St. Francis of Assisi
The prayer of St. Francis has been my life purpose and my mantra since I was a child. Having a vocation I used to read Butler’s Lives of Saints for inspiration to figure out which order I wanted to join. I came across St Francis of Assisi’s prayer and started reciting it as often as I thought of it. When I was a teenager, mother asked me to stop praying it with the warning to be careful what you pray for. I said no, this is perfect…it is exactly what is in my heart. I had known since I was three why I was here and this was it. What this devotion afforded me was more than just confirmation of my own internal guidance. It served as a touchstone for the para-digm through which I was to treat my fellow creatures and from that a dedication to peaceful reconciliation as the only valid course of human interaction.
While I was at a Catholic university, I took the Third Order name of Sister Mary Francis Joseph, T.O. P. after the three closest people to Our Lord after discovering I was unable to enter the religious life due to illness. It took me quite a while to realize I could serve better on the outside than on the inside. I have asked him many times to watch over members of my family and felt he always granted me and them this favor. Thus is the audacity of a child’s faith which is with me still. I have had some very interesting substantiation that he is with me always.
The encyclopedia says the Prayer of Saint Francis is a Christian prayer attributed to the 13th-century saint Francis of Assisi, although the prayer in its present form cannot be traced back further than 1912. The prayer has been known in the United States since 1936 and Cardinal Francis Spellman and Senator Hawkes distributed millions of copies of the prayer during and just after World War II.[1]
Having psychically communicated with plants and animals all my life and empathically felt the emotions of other souls, I feel con-nected to St. Francis through morphic resonance.
So here is the substance of divine guidance on the essence of living the life of charity and beneficence. Enjoy the purity and blessed-ness of the feel of these precious words and decide for yourself is this is your calling.
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
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.
Amen.
The way God has it organized, it is in giving that we receive the gift of serving others which warms our hearts, pardoning that we real-ize we too deserve pardon, and dying that the soul is released once more to the eternal now of His presence.
