800 Years of St. Francis · Day 22 of 31 · Thursday, October 22, 2026
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love… (Full prayer)
No prayer in the world is more closely tied to Francis’s name, and it may surprise you to learn that he didn’t write it. It first appeared in a small French magazine in 1912, nearly seven hundred years after his death, and within a few decades it was being prayed everywhere as “the Prayer of St. Francis.”
I have come to love that story. The prayer sounds so much like him that the world simply gave it his name. That may be the truest tribute a life can receive: when your footprint is so clear that words you never spoke are recognized as yours.
The word that matters most in the prayer is instrument. An instrument doesn’t make the music. It lets the music through. A flute has the breath but not the song. A camera catches the light but doesn’t create it. In my own reflections, I have written, “I am a prayer, or sayer of thoughts, not of my making.”
Being an instrument of peace doesn’t mean avoiding conflict. It means meeting conflict with presence, so that something larger than our first reaction can pass through us.
Notice today: Which line of the prayer does your day most need from you? Where there is injury, pardon? Where there is sadness, joy?
When a life is transparent enough, the world recognizes its music even in words it never wrote.
At San Damiano: Advent Taizé Prayer Services begin Tuesday, December 1, 7:00 – 8:00 pm, with Jesse Manibusan: an hour of simple chant, silence, and candlelight. Details
Day 22 of 31 · 800 Years of St. Francis: A Daily October Companion · spiritualbreak.com
Reflection © 2026 Michael J. Cunningham OFS.
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