“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.
Amen.”
How the prayer of Saint Francis came about.
Great things often have humble origins. The Amazon, the most voluminous river on earth, starts in an insignificant
spring between two fifteen-thousand-foot mountains south of Cuzco in Peru. The São Francisco River, the river that unites us Brazilians, starts in a tiny spring in the heights of the Canastra range in Minas Gerais. Slowly the waters join other waters until they form mighty rivers that empty into the vast sea.
Something similar has happened with the Prayer for Peace. It arose anonymously, out in the periphery, without anyone giving it any particular importance. Soon its beautiful and inspiring content was warming people’s hearts and setting their minds on fire. Like a ray of light travelling through endless space. The Prayer for Peace kept spreading and winning over the world.
Everything in it is true and persuasive. It is so simple that anyone can understand it. It is recited by Buddhist children in Japan, Tibetan monks in India. Muslims in Cairo, Christian popes in Rome, base-community members in Latin America, and even workers in demonstrations and strikes. They all feel that this prayer is a very inspired translation of humankind’s age-old desires. It connects with calls for peace and tolerance, which are absolutely necessary for our current perilous crossing from the local to the global, from the national to the planetary, from many societies to a single world society.
When prayers that are so inspired and universal emerge, it is a sign that their author is the Holy Spirit, who tends to act anonymously in the gentleness of hearts open to the divine. That must have been how the Spirit was at work in the unknown author who, full of spiritual fervor, gave shape to the prayer subsequently attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi.
The Prayer for Peace first appeared in 1913 in a small local magazine in Normandy, France. It was unsigned, and had been copied from another magazine that was so insignificant that it left no sigh in history, for it has not been found in any archive in France.
From periphery to Center
The prayer of Saint Francis became widely known after it appeared in Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, on January 20, 1916. The well-known French daily La Croix published in on January 28, at practically the midpoint of World War I (1914-1918), When prayers for peace were being offered everywhere.
How did the Prayer for Peace, or Prayer of Saint Francis, reach the Vatican, and then begin to spread through-our the world?
In dioceses and parishes throughout Christendom, people were praying for an end to the war that was bringing devastation and shame to Europe, the cradle of so-called Western Christian civilization. The Marquis de la Rochetulon, founder of the Catholic weekly Souvenir Normand, send Pope Benedict XV several prayers for peace. It is not known whether the Marquis himself had written them or collected them from those circulating among the people.
This was the context in which the Prayer of Peace was published in Osservatore Romano. Since then it has won the minds and hearts of millions of people around the world, and has been ecumenically transformed into a prayer for union among religions, which pray for peace, world peace, social peace, ecological peace and personal peace.
Everything in it is simple and true, everything comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Anyone can respond to it by saying “Amen” and “Let it be so” with no confessional reservations.
(from The Prayer of Saint Francis: A message of peace for the world today – By Leonardo Boff)
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