Editor’s note: Ian Morgan Cron’s beloved novel Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale returns this year in a new, updated edition. Ian originally wrote the book after years of watching Christians describe, almost word for word, the kind of believer they longed to become, without realizing they were describing Francis of Assisi. Here, Ian shares the story behind the book, and the prayer that has quietly shaped his life ever since.
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Key Verse: Colossians 3:15
I first learned about St. Francis of Assisi as a little boy. Years later, this amazing Christian figure reappeared in my life in the most surprising and powerful of ways. I was so changed by the encounter that I wrote a novel about it, titled Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale.
It all began with me having the same conversation. People, mostly good, faithful, tired people, would tell me they were disappointed in the church. And then, almost without exception, they’d describe the kind of Christian they wished they could become instead: someone simpler, more joyful, less interested in winning theological arguments than they were in loving their neighbors, more at home in creation, a peacemaker, closer to the poor. One day it hit me. They were describing St Francis of Assisi, and most of them had no idea!
To most people raised in evangelical churches, Francis is a garden statue with a bird on his shoulder, not a man who helped rebuild a church in crisis eight hundred years ago, largely by refusing to defend it and choosing instead to radically live like Jesus. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I started reading everything I could find, and eventually I wrote it all down as a novel, Chasing Francis, about a burned-out pastor who travels to Assisi and meets Francis through the people and places that still carry his fingerprints.
Somewhere in the middle of researching and writing Chasing Francis, I ran back into a prayer I’d heard a hundred times in church basements and funeral bulletins without ever really reading it. It’s usually called the Prayer of Saint Francis, and though he probably didn’t write it, I don’t think that matters much. Whoever wrote it understood Francis better than most biographers do, because it’s the closest thing I know to what his life actually looked like from the outside.
Lord, make me an instrument of Your 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,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Read it slowly and you’ll notice it never once asks God to fix anyone or anything else.
Every line is a request to become something: an instrument.
Paul gives the exact same instruction to a fractured little church in Colossae:
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. — Colossians 3:15, NIV
Not peace as the absence of conflict. Peace as the thing ruling inside you, whether or not the conflict around you ever resolves.
That line, “grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,” used to needle me every time I read it, because it names the exact opposite of how I was wired. I wanted to be understood before I bothered to understand anyone else. Paul was blunter about the same problem:
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. — Philippians 2:3–4, NIV
Francis didn’t rebuild a broken church with better theology. He rebuilt it by slowly becoming the kind of person this prayer describes. And when people witnessed his life, they became inspired to follow in his footsteps.
And then there’s the last line, the one that sounds like a riddle until it doesn’t: “it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Jesus told His disciples almost the same thing:
Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. — John 12:24, NIV
Francis gave up his father’s name, his fortune, and his own comfort, and what grew out of that small, buried life turned out to be big enough to still be changing lives eight hundred years later. Including mine. I hope, including yours.
I didn’t write Chasing Francis to make a case for a saint nobody asked about. Nor did I write it merely because I believed Francis could help us repair the contemporary church (which I do!) I wrote it because I wanted readers to meet the man behind the garden statue and maybe recognize, the way I did, that he’d been describing the Christian they’d always wanted to become. If that sounds like you, I’d love for you to pick up the new edition and spend some time with him yourself.
Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where I find hatred, let me sow love. Where I find despair, let me plant hope. Teach me to console before I ask to be consoled, to understand before I demand to be understood, and to love before I insist on being loved. Whatever in me needs to die so something truer can live, I release it to You today. Amen.
Written for Devotionals Daily by Ian Morgan Cron, author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale.
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Your Turn
Read the Prayer of Saint Francis again, slowly, and notice which line stops you. That’s probably the place God wants to start. ~ Devotionals Daily