The ‘prayer’ of ‘St Francis’
Does anyone else dislike this piece of kitsch as much as I do? Anyway, I subjected the longsuffering members of another forum to this rant, so you blog readers might as well get it too.
The prayer was discovered (and possibly written) anonymously in 1912. As the wiki article on it notes (you can find the words there too), the prayer has been used and promoted by Roman Catholics, although it has become popular in other circles.
It is an essentially Christ-free poem that makes the individual pray-er the focus of God's work on earth—where the true source of grace (the cross) has been eclipsed. In its place, I have become the channel of God's grace and the one whose work will bring knowledge of God.
There are a few other surprises in it, too. It is news to me, for example that I will be the one who brings about “true faith in you”, as the ditty purports to request.
Like many fluffy and ambiguous hymns and choruses we tend to sing in churches today, a good lawyer could probably get the prayer off the charge of semi-Pelagianism by appealing to the ambiguity and general vagueness of almost all of the words: “He didn't mean it, yer Honour. In fact, he didn't mean anything.” (Of course, on the basis of these grounds, most of our TV advertising and jingles could be sung in church with only the slightest of tweaking—for example, “Oh what a feeling! Lord Jesus!” might well be sung to the tune of the Toyota ad).
It's my (slightly belated) Reformation Day wish (October 31) that we might extirpate this pseudepigraphal prayer of St Francis from all Protestant hymnody and, incidentally, from the walls of some of the houses of our elderly aunts where it sits in all its cheesy needlepointed or tea-towelled glory under a picture of those praying monkish hands.