“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; 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;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.”
-Prayer of St. Francis
I have lost my faith a number of times. First, in the church I grew up in, and then in the idea of god as a whole. I was capable of believing in absence of evidence, but I am not capable of believing contrary to evidence. Recently, my faith faltered again, continues to falter, my belief in the goodness of humanity, in the idea that people, given the opportunity, will mostly choose love. My faith is being tested.
I miss a number of things about my religious life. I miss the community, though I have found that elsewhere. I miss the normalcy and organizational infrastructure of serving others. I miss praying.
I miss praying most often when life is overwhelmingly wonderful. There are moments when the world is so beautiful and I become so aware of how profoundly grateful I should be for the life I am privileged to lead, and I don’t know where to send that gratitude. I have worked for a lot of what I have, but so much of what makes my life good, and in the grand scheme of things, easy was gifted to me by the happenstance of my birth as the white child of middle class parents who were also the white children of middle class parents. I feel blessed (no hashtag), but by whom? I am well loved by people who amaze me every day, I have seen the northern lights and wept at their grandeur on a boat in the North Atlantic, I am allowed to make art for people who want to see it. I go to sleep full and warm and safe every night. I am grateful to all of the people who help make that life possible, but it feels as though there ought to be a larger “something” to thank. My gratitude to the random chance of a chaotic, infinitely fascinating universe goes unnoticed. All I can do is hope to use my good fortune and, yes, my privilege to improve the world a little bit and earn my place in it.
There are the dark days, too. It’s not so much that I miss the hope that someone will intervene. If anything, the idea that there might be an all-powerful force capable of preventing any hurt or pain who chooses only to act sometimes, when begged, is actually discomforting to me, one of the roadblocks to faith in a higher power that I simply cannot get over. But I miss the idea that I might draw strength to intervene myself from some well deeper than my own. When I feel empty of inspiration, when I have had the fight knocked out of me, I need a ray of light from the heavens to pick me up again. I need an angel. I need divine intervention.
I have loved the Prayer of St. Francis (and many of its musical interpretations) since I was a kid. “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” I am willing. I will do what needs to be done (or try at least) but Lord, give me the tools. It is a prayer about the power of an individual person to see a problem and be the solution. We get to choose to be an instrument of peace, of love, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy, through small acts or great deeds, with whatever gifts we are given. We can, as the saying goes, choose to light a candle rather than simply curse the darkness.
“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” As a non-believer, who can I ask? Who will make me an instrument of goodness? I will. I will choose to be an instrument of joy and love and peace and forgiveness, and on days that I don’t choose it, I will forgive myself and choose it again tomorrow, or the next day. You make me an instrument of goodness. People have become my religion and my motivation to fight for a better world. On days that I doubt them, I will forgive myself and forgive them, and believe again tomorrow, or the next day. I will light a candle, even if it’s small and even if it flickers. I don’t necessarily have faith that good will win out in the end; I have seen too much evidence to the contrary to be certain, but in absence of faith, I still have hope. I know there are people who have done more and suffered more than I have; if they can’t hope anymore, then it’s my job to make a world they can feel hopeful about again. I do seek to be consoled, to be understood, to be loved; I am human and vulnerable and I need, endlessly. Once I have put on my oxygen mask, though, it’s time to get to work.
For it is in giving that we receive.
