Story by Joe Pisani

I suppose it’s a measure of my intelligence that I find some of the deepest thinking on bumper stickers. In fact, I’d rather read bumper stickers than plod through Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Stephen Hawking.

Who wants to spend hours, trying to get through a 400-page tome when you can be enlightened in a matter of moments while you’re stuck in a traffic and spot a bumper sticker with simple wisdom like “I believe in a better world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.”

With bumper stickers, you can achieve enlightenment in the most unlikely places and at the most convenient times, when you need to be uplifted.

We’ve all seen bumper stickers that proclaim eternal truths in the fewest possible words. Then, there are bumper stickers that are nasty, vulgar and political. I admit that sometimes I’m discouraged to learn someone I respect voted for So&So. (How could they be so stupid?)

For now, however, I’ll stick to wisdom my father shared with me, which was on the bumper of his Ford van — “Live and Let Live.” It was a saying he learned in AA.

The world would be a better place if we all lived and let live. There would be no divisions in America, there would be no war, there would be no mean-spirited media commentary, there would no vicious politics.

My father’s other bumper sticker had another AA slogan that said, “A Day at a Time.” Advice like that comes in handy when you’re stuck in gridlock on I-95 at rush hour, or worse, when you’re coming off a flight at JFK on a Friday afternoon, struggling to get back to Connecticut on the Van Wyck Expressway. Sometimes, he told me, you have to take it an hour at a time.

Bumper stickers range from the inane to the irreverent, from the profound to the boastful, such as “The Proud Parent of a Shelton Middle School Honor Student” or “This car made it up Mount Washington.”

There’s also humor. We’re all familiar with “Baby on Board,” but how about “Adults on board — we want to live too.” One of my favorites is “Be nice to your kids. They’ll choose your nursing home.” There’s quite a few “I brake for ….” bumper stickers, which include everything from wildlife to yard sales and tailgaters.

There’s even a genre known as “Bumper sticker theology.” One of my favorites is “Save America — Pray the Rosary. Many of them focus on Jesus. When you think about it, Jesus bumper stickers could be the first encounter some people have with the Son of God, so I consider them a form of street evangelization. (Or aggravation for angry atheists.)

The Holy Spirit is always at work even in a traffic jam, and I’m convinced he can open up a person’s heart a crack given the opportunity. That would let Christ enter, and from there, only God knows where the encounter will lead.

There are also humorous Jesus bumper stickers, such as “Do you follow Jesus this closely?” “Jesus 2024 — our only hope.” “Jesus is coming back — look busy.”

Some of the most popular include “Jesus loves you,” along with “Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.” And “Try Jesus. If you don’t like him, Satan will always take you back.”

I’ve seen “Jesus is my anchor,” not to mention the immortal words that Jesus gave to St. Faustina: “Jesus, I trust in you.”

One of the most profound Jesus bumper stickers I’ve ever seen was four simple words: “No Jesus, no peace.”

I first saw it while I was driving on I-91, distracted as usual about what I had to do, what I didn’t do and what I was doing … until I spotted the bumper sticker on an old Toyota.

They were four words with a message that could change your life forever: “No Jesus, no peace.”

We live in an age when too many people pursue fake peace and false alternatives to the true peace that only Jesus can give. Instead, they select counterfeit peace by pursuing New Age philosophies, pop psychology, addictions and consumerism.

I have friends and family members who give Jesus only a fraction of their attention because they’re constantly focused on their careers, their romantic relationships, their political agendas, the pursuit of pleasure and possessions, the opinion of others, and moving up in the world. They’ll never have real peace until they shift their focus to Jesus.

As he, himself, said: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”

No Jesus, no peace.