Monday, December 8, 2008

Peace?

The Prayer of Saint Francis is a Christian prayer. It is attributed to the 13th-century Saint Francis of Assisi, although the prayer in its present form cannot be traced back further than 1912, when it was printed in France in French, in a small spiritual magazine called La Clochette (The Little Bell) as an anonymous prayer, as demonstrated by Dr Christian Renoux in 2001 (Cf. Christian Renoux, La prière pour la paix attribuée à saint François, une énigme à résoudre, Paris, Editions franciscaines, Paris, 2001).
The prayer has been known in the United States since 1936 and Cardinal Francis Spellman and the Senator Hawkes distributed millions of copies of the prayer during and just after World War II (Cf. C. Renoux, op. cit., p. 92-95). Many different versions of the prayer exist. The most popular is this following one:


Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; (What does that mean for a believer?)

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.
(Wikipedia)

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