The Peace Prayer

Many years ago, I came across this prayer–very well known in Catholic circles, but I was a Protestant at the time and hadn’t run into it before. And it was so beautiful that it stole my breath. So beautiful that I shushed everyone in the car and read it aloud to them. We were sitting in line for a car wash at the time. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do, LOL. I remember the kids behind me, David beside me, and these words filling the space.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
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.

It’s known as “The Peace Prayer” or “The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi.” If you’re not familiar with St. Francis, he was born to a noble family in 1181 but felt a call to join the Church. He gave up everything, donned a coarse brown habit, and went to live in the woods. Stories say he was able to speak to the animals. And soon, he began to draw people to his austere way of life because of his fire for the Lord. He founded what we now call the Franciscan Order.

He was a man who chose to live outside of the demands of society so that he could be a pure instrument of the Lord…which had a profound effect on society. He shunned material wealth in pursuit of spiritual riches. And this prayer is just one small part of his legacy.

This prayer is one that has taken up residence in my soul. My church has recently begun reciting it at the very start of every service, and so it’s been fresh on my mind. As I meditate on it, I decided it would be fun to really look deep into each line. 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…

It leads off, of course, with the main goal. That we, as children of God, would be instruments of His peace. What does that mean? Well, Francis goes through the how, but let’s first examine what it is and why we’d want it.

As I reminded us in my Word of the Week this week, the primary definition of peace has always been “freedom from civil disorder or war.” If we are asking to be instruments of peace, that means that we want to be used to stop unrest. We want to be the means by which disorder is halted. We want to be the ones to lead the way in laying down arms and instead holding their arms out wide like Christ did for us. If we are instruments of peace, we do not seek division but unity. We do not seek to win but to reconcile.

Is that what we desire today? Truly? In this world, this country that is so divided…are we actually praying to be used for peace or are we instead praying that our enemies be cut down and silenced? Something to think about, isn’t it? Because peace is not about winning, friends. Peace is about halting the fight entirely. Now. Assuming we want to do that (and even if we’re not there yet, I hope we can agree it’s what we should want), how do we do it? Francis provides us with quite the road map.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love…

Where is there hatred? Everywhere. It’s all around us, and you don’t have to do more than turn on the news or scroll social media to see the proof of that. 

That’s not the most dangerous hatred though. The most dangerous hatred isn’t what’s without. It’s what’s within.

When we harbor animosity for someone, when we want to shout “What’s wrong with you??”, when our pulse pounds with outrage over the stance someone is taking…friends, this is hatred. We as Christians don’t usually want to call it such, because we know we shouldn’t hate. But it doesn’t matter what we call a thing if we’re doing the action of that thing. We cannot condemn their “hate-filled speech” in words that return the hate and maintain any kind of moral ground just because we use synonyms instead of the word itself.

Even if we don’t want to admit our feelings are that intense though…are we sowing love? Do we meet each horrible thing that someone else does with a good response of our own. Is our first response to pray for them, pray the Lord shows them His mercy and grace, pray that they embrace a full relationship with Him. Do we earnestly seek their good?

And more–are we acting on it? Sowing is an active verb. It’s what farmers do with seeds. We need to be PLANTING peace all around us, friends, especially where there is hatred.

And that active sowing, that planting, is what governs the next few phrases too.

Where there is injury, pardon

We are all familiar with injury. Sometimes it’s physical, sometimes it’s emotional. Sometimes it involves our bodies, sometimes it involves our circumstances. I’ll admit it–when I learned that the health care subsidies were being let to lapse and my insurance rates could skyrocket up to $20,000 a year, I felt that like a wound to my chest. It hurt. Not just that my government would choose to do it, but that so many people insisted this was a necessary cut of wasteful, fraudulent spending. It didn’t feel that way to me. It felt like people were saying, “I don’t care if you can afford your healthcare.”

I could choose to sow bitterness. I could choose to sow vengeance. I could choose to sow hatred. Instead, God calls me sow–to plant, to pursue–pardon.

That means I need to go out of my way to forgive and to wipe the slate clean. Every time we’re hurt, every time we see a hurt in others, we shouldn’t be building a wall. We shouldn’t be making a case against them. We shouldn’t be adding to a list of ways they’ve wronged us.

We should be holding out our hands and offering forgiveness and reconciliation. 

Where there is doubt, faith

Doubt. We’re going to run into this too, first in our hearts and minds, and certainly in the world around us. Believing in something unseen is hard. Believing in a God who is good when our world is filled with evil can be a challenge. Clinging to faith when we feel alone and forsaken can seem impossible.

But faith is not a feeling. Faith a substance. It IS the evidence, not the thing we need evidence of. Faith is the manifestation of hope and the proof of all we can’t see or know with our senses. And this is the thing we plant in fields of doubt. First in our own hearts and then in those around us.

Plant the truth of the God who sees, the God who knows, the God who loves, the God who wills our best. Plant the truth of the God who sacrificed His one and only Son for us. Plant the certainty that Christ remade the entire fabric of the universe and that there is something better than this world waiting…something that has come into this world through Him. His kingdom is HERE, friends. It’s now. And we are how the world sees it.

Are we planting that reality in the fields of doubt around us, showing it through love, being the hands and feet of Christ to an aching world?

Where there is despair, hope

In many languages, these two words are clearly opposites even in their form and spelling. In French, for instance, they’re espoir (hope) and desespoir (despair, literally “un-hope”). This is certainly true in the Latin that St. Francis would have written this prayer in as well, with hope being sper and despair (you can already see it, right?) desperatio. (From which we get both despair and desperation.)

The relationship between the two words isn’t so clear in English because we use the Latinate for despair but an Old Norse root for hope. 

They are irreversibly linked though. They share a root. They are opposites. So where we see despair and desperation, our job is to hack off that prefix. To take out the “not.” Banish the un-maker. And plant instead the root of the word.

Hope. Hope means “trust in our salvation,” friends. “To have confidence.” And its very definition is rooted in the trust we have in God.

We are NOT always going to feel it. But again, faith and trust are not feelings, they are actions, and those actions bear the fruit of hope. Spread that hope all around you and all throughout yourself. Choose hope. Choose trust. 

Where there is darkness, light

Oh friends, the world looks so dark, doesn’t it? Every generation, we think this is the darkest it’s been. But every generation has thought so. Because the darkness has always been pervasive. 

And that’s why God sent a Light into the world. 

When I was in middle school, I bought this tiny little doll-sized book of quotes. It was maybe 2 or 3 inches by 4 or 5 inches. Such a cute little thing, I couldn’t resist. And I read through it many times. One of the quotes in there was this: “There are two ways to spread light. To be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

When you don’t feel like you can generate light on your own, that’s okay. You don’t have to. You can REFLECT it instead. When you cannot be the candle, then hold the candle. Hold it aloft to light your own path and to scatter that darkness. 

Because we know the Light. And we are called to be children of that Light. Not of darkness. Don’t let it close in, don’t let it win, but don’t ever think you succeed by fighting it off. We do not fight darkness with things of darkness–violence or hate or resentment or power. We fight darkness by walking into it with the Light of Christ before us. We fight it by shining out His love. 

Where there is sadness, joy.

I love this one. Joy is so important to me, and I have long talked about how it isn’t a feeling either, but a choice. And as such, it’s something we can share. We can spread. 

There is a time to cry, yes. And when we sit with someone in their sorrow or sit alone in our own, the answer to it is not happiness. It’s not necessarily laughter or fun.

The answer is to know that no matter how upset we are, how we’re grieving, how sorrowful we feel, life is still beautiful and God is still good. That when praise does not come easily, we offer it anyway as a sacrifice. And God will see it and pour blessing out upon us. Not physical gifts but Words of Life. He’ll surround us with His love. And we’ll have this deep, abiding knowledge that we are NOT alone, and that we are cherished, and that even the ugly bits–pain and sickness and loss–are an opportunity for Him to provide, to show us His love, and to use us to draw others to Him.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

This line is a setup for the ones to come, governing them all. For everything that follows, we should NOT seek the first, but, with His help, the second, granting that we only servants and that He is our true Lord and Master, the one whose will we have sworn to obey. Even when that means we may not seek…

To be consoled as to console

Let’s face it. We like to be consoled. We like to receive comfort when we’re hurting. We need arms to come around us and encouragement and assurances to buoy us up. We all do.

But we also need to be willing–no, EAGER–to be those arms coming around others. To be that encouragement. To offer that assurance.

Even when we don’t feel the same grief. Even when their loss means our win. Even when we’re still hurting. Because we should not so much seek…

To be understood as to understand

THIS. Oh, guys. I literally had a Christian man on social media tell me I was going to hell because I expressed a desire to understand those who held the “other” position.

Understanding does not mean condoning. Understanding means that we can comprehend a person’s motives and love them. Just as God loves us, even though our ways are certainly His ways, right?

We always want people to understand us. But we’re not nearly so quick to try to understand them. But when we do…when we truly understand someone, we cannot help but love them. It doesn’t mean we agree, it (again) doesn’t mean we condone sin. It means that we literally “stand in the midst of” their thoughts and feelings and circumstances.

We stand with them. Not insisting they move to us, but going to them. Reaching out. And by doing so, seeking not so much…

To be loved as to love.

These days when I think of walking out love, I think my Patrons & Peers group. Just in the last few weeks, they have demonstrated what it meant to seek to love above being loved in so many ways. When one of the ladies realized another was having financial difficulties, she reached out about taking up a love offering for her, and though the other ladies had no idea who it was for, they gave. We ended up sending her about $1,500. When I mentioned to the group a total stranger who’d emailed me, in a dark place and feeling so alone and without hope, they said, “Let’s invite her in. Let’s shower her with cards and gifts and encouragement.”

We all want to receive that love too–of course we do. But when we look beyond ourselves and instead see the aching hearts around us, when we reach out to them and say, “You are seen. You are cherished. Your life is sacred and you have been chosen by the One Living God, you are His precious child and He would literally die for you,” we are answering the most basic call He puts on our lives.

When we seek above all to show His love, it does not return to us void. Even if we’re rebuffed, it’s not returned to us void. Because love will ALWAYS make a difference. Perhaps in the heart of the person you’re loving, perhaps in those who see it, and absolutely within ourselves.

The more we love others, the more we love God, the more aware we are of how He loves us. The more we love others, the closer we draw to Him.

For it is in giving that we receive

When we give that love, that understanding, that consolation; when we sow that joy and light and hope and faith and pardon and love…you know what happens?

We’re filled. The more we pour out, we more that flows in, directly from the hand of God. We don’t do it to receive, but He does not leave us empty. He does not leave us dried up and withered. He fills us to overflowing so that we can keep pouring.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned

The prayer Jesus taught us makes this clear. Forgive us our sins AS we forgive those who sin against us. If we refuse to forgive, then we have effectively frozen our own hearts. And frozen hearts cannot receive the nourishing waters of life. We have to break up that ice, melt it, let the flesh of our hearts soften again, so that we can receive that forgiveness in turn. So that it can pour into us and through us, to revive us and refill us.

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

As an adult decades away from my first reading of the Chronicles of Narnia, I would always say that The Last Battle was my favorite of the series. “Really?” my best friend asked me on a writing retreat, during the time when I was reading the series out loud to my kids. “Why? I found the story not nearly as compelling as the others.”

“It isn’t the story,” I admitted. “I couldn’t have even told you what it was about until I started rereading it. It’s the theology. When I read it as a kid, this story taught me as nothing else ever did that this life is but a poor reflection of Heaven. C. S. Lewis taught me that the best, the pinnacle, the thing we should want most is what’s waiting in the after.”

We cling to this life and we love it because it is a gift from Him. We value it, as we should, because it is sacred and precious.

But it’s only the seed, friends. It’s only the beginning. It’s only the “in a mirror, dimly.” What waits for us is something MORE, something greater, something filled with everything we most desire: Him.

We should yearn for heaven because that’s where Jesus is. And to be with Him will be the fulfillment of our every wish. Just as He died and so broke the chains of death forever, so too we know that when these mortal bodies pass away, it’s just the releasing of the chains. It’s the manacles falling free.

To live…to live is Christ. To share His love, His joy, His peace with those so desperate for it is a beautiful, awe-inspiring, amazing gift that we are given, one to be cherished and taken seriously. But to die? Well, that’s even better. That’s gain. That’s passing into the world where we reign with Christ. Where, from His very throne room, we can sing His praises with the angels and declare the most eternal truth:

“Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty,
    who was and is and is to come!”

He is our every answer. His love is the answer to hatred. His pardon is the answer to injury. His faith is the answer to doubt. His hope is the answer to despair. His Light will forever pierce the darkness and defeat it. And with His joy, no sadness can ever hope to prevail.

This, friends, is what peace means. This is what means to be an instrument of it.

It means putting aside self in favor of Him. It means seeking not our own but His, for the sake of others. It means being to the world what Christ is to us, knowing that to live in Him is but a foretaste of what’s to come.

Quite a prayer, isn’t it? Here’s a little image I made with it to display for myself; you’re welcome to save it and share it too.