Troubadour to Saint: The Transformative Early Years of Francis of Assisi
In the grand tapestry of Christian thought, there are few threads as golden and vibrant as the prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, which begins with the humble supplication, "LORD, make me an instrument of your peace." It is a prayer that, like the saint himself, stands as a sort of divine contradiction in the world, a holy absurdity that makes perfect sense only when viewed through the lens of that topsy-turvy logic of Christianity which insists that the last shall be first and that to die is to live.
Let us consider, for a moment, the audacity of this prayer. Here is a man – for Saint Francis was very much a man, despite the legends that have grown up around him like wildflowers in an abandoned field – asking to be made into an instrument. Not a master, mind you, nor even a humble servant, but an instrument. It is as if he were saying, "LORD, make me a flute through which your melody might play," or "LORD, fashion me into a hammer with which you might build your kingdom." It is a request for a sort of holy objectification, a desire to be used utterly and completely for a purpose beyond oneself.
And what is this purpose? Peace. But not just any peace, not the peace of treaties signed by stern-faced men in stuffy rooms, nor the peace of exhaustion that follows a long quarrel. No, this is the peace of God, which, as Saint Paul tells us, passes all understanding. It is a peace that is as foreign to our world as a dolphin in a desert, and yet as necessary to our souls as water to that same arid land.
The prayer goes on, and in doing so, it paints for us a portrait of this peace in a series of paradoxes that would make even the most dedicated logician's head spin. "Where there is hatred, let me sow love," it says, as if love were a seed that could take root in the stony soil of animosity. "Where there is injury, pardon," it continues, suggesting that forgiveness might flourish in the very wounds that call out for vengeance.
These are not the words of a man who has misunderstood the world, but rather of one who has seen it all too clearly and has chosen to stand athwart its natural currents like a stubborn salmon swimming upstream. For the world, left to its own devices, does not move from hatred to love or from injury to pardon. It spirals ever downward into cycles of retribution and revenge, each wrong begetting a new wrong until the original cause is lost in a fog of mutual grievance.
But Saint Francis, in his holy madness, proposes another way. He asks to be made into a sort of holy alchemist, transmuting the base metals of human spite and pettiness into the gold of divine love. It is a task that would seem impossible, were it not for the fact that we have seen it done, not only by Francis himself but by all those saints and martyrs who have followed in the footsteps of their crucified LORD.
As we delve deeper into this prayer, we find that it becomes even more radical, even more at odds with the wisdom of the world. "Where there is doubt, faith," it proclaims, as if faith were a torch that could be lit in the damp caves of uncertainty. "Where there is despair, hope," it continues, suggesting that hope might bloom like a flower in the cracks of a heart turned to stone by despair.
Here again, we see the upside-down logic of the Gospel at work. The world tells us that faith is for the naive, that hope is for fools who have not yet learned the harsh lessons of reality. But Francis, echoing his master, insists that it is precisely in the darkest moments, when all seems lost, that faith and hope are most needed and most powerful.
And then comes perhaps the most startling request of all: "Where there is darkness, light." This is not merely a plea for illumination, but a volunteer's call to be the illumination. It is as if Francis is saying, "LORD, send me into the darkest corners of human experience, into the shadows where despair and hatred breed, and let me be a candle there." It is a prayer that acknowledges the reality of darkness while refusing to cede territory to it, a recognition that light does not deny the existence of shadows but rather defines itself in relation to them.
The prayer then takes a turn, moving from the external to the internal, from what we might do for others to what we ourselves need. "O Divine Master," it begins, in a tone of deepest supplication, "grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console." Here is a radical reorientation of the human heart, a rejection of the natural impulse to seek comfort for oneself in favor of becoming a source of comfort for others.
This is not the stoicism of the ancient philosophers, who sought to rise above the need for consolation through sheer force of will. Nor is it the asceticism of certain Eastern traditions, which seek to extinguish desire altogether. No, this is something altogether different, a sort of holy empathy that recognizes the universal human need for comfort and volunteers to meet that need in others even at the cost of one's own ease.
The prayer continues in this vein, each line a further exploration of this theme of self-forgetting in service of others. "To be understood as to understand," it says, acknowledging the deep human longing to be known while simultaneously calling us to set aside that longing in favor of truly knowing others. It is a call to listen, really listen, to step outside the confines of our own perspectives and experiences and enter into the world of another.
"To be loved as to love," the prayer goes on, and here we come to the very heart of the Christian message. For is this not the great mystery of the Incarnation, that the God who is love itself chose to enter into human history not to be loved (though He is infinitely worthy of love) but to love, even to the point of death on a cross? Francis, in asking to emulate this divine love, is setting himself a task no less daunting than that of becoming like God.
And then we come to the final, most famous line of the prayer: "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." Here, in these few words, is encapsulated the entire paradoxical wisdom of Christianity. It is a series of statements that fly in the face of all worldly logic, that stand as a rebuke to the careful calculations of self-interest that govern so much of human behavior.
The world tells us to accumulate, to hoard, to protect what is ours. Francis tells us to give, and in giving, to receive something far greater than what we have given away. The world counsels us to demand justice, to hold onto our grievances as a form of power over those who have wronged us. Francis tells us to pardon, and in that act of pardon to find our own liberation from the prison of resentment.
And finally, most radically of all, in a world that sees death as the ultimate enemy, the final negation of all our strivings and hopes, Francis presents death as a doorway, a passage into a life more real and vital than anything we have known before. It is the ultimate expression of the Christian hope, that what appears to be an ending is in fact a beginning, that the grave is not a period but a comma in the story of our existence.
This prayer, then, is nothing less than a manifesto of the upside-down kingdom of God. It is a call to live in a way that makes no sense by the standards of the world, but which, when embraced, reveals itself to be the only way that truly makes sense at all. It is an invitation to step out of the narrow confines of self-interest and into the broad expanses of divine love.
But let us not mistake this for mere sentimentality or woolly-headed idealism. Francis was no naive dreamer, no sheltered innocent unacquainted with the harsh realities of the world. He had known war, had seen the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting on one another. He had experienced the bitter sting of rejection, the pain of physical suffering, the dark night of spiritual desolation.
No, this prayer springs not from ignorance of the world's darkness, but from an intimate acquaintance with it. It is precisely because Francis knew how deep the shadows can be that he longed so desperately to be an instrument of light. It is because he had felt the ache of hatred that he yearned to sow love, because he had known the pain of injury that he sought to offer pardon.
In this, as in so much else, Francis stands as a mirror image of his beloved LORD. For did not Christ himself, knowing full well the depths of human sin and suffering, choose to enter into that very brokenness? Did He not, in the Garden of Gethsemane, with the weight of the world's sorrow heavy upon Him, still pray "not my will, but Yours be done"?
This, then, is the true radicalism of Saint Francis and his prayer. It is not that he denied the reality of the world's darkness, but that he refused to let that darkness have the final word. It is not that he was blind to injustice or immune to pain, but that he insisted on meeting that injustice with mercy and that pain with love.
In doing so, Francis offers us a way of being in the world that is at once deeply engaged and utterly detached. He calls us to pour ourselves out in service to others, to be fully present to the sufferings and joys of those around us. And yet, at the same time, he reminds us that our true identity, our deepest reality, lies not in what we can accumulate or achieve, but in our relationship with the Divine.
This is the great paradox at the heart of Christianity, the mystery that Francis embodied so fully in his life and in this prayer. We are called to be fully in the world, to love it with all the passion that God Himself loves it, and yet not to be of the world, not to be defined or limited by its categories and concerns.
It is a high calling, perhaps the highest imaginable. And yet, Francis insists, it is not beyond our reach. For the prayer begins not with a declaration of Francis's own strength or virtue, but with a plea for divine assistance: "LORD, make me an instrument of your peace." It is a recognition that we cannot, by our own efforts, transform hatred into love or despair into hope. We can only offer ourselves as instruments, as channels through which the God’s love might flow into the world.
And here, perhaps, we come to the deepest truth of this prayer and of Francis's life. For in offering himself as an instrument, in seeking to be a channel of divine peace, Francis found his truest, fullest self. In losing his life, he found it. In emptying himself, he was filled with a joy and a peace that surpasses all understanding.
This, then, is the invitation that Saint Francis extends to each of us through this prayer. It is an invitation to a life of radical openness to God and to others, a life of courageous love in the face of hatred, of stubborn hope in the depths of despair. It is an invitation to become, in our own unique way, instruments of divine peace in a world that so desperately needs it.
And if we accept this invitation, if we dare to pray this prayer not just with our lips but with our lives, who knows what transformations might occur? Who knows what seeds of love might take root in the soil of hatred, what flames of hope might be kindled in the darkness of despair? Who knows how we ourselves might be changed in the process, shaped by the very peace we seek to channel?
For in the end, this is the promise and the challenge of Saint Francis's prayer: that in losing ourselves, we might find ourselves; that in dying to our own narrow concerns, we might be born into a life more abundant than we could have imagined. It is a promise as old as the Gospel itself, and yet ever new, ever radical, ever capable of turning the world upside down – or rather, of turning it right side up at last.
