During a trip home to visit my family I ran across a book that belonged to my grandmother and was ear marked for the church yard sale. As I picked up the book, with resplendence I remembered my first encounter with Saint Francis of Assisi in Beverly Hills during an Alanon meeting. I was distracted by the words of Saint Francis’ Prayer that covered the wall and marked me for life.
“Lord, make me an instrument of Thy 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.”
As I sat at my Grandmothers looking through my new book this saintly, but unsanctimonious man’s life spoke more eloquently than a lifetime of sermons even centuries after his death. Raised in wealth and pursuit of worldly pleasures, Assisi turned his back on everything he knew to embrace God and revolutionized the church. He lived a life of service to the outcast when the church of the Middle Ages was a bureaucratic institution with self-centered and power hungry leaders, rather than selfless servants of God. Imagine if politics reflected this kind of leadership!
Like Jesus, who chose to hang out with the misfits, the prostitutes and the lowly, Assisi too “had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd?” (Matthew 9:36)
His words still pierce my heart as I read, “Lord, make me an instrument…Grant me 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…”
How far short we fall, but how grand an enterprise to aspire to be this kind of instrument.
