Becoming Instruments of Peace

The Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi begins with a request: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Peace is the theme of this second week of Advent, so I’m reflecting on what it takes for us to be instruments of God’s peace. Just what are we asking for when we petition God to make us peacemakers?

A few years ago, a teenage boy was telling me about how he didn’t understand having to share his preferred pronouns in some group settings when introductions were being made. It felt bothersome to him as a cisgender male, and it was making him resent people who identified as gender non-binary or trans. So, I encouraged him to talk to some of his peers that he knows who are transgender and be receptive to their experience; to get to know them, and to perhaps learn why sharing their preferred pronouns and hearing their peers do the same matters. I told him that reaching out and having those conversations might help him gain a better understanding and a more empathetic appreciation of the people in his daily life. But he dismissed my suggestion and said, “I don’t want to know about all that.” I wish I had been quick enough in that moment tell him how that said a lot about him, and nothing about his transgender peers.

Anaïs Nin writes, “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Asking God to make us instruments of peace requires that we pinpoint what makes us uncomfortable about our neighbors and ask ourselves why that is. I need to do this self-reflective work as much as the young person I had that conversation with; everyone who wants to be a peacemaker does, because, as the Dutch Catholic priest and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen points out in his book fittingly titled Reaching Out, “In our world the assumption is that strangers are a potential danger and that it is up to them to disprove it.” So, as I reflect on the Prayer of Saint Francis, it seems to me that the only ones that we aspiring peacemakers should assume to be potential dangers are ourselves when we refuse to look inward for the hidden hostilities and bubbling resentments we might have for those neighbors of ours that we don’t really know anything about.

The psalmist writes in Psalm 139, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” It is impossible to ever completely know ourselves as God does, but if I want to be a peacemaker, maybe the first thing I should do is search myself through eyes of grace, mercy, and love, and weed out anything clouding that vision, because that’s how God sees me. It’s how God sees all of us. And it’s how God equips us to see one another when we pray humbly with an open heart and an open mind for God to make us an instrument of Their peace.

Prayer: Spirit of the Living God, Source of my heart’s yearning for true peace, fall afresh on me. Melt me and mold me; fill me with your unassuming grace; and use me as an instrument of your peace. By your love that keeps no record of wrongs, give me the courage to search myself as you have searched me and known me so that I would be liberated from my insecurities and needless fears in order to reach out to my neighbor and come to know them as a friend. Help me to be a peacemaker by being at peace with myself enough to make true peace possible between me and anyone you bring into the limited scope of my life. Amen.