A Peek at the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi

Blog Post

The prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi has found itself reprinted on posters, plates, and journals – pretty much everywhere. Spending time with individual lines of this prayer is a long-used pathway to contemplative prayer. Regardless of who actually wrote this piece, it has a great deal of value in the lives of any Christian willing to consider its message. You don’t need to be in recovery to gain wisdom from it.
We do a deep dive into this prayer in Dissecting the Prayers and Promises of AA, and here’s a sample:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace

Rarely in literature has such a beautiful picture been painted. When working our way through the third step, we “turn our will and our lives over to God.” To some approaching sobriety, this sounds like failing and giving up, while to others, it is resignation to drudgery for the rest of our days. We would agree to anything because we have made such a mess, and the new plan wouldn’t need to be very good at all to be better than how we had been living. Secretly, we harbor a fear that the life following God will be rather bland and no fun, but in most cases, nothing could be further from the truth. (And seriously, it’s a safe bet that almost anybody could have picked a better life for us than the ones we had been living.)

The first line of this prayer is, in effect, the first three steps in one breath: I can’t, you can, I surrender.

This is, however, so much more than surrender. A violin in the hands of a fourth grader can be potentially classified as a virtual weapon of mass destruction, but a Stradivarius in the hands of a master musician can produce such beautiful music that one senses that perhaps a window to heaven has been left open.

In this opening line, we are not just surrendering to a new plan but offering ourselves to the Creator of the universe to create peace out of chaos through us – not just for us.

Jesus prayed this very prayer in the garden the night before his crucifixion. We translate it to read “your will be done,” but I’m told the actual word used, fiat, has the connotation of Jesus asking to be used by his Father to create through him – to be God’s instrument of ongoing creation. True, it is a very bold request for us, but God has been waiting all your life for you to humbly ask. Simply pray this one line sincerely for the rest of your life and be amazed at the beauty He can and will create through you.

(From Chapter 8 – The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi)

We pray that this book allows God’s Spirit to speak into the lives of many, many people, regardless of whether they are seeking sobriety or what AA’ers call “normies.” We pray it broadens and deepens everyone’s prayer life. Please recognize the value of prayer in healing the lives of everyone in your life and buy several gift copies today!

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