintaining Peace by Fr Jacques Philippe. The book’s short sections make it perfect content for retreats, daily prayer times or night reading, especially if you are, as the preface suggests, keen to acquire the peace of Christ in this time of “agitation and inquietude”.

Hearing that my wife was pregnant again, this time with our third child, I felt it was time for a re-read, and was immediately struck by the passage focused on in the book’s opening chapter: “Without me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Reading these words, this call to surrender entirely to Christ, I recognised how numbed I had become to the idea of surrender. For so long, due to its common recurrence in spiritual teaching, songs and testimonies, it had been reduced to a buzzword in my life. It was something understood and believed in intellectually, but which lacked any resonance in my heart. Something I could encourage other people to practise, while blindly not recognising the many ways I still cling to self-dependence.

In many ways, this is no surprise. The symbiotic relationship between surrender and peace, which Philippe deems foundational in his book, can seem jarring to our modern minds. As our Western world has become increasingly captured by an ethos of individualism, we have forgotten the fruits that come from being dependent on God and one another, and instead have made a golden calf out of the secular trinity: me, myself and I. What is harder is that our relative material comfort means relying on ourselves is, at a surface level, quite achievable. Moreover, such a mindset has been infused with genuine virtue, making it hard to mark out its excesses.

As I have journeyed through my twenties, got married, found employment and begun raising a family, I have become increasingly comfortable with, and even found meaning in, the idea that at least three people in the world depend on me. This is no bad thing. The aspiration to, as Richard Reeves puts it, become a man of “surplus value” is a significant driving force in my life, and has been for generations of men before me. And yet the truth we must all reckon with is that our finitude, by definition, means we cannot be fully relied upon if we are not also reliant on something bigger than ourselves.

Reflecting on these words from Christ, I have found that my pursuit of peace by material means has left me like a dog running after his own tail. Instead, all I need to do is remain grafted to the vine and open. In Psalm 23:5 we read: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies; thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.” My instinct towards material solutions for dealing with the enemies of my mind could be likened to filling half the table with my own food, or half the cup with my own drink, before allowing God to provide anything. God is calling me to clear the table of my heart, empty the cup of my mind and be open for Him to fill it with His spirit of peace. It is a hard and necessary task for all who desire to be close to Him in our age of relentless distraction, but as He cautions His disciples, without doing so I can do nothing.