By Martin L. Smith
Serendipity. A peculiar word, from an odd source. An English writer of the late 18th century, Horace Walpole, concocted it from the Arabic name for Sri Lanka after he came across it in an old Persian folk tale! The story dealt with fascinating discoveries we stumble across accidentally while we are looking for something else. Recently, browsing on the internet, I came across—serendipitously!—the intriguing account of the origin of the famous “Prayer of St. Francis,” which is now in our prayer book (p. 833). It is known and loved the world over: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”
The story illustrates how grace works through odd, accidental ways and surfs the waves of human error. Apparently (it feels a bit like telling a child there is no Santa Claus!) the prayer was not written by St. Francis. It is a modern prayer originally composed in French. It first surfaced in 1912 in a devotional newsletter called La Clochette, piously recommended as a “beautiful prayer to recite during Mass.” We can picture devout subscribers cutting it out and using it throughout the devastating war-torn years that followed. But the author remained unknown. It was just one prayer among thousands of devotions like it.
How on earth did it spread across the world? Well, not long after World War I started someone sent it to the Pope and then it was printed in the Vatican newspaper. And then around 1920 a French Franciscan friar decided to print up some holy cards to circulate the prayer, now entitled the Prayer for Peace. He happened to use cards with a picture of St. Francis on the front. One of these cards must have fallen into the hands of an ardent group of Protestant peace activists, because when they started using the prayer in their movement committed to radical non-violence, they gave St. Francis as its author! It was an easy mistake, to assume the famous saint had written the prayer on the reverse. In 1936, an American Disciples of Christ minister called Kirby Page included an English translation in his book Living Courageously, based on the same mistaken assumption that St. Francis was the author. After that it was taken up during World War II as the most favored prayer for peace and spread across the globe, borne along by the reputation of the beloved saint of Assisi, becoming in every sense of the word a living classic of prayer and an ecumenical treasure, loved by people of every tradition.
Is it a let-down to learn the prayer is not by St. Francis? Not for me. The serendipitous discovery reinforces the truth that deep, creative spirituality isn’t confined at all to the saints who achieved fame. The Spirit is like a vast underground aquifer, and while many who have drilled their wells deeply to draw on it became known and loved, there are countless numbers who in their time dug just as deep, while carrying on their lives in the same obscurity as most of us do.
Our own cultural bias in modern North America is so ludicrously geared to celebrity, to notoriety, that we need to compensate for it by learning to rejoice in the mysterious contributions that flow to us from the anonymous and obscure. And surely no one would encourage us more than humble St. Francis, who is presumably more than happy to have played a part in spreading, through a blunder, a prayer which reveals that some unknown author had as deep a gift for prayer as he had!
Embracing this as a modern prayer, a prayer emerging at the beginning of the blood-soaked 20th century, a prayer that faces into the staggering challenges posed by human entrapment in the cycle of violent retaliation, jolts us into realism. Perhaps in some quarters the association with St. Francis actually weakens the impact of the prayer by linking it with a nostalgic sentimentality, since he is so often suffused with a pious haze of sweetness and light—the simplistic saint who preached innocently to the little birdies, the patron of pets; charming, but quite impractical.
I’ve decided to learn the prayer by heart in the original French. Sometimes using another language in prayer helps us really attend to its meaning. The original version, at least to my ears, encourages us to point quite specifically at the situations in which we are promising to practice gospel reconciliation. Là où il y a la discorde, que je mette l’union. As if to say, there! just here! in that place where I see discord, may I take responsibility to act as a reconciler. It is not a prayer of pious generality but a demanding pledge of commitment to the crucified Messiah to whom we owe our vows as peacemakers.
Martin Smith is well-known in the Episcopal Church and beyond as a priest, writer, preacher and leader of retreats. Through such popular works as A Season for the Spirit and The Word is Very Near You, he continues to explore a contemporary spirituality that encourages a lively conversation between new knowledge and the riches of tradition.