"Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace."
So it (the Prayer of St. Francis) begins and continues as a petitionary address to Lord. In part or whole, this line and those following have been the focus of contemplative meditation for more than twenty-five years. Oh, there have been days or weeks--lapses in practice--but in the main, this has led me to more than less satisfactory periods of calm and a sense of oneness with the cosmos.
Throughout this practice it has always bothered me who this Lord is. The facile answer is God or Christ, but that somehow never convinced me, so much so sometimes that I abandoned using direct address and skipped directly to "instrument of peace"; and that has sufficed, mostly.
At one point, amidst a particularly intense period of extraordinary if not mystical experiences having to do with this peace prayer, and sometimes not, I looked into the gray hood of the figure I kept seeing or imagined I saw and found there my own face, meaning that I was not petitioner but in some sense the lord? There would be mental gymnastics I did that justified or perhaps explained that I as Lord was the intent, but not proved that this was indeed a plausible truth or view. In the end, the Lord escaped identity certain.
Today that chimera (a fantastic, unrecognizable, or impossible idea or figment of the imagination) dressed not in gossamer but a Franciscan's medieval hooded cassock the color of gray still won't look at me and reveal his, maybe her, identity. I want to know to whom it is I am addressing and perhaps am or stalked by; and should I abandon contemplative meditation on the words of this spiritual passage, which I still believe is worthy and practical to drive into conscience/consciousness and manifest in deed?
I have tried alternative mantras the most recent of which grounds, for the most part, daily life: Live, let live. Without boring or ruining for myself further explication and elaboration on why this is particularly useful and sacred today, I shall let it be! and continue to remind myself that here is the most appropriate key to living and being that I need right now. For there is not much that I can do to save others except to live as I profess, or to reach for its/my higher self and manifestation in the world. That is enough. The Lord can remain in the background, second string, still a mystery, still a source of coming to a still point now and then.
The last line of the peace prayer has been translated differently into English. The French "is awakens to eternal life." The Blue Mountain Center's version is "dying to self that we are born to eternal life." And the version from my Catholic upbringing is "dying that we are born to eternal life."
(For different purposes I have commented elsewhere on these lines. See https://alt-trans-display.blogspot.com/2025/08/it-matters.html and https://inter-linear.blogspot.com/2026/01/fr-en-prayer-of-st-francis.html.)
The Blue Mountain Center's version is slight manipulation of language/emphasis. The proponent had strong Eastern influences growing up in India, and so the self or Self appears. But wait. The original French has two lines above the last, "it is in self-forgetting that one finds." Perhaps Blue Mountain's English version has captured the more accurate meaning, or has the better interpretation from the original.
With the version I grew up with, consistent with the focus on the afterlife, we gotta die to go there. Pretty practical from the Church's point of view, to focus on the end of times and living as one should as insurance, or is it obedience?
This is not all for the French or its English translations, and because it is not all, using this spiritual passage suggests the richness of contemplative meditation based on it. If one awakens to eternal life, that is different from wanting to die to get there or being born (again).
I rather like awakens as a preferred translation from the French.
