Prayer of St. Francis - A Meditation
The 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 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.
Amen.
This week I got angry. A friend of mine has been badly wounded by the church he pastors, by people who should know better. I am sure that the people involved believe they have good reasons for conducting themselves as they have done, reasons that can be made to sound spiritual, and sincere. But the way they have gone about it has been very poor indeed. So I got angry.
I haven’t yet decided what my response needs to be, or even if I need to make a response, to what has happened, beyond supporting my friend. But this week has been very useful in bringing home to me that my own “righteous” anger actually has no place in that response. I might have good reasons for feeling angry. But I need to find a way to respond in love. Which may still mean making some kind of formal objection to this church, or drawing attention to the hurt they have caused. But not in order to make myself feel better, or to make them feel bad. Not because I have something to get off my chest, or because I want to wound them. If those are my motives, then I should just keep my mouth shut.
These reflections came about as I was preparing worship for Carey College - a service that included Sarah McLachlan’s musical setting of the Prayer of St Francis. I was driving to the chapel service, and singing that prayer. And I got stuck on the lines: ‘where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon.’ And this situation with my friend and his church flashed into my head. In that instant I realised that I had been reacting out of my own tendency to wrath, and not seeing this situation with the eyes of God.
Where there is injury…pardon. Of course, it’s not my place to pardon an injury that has not been done to me. But I realised that what I was doing in my anger was choosing to place myself in solidarity with the injured party, not for his sake, but so as to fan into life, to give expression to, the ever-present flames of revenge and retaliation within myself. As long as I do that, there is no way that I can be an instrument of peace…for my friend, and within the wider church setting.
The following day, I started reading this book: Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, and was struck by the following passage -
As we ask the question ‘Who is Christ for us today?’ it is increasingly meaningless to answer with the traditional teaching that he is the Saviour of our individual souls. In what sense can individual strands be torn from the one fabric of reality and be considered complete? My well-being will come only in relationship to our well-being and the well-being of all things. We are being invited to seek a new salvation.
In a time when people are longing for peace, for a sense of connectedness with the whole, with others, with our hurting earth…what is a Christian vision of wholeness, of goodness? How can we be Christ-followers in a way that honours the well-being of all things?
Last Sunday Jeannie led us in some reflections to do with the Body of Christ, in particular the communion meal as a re-membering, a putting back together, of that which is broken within humanity. We read the Scripture passage about the Body from 1 Corinthians. We reflected on an image of an inclusive Last Supper.
I’d like to stay with these themes, by reflecting on the Prayer of St. Francis, a prayer for peace, a prayer that seeks the good of the whole.
The first verse of the prayer is a litany of what peace looks like in its fullness. Peace, as we’ve considered before when we were looking the Beatitudes, is not simply the absence of conflict, but it is the presence of Christ, the restoration of all things into union with God. Our task, as Christian people, is to be instruments of this fullness, this restoration.
Where there is hatred, it is for us to bring love…not just to denounce the hatred, or, worse, to contribute to it. That means not meeting the hatred we see outside of us with the quiet hatred that lurks in our own hearts. But to meet it with practical steps to transform that hatred into love.
Where there is injury, especially injury to ourselves, our task is to forgive, or to be an agent of reconciliation, without glossing over the pain of the injury.
Where there is doubt, it is not for us to dismiss, or to answer the doubt, unless an answer is being sought, but to keep our faith and to live our faith, and to be alongside people’s doubt in ways that encourage them to keep searching.
Where there is despair, it is for us to hold on to hope. Holding hope is a profound task. Someone who is in despair cannot hold hope for themselves. We can’t ask that of them. That is the nature of despair. It’s lonely, and it’s hope-less. What we can do is to hope on their behalf, and to try to cushion the practical effects of the despair on their life.
It is not for us to ignore the extent of someone’s despair, but it is also not for us to enter into the despair with them. Rather, we quietly hope, we pray, and we wait. We occasionally express our hope, without forcing it down their throat, and without expecting the other to take it on board or do anything with it.
Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy. This does not mean that we are relentlessly happy or positive. It does not mean that we insensitively trample into people’s pain or their difficulty with our bright smiles, our solutions and our cheerfulness. But neither do we let our light become dark, or our joy turn to sadness, when we are in the midst of others’ pain. This is often the direction that things flow in - the gravitational pull is toward the negative. That way lies burn out for the person who cares, who is alongside darkness and sadness, whether professionally or in friendship. Our light cannot be self-generated, or it will go out when confronted with the horror of the darkness. It needs to be the reflected light of God, who says ‘let there be light’…God the creator of light. Our only responsibility is to clean and focus the mirror that does the reflecting. And our joy is not the brittle happiness that comes from clowning people from tears to smiles, but the joy of knowing that there is no place, no matter how dark and how sad, that is outside God’s embrace.
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;
To be an instrument of peace, is as simple and as difficult as rising above what we need for ourselves, in order to meet the needs of another person, or the needs of a situation. In Philippians we read: ‘If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.’
If ever there were a recipe for martyrdom this sounds like it might be it! But this not a plea to put ourselves down and to exercise false humility, or to neglect or mistreat ourselves. This teaching, and the Prayer of St Francis, assumes that we are to some degree in touch with God, the source and depth of our true selves. It assumes that we are on the path of transformation. And that we are ready to learn the most paradoxical lesson of our faith, which is that if I want to save my own life, I will lose it, but if I am ready to lose my life for Christ’s sake, I will gain it. When my heart is able to reach out to another, even when I feel fragile myself, when I seek deeply to understand another even when I feel misheard and unrecognised, when I can give love even when I do not feel like I am receiving it in return…then I am inches from eternity, and I stand at the door of God’s realm.
To look not to my own interests, but to the interests of others, is to trust that my needs will be cared fo—that God is hovering over the situation ready to give me what I need with each step I take toward the goodness of the whole.
In our world, we have done a lot of good work on recognising human rights, and protecting the rights of the most vulnerable. This is important. However, on the path to human maturity there is a step beyond enshrining rights. This is the step of willingly forgoing our own rights for the sake of others. Nobody can ask this of us, or force it on another. Only someone who knows who they are - a person who knows themselves to be God’s beloved child - can choose this. And it is the central path of our faith. Because Jesus is our Way, our Truth and our Life. In order to show God’s love to us, Jesus transcended the same temptations that face us all, and then some.
He overcame our natural human desire to avoid suffering
He overcame the temptation to have a ‘successful ministry’ on any human measure
He overcame the temptation to prove himself, to show up his opponents, to exercise his considerable power to vindicate himself.
And in the end he gave up his grasp on life itself, under the most gruelling and distorting conditions.
We, on the other hand, like to identify our needs, and then hope that everybody else will meet them. We have many tools at our disposal to do this - the Enneagram and other personality maps, and therapeutic relationships are very useful for helping us to realise what our primary needs are, and therefore the things that we are most likely to react to. But the purpose of these things is not to make us more articulate about ourselves so that we can take up residence in our smallness, and invite the world to meet us on those terms. The idea of identifying our primary needs is to recognise how they make us un-free…how they hold us hostage to a particular view of the world, and make our reactions predictable. The point is to seek the healing and transformation of these knee-jerk, or compulsive, responses. When we can let our needs go in favour of a greater good, of a wider well-being, then we are stepping into freedom - the kind of freedom that generates compassion.
Can you think of an occasion recently when you said, or did something out of a need for another person’s approval? Or to control a situation so that the outcome was what you wanted it to be?
Or, can you think of a conversation recently where you felt your heart beat a little bit faster, or when you started interrupting the other person, because you needed to get across that you were right, or justified in what you were saying?
Or, can you think of a time recently when you’ve put another person down, or cast them in a negative light, or laughed about them, so as to see yourself as one of the ‘good guys’ - on the winning side, or the righteous side, or the reasonable side?
Or, can you think of a time when you were being asked to look at something painful and difficult about yourself, and instead of entering an honest change process, you simply defended yourself and moved on?
Jesus leads us into an upside-down world, where in giving, we receive, in pardoning, we are pardoned, and in dying that we are born to eternal life. It feels counter-intuitive. It cuts across all our protective mechanisms. But it is the path to freedom and wholeness not just for ourselves as individuals, but for the whole Body…the body that hurts when one part hurts. And for the earth, that groans as we humans, in our un-health, ravage the very life that sustains us.
I’ll play now the Sarah McLachlan track, and I invite you to treat this prayer like Lectio Divina… to notice the line that most stands out for you, and to dwell with it, meditate on it, let images and associations flow into your mind and heart, and to bring all these things to God in silent prayer.