"Gie's peace!" The phrase is a Scottish contraction of "Give us peace". It's a plea, but the tone is an urgent demand! Usually it's a clear sign of frustration, impatience, even exhaustion. It mostly arises from anger and powerlessness, and usually means "I've had enough!"
"Gie's peace!" is always an interruption of a conversation, a signal that whatever is happening or being said should stop. In more formal language it is a "cease and desist" order.
"Gie's peace!" is an expression of a person's need for respite, relief, and time for recovery of inner equilibrium because somehow the world out there, with its tirade of words coming at us, the conveyor belt of happenings that keep on coming and that we have to cope with, they're all too much.
And here's the thing. "Gie's peace!" is often said to those who are nearest to us, a cry of the heart to those who care about how we feel. It erupts in the context of a relationship of trust, the best place for a cry for peace to be heard, and understood.
At heart "Gie's peace!" is a cry for help, support and understanding. It's a desperate response to whatever is coming at us, other people's words, demands, criticisms, or just the cumulative impact of too many expectations. And so the prayer is uttered, "Gie's peace!"
There. I've said it. "Gie's peace!" is a prayer. Short, to the point, from the heart, to God. It arises from pain, frustration, and a heart pushed to its limits. It can even be used as a prayer response.
Really? With the full range of meanings and situations just described? Telling God we've had enough? That it's all too much? In the face of life's too-muchness, can we really tell God to "cease and desist"? Perhaps not. But then again, perhaps.
If we ask God for peace we should be careful and care-filled with what we ask.
Peace isn't, and cannot be a self-preserving inner immunity to the world's suffering.
Peace isn't, and cannot be, contentment and passivity in the face of injustice and cruelty, or indifference and complacency about poverty and oppressive systems.
Peace isn't, and cannot be, about my personal piety and spiritual wellbeing; there are communities out there, indeed a community of communities, but riven by division, not helped by divisive rhetoric and fuelled suspicions.
Peace isn't and cannot be, for the church but not for the world, for us but not for them, for our way of life to be protected while others' ways of life are devastated by market forces, climate change, long term enmities and wars, and oppressive persecutory regimes.
"Lord, gie's peace!" is a prayer that respects the apostrophe. It means "Lord give us peace". In prayer before "The Father from whom his whole family in heaven and in earth derives its name", 'us' is a universal; just as "Give us this day our daily bread" is a prayer for a hungry world just as much as for our own table.
"Lord gie's peace!" There's a case to be made for a responsive prayer, written out of our frustration and exhaustion in the face of a suffering world. An honest and emotionally freighted prayer, impatient, angry, trustful but struggling, pleading and yet a demand, peremptory and yet persistent. The One we address is the God of Peace; the world we live in is facing a huge peace deficit; we connect those two poles of our existence together when, standing in our place in the world, we dare to pray, "Lord, gie's peace!"
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