Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

In recent years, this has become one of my most favorite prayers.  It is lovely, and just one reading of it brings a sense of peace and calm to my soul.  It is a prayer that we can all get behind.

Except when you look a little deeper, it isn't.  These are hard words; convicting.  Of course, I want the world to be full of those things: love, peace, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy.  But do I really want to be the one to bring them about?  Can I do that hard work?  When I look at the second part of the prayer, I can see the real challenge that has been issued.  A prayer to make myself less important in the world around me.  This Prayer of Saint Francis is a sneak attack.  At one glance, it asks us to pray for goodness in our world. Take another look, and it sidles right up next to the Litany of Humility with its brazen challenge to the pray-er.  

...that others may increase and I may decrease...

This beautiful prayer of peace is asking God to make me different.  Not the rest of the world.  Lord, make me to sow love.  Lord, make me to sow pardon.  Lord, make me to sow light.

That is a far cry from what I usually sow.  I don't know about you, but I tend to hyper-focus on sadness, devastation, and injustice for but a few breaths.  I pause, with the rest of the world when crisis happens.  I cry heavenward and rail against the suffering that we all feel.  And then, over the course of a few days or weeks or even minutes, I move on.  And I go through my life sowing the more persistent weed of indifference or selfishness.  Impatience and self-importance. 

Once, I had an experience that seared my own unkindness into my brain.  I was on my way to lead music for a retreat, and I was riding with a friend.  We went through a McDonald's drive-thru and I was floored by her unabashed generosity of spirit.  She chatted up the drive-thru attendant as though they were great friends who had known each other for years.  She didn't even bat an eye when the service was slow.  She showed genuine love and care for this person whom we had never met nor would likely ever see again.  She went out of her way to sow light.  And here I was, about to spend a whole weekend teaching young people about how much Christ loves them.  And I couldn't believe how well she loved this stranger.  

Far too often I am quick to speak and slow to listen.  Far too often I fight to make myself understood, rather than to understand the other.  Far too often I honk at the driver who ticked me off on the highway, rather than just yielding.  Far too often I am unforgiving.  Far too often I think only of myself.  

Our world is fallen and broken.  It is hard to think of the things that make it that way without getting paralyzed by anger.  But our God has given us to each other.  We can do the holy work of sowing peace, justice, truth, love, light, and joy.  But it starts with knees to the ground and eyes to the heavens.  It starts right here, in my own home and my own heart.  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.