Lord, let me be an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light, and where there is sadness, joy. ~ St. Francis Prayer
Now, that’s quite a prayer, isn’t it?
The first time I encountered the prayer I was in the lobby of the convent where my aunt lived.
It hung as a mural on the wall.
I remember thinking I’d never met anyone who possessed these virtues. I knew plenty of troublemakers but not any peacemakers. Even my beloved aunt had her surly side.
Indeed, peacemakers of any sort are hard to come by.
It wasn’t long before I was thinking the whole prayer might be nothing more than a wish dream.
And yet Francis was on to something. We need people with these virtues.
The question is how do you come by them?
Are you born with them?
Are they found through a mountaintop experience?
or in a deep, dark valley?
I think they’re maybe forged in fire, in the way steel is made:
- mined from the ground of human experience,
- smelted in the blast furnace of compassion,
- impurities removed in the white-hot heat of honesty.
I don’t think it’s a pious process that turns:
- hatred into love
- doubt into faith
- despair into hope
- darkness into light
- sadness into joy
I think more likely it’s rough, tough stuff, in which we’re willing to be burned, broken and forged into an entirely new creation.
I think it’s more like the recovery process — where bittersweet experiences are mined and the impurities removed in a rugged 12-step program.
To transmit the virtues of love, faith, hope, light and joy requires we do the hardest work we’ll ever do.
💐
I had the opportunity of witnessing these virtues being forged in a guy in prison.
He was an inmate and his name was Sam.
Sam had spent half his young life in jail, having been abandoned at 12 and left to grow up on the streets. He’d gotten addicted to methamphetamine and lost himself to his addiction.
He descended into a paranoid state of violent delirium.
He killed an unwitting homeless stranger at a bus stop not far from where I live.
I met up with him weekly in an AA meeting conducted in the Snohomish County Jail while he was awaiting sentencing.
For many the criminal justice system is a revolving door — nothing ever gets better. But for those willing to confront their demons, unconditionally — it can be something quite different.
For Sam, it was different. He had gotten clean and in the time I worked with him I witnessed his transition from troublemaker to peacemaker.
It was a marvel.
As his mind cleared his heart softened and his soul awakened. He began to really feel the freedom that comes with sobriety.
He shared with the group all manner of startling admissions from his ferociously difficult life.
He said in his addiction he’d confused:
- hubris for knowledge
- recklessness for passion
- arrogance for wisdom
Over the years Sam had virtue smelted into him in the blast furnace that is prison. The process was not easy and by no means final.
Sam had to practice virtue one day at a time.
Ever reminding himself he was not a bad guy, but a broken guy; not a troublemaker, but a frightened child; not a reprobate, but a lost soul.
The hot, tempering iron of failure burned virtue into Sam’s soul. For Sam to BE an instrument of peace he had to DO the work of peace.
And for Sam that work could only be done where he lived.
In prison.
Sam was looking at hard time on his manslaughter conviction, maybe twenty years or more.
And here’s the point of the story.
Sam admitted what he had done, and was willing to pay his debt to society.
Virtuous living for Sam was no poetic abstraction; it was the bedrock of his sobriety — the only thing keeping him unshackled from his addiction.
He needed to BE the St. Francis prayer.
Sam told me the penitentiary was the perfect place to DO the work of a peacemaker and while he did he was FREE, and that was something the state could never take from him.
Just a thought…
Pat
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