"Peace on Earth..."

"Peace on Earth; good will to men..."

The other day, I started to think about the word "peace;" it's a word we seem to take for granted, especially this time of year.

Words change over time, and not only in their sounds, like the garbled messages at the end of a long game of "Telephone." Their meanings change subtly, too. And just as you can gain deeper understanding of a person through learning about their life's journey, so you can gain deeper understanding of words by learning about their etymology. And sometimes, like a grizzled traveler, they're carrying secrets in their baggage that make you look at them in a whole new light.

So, this afternoon, I took one of my favorite books, The Roots of English: A Reader's Handbook of Word Origins by Robert Claiborne,* down from the shelf and looked up PEACE in the word index. I was led to this (Page 142):

PAG-, PAK-, L pangere, pact-, fasten, fix, whence COMPACT ("fixed together") and PEACE (when enemies are "fastened together" by a PACT), whence PACIFY [. . .]

L palus, a stake (fixed in the ground), > the PALE or PALING made of stakes or POLES. [. . .] Also < the "stake" sense is L pagus, (staked out) boundary, hence village, hence countryside, whence PEASANT, paganus, countryman, hence civilian, > PAGAN (a "civilian" not in the army of Christ).

It is perhaps disapointing that a word so many of us associate with serenity and idyllic freedom has, at its core, such strong ties to the concept of force -- whether the bodily force assoicated with tying something down, or the conceptual force of laws and treaties, or the energetic force of a peasant wresting food from the soil, and domesticating herds of animals, and keeping them in pens. We'd rather associate "Peace" with life in the Garden of Eden, than with the life of toil and pain that came after the exile.

And yet...

I'm reminded of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall":

. . . The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.

The pat interpretation of this poem, the one most American students are taught, in Junior High Englsh class, is that the narrator represents the enlightened, peaceful, view, and the neighbor, who insists on repeating: "Good fences make good neighbors," as unenlighteded and belligerent: "Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top / In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. / He moves in darkness as it seems to me."^

But maybe, considering that fences, themselves, are at the very root of "peace," that pat interpretation has got it the wrong way 'round. After all, without the wall to mend, would the neighbors meet at all? Would there be any occasion for them to cooperate, despite their differing points of view, and do the delicate work of balancing stone on stone?

Psychologically, too, boundaries are important for our "peace of mind--" knowing how to give ourselves the safe space necessary to rest. Knowing that the boundaries are there, even with our loved ones, when there is no threat of attack, grants us the confidence to know that each of us is unique, and each of us has special gifts to give the world. Without some sort of boundary, there'd be no meeting place, no point of exchange, trick-or-treat, Jolly Wassail, or generosity.

Peace on Earth.


*(1989, Times Books, a division of Random House, New York).

^The complete etext of Mending Wall, by Robert Frost