The Why Beneath it All

Years ago, I attended a business training where the speaker had us do the “5 Whys” exercise. The point of the exercise was to understand why we were motivated to work the business and to ask the question “why” 5 times to move past the obvious answers and dig deeper.

When I followed the question all the way down, my answer surprised me a little.

Peace. I wasn’t looking for greater success or more recognition. I wasn’t looking for achievement in the usual sense. My soul wanted peace.

What peace truly is has become something of an investigation for me. I have found it to be the relaxation in my body that happens when I feel at ease with life. It is the feeling of light in my body when I speak my truth, a sense of harmony in my body and coherence in my energy field. It’s the quiet moments with my family or my partner where there’s deep connection, laughter, no agenda. Peace has become a source of truth for me, a north star that helps me know when I am living in alignment with what matters most.

We may think the idea of striving for peace sounds trite or idealistic. But when we dig deep enough to understand what we truly want, many of us eventually land there.

Often the goals we chase — success, security, recognition, freedom — are simply different paths toward the same sacred place.

I grew up Catholic. When I later realized I had gifts that Christianity didn’t seem to recognize, I felt the need to find bridges back to the God I knew while also exploring what those gifts meant and the direction that discovery might take me.

Along the way, I began to notice something important.

God was bigger than any religion we follow. The sacred truths we seek seem to appear across traditions, languages, and ways of understanding the world.

Over time I began to see that many of the bridges between spirituality, science, and Christianity point back to something familiar — the language of the Holy Trinity. A trinity larger than any religion.

And within that trinity is a movement toward harmony, coherence… and ultimately peace.

When I wrote the book Awakened Faith, Learning to Live the Lord’s Prayer in the Spirit of Christ, I found myself returning to this idea again and again: that what we are really seeking in life is not simply success or achievement, but a deeper alignment within ourselves and with the sacred that moves through everything. Central to that alignment is finding peace within ourselves, peace in our relationships, peace on Earth, and peace throughout the universe.

If we trace our whys back far enough, we may find we are looking for that peace, that ease, that calm, and stillness. A world where war is not the answer, where othering becomes so rare we don’t even know what it is. Where gossip is a thing of the past, and hate has dissolved completely into a bed of loving light. Where love lives so large that peace bridges any separation we once believed was real.

I would submit that it’s why we’re here. Perhaps peace isn’t just something we hope for, but something we’re here to remember.