Lord, Make Me a Channel of…Disturbance?

Parents have certain things in mind when they consider Catholic education for their children, including moral formation, high academic standards, and community engagement. When they think of Catholic higher education, the Catholicity of the institution is often an added bonus rather than one of the selling points. It is not surprising, therefore, that most Catholic institutions of higher education are regarded as out of step with the magisterium of the Church. Many parents, understandably, believe their child’s earlier spiritual, moral, and educational formation will be sufficient to ward off heterodoxy, but they are sadly mistaken.

Universities have long been championed as bastions of free thinking, usually in the form of professors challenging the inherited beliefs of their students. The average class at an average Catholic university will pummel students with reasons and arguments meant to demonstrate how factors outside religion and the divine can be used to explain all aspects of social life. Such exercises, the argument goes, are meant to strengthen students’ critical thinking and communication skills. Sometimes, however, professors push the envelope too far and end up distorting students’ thinking. If these students are not also presented with the arguments for religious belief, they run the risk of spiritual, theological, and intellectual perversion of the type I found one spring day in my classroom at the Catholic university where I teach. On the white board, a teacher (or guest speaker) had left a version of one of my favorite prayers, the St. Francis Prayer. The original reads:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, union;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is error, truth;
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.

This prayer is a wonderful reminder that, with God’s abundant grace, we are the hands and feet of Christ in the world, bringing goods such as peace, love, pardon, union, faith, and truth to those we encounter. Moreover, it reminds us of the unique economy of grace, in which our needs are met only through our intentional serving of others — that is, we must be willing to give to others that which we most covet for ourselves. This is challenging, so it should come as little surprise that someone — one of my colleagues, no less — has tried to lower the bar. It is difficult to imagine a prayer gone more wrong than the Reverse St. Francis Prayer written on the white board. It reads: