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:

Dear Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.
Where there is apathy, let me provoke;
where there is compliance, let me
bring questioning;
where there is silence, may I be a voice.
Where there is too much comfort
and too little action, grant disruption.
Where there are doors closed
and hearts locked,
grant me the willingness to listen.

When laws dictate and pain is overlooked…
when tradition speaks louder than need…
grant that I may seek rather to do justice
than to talk about it.
Disturb us, O Lord,
to be with, as well as for, the alienated;
to love the unlovable as well as the lovely.
Lord, make me a channel of disturbance.

 — Author unknown

It is a bit of a surprise that no one claims credit for authoring this prayer, since it manages to pervert Catholic philosophy, Catholic social teaching, and Catholic morality in two short stanzas. The most common definitions of the verb pervert, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, are “to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right” and “to divert to a wrong end or purpose.” This begs important questions: Why is the Reverse St. Francis Prayer a perversion? What does it pervert?

What is so interesting about this prayer is it takes the unqualified goods of the original prayer (peace, love, pardon, union, truth, etc.) and replaces them with highly qualified goods (provocation, questioning, disruption, etc.). What do I mean by highly qualified? I mean that provocation, questioning, and disruption are only good things in specific circumstances, such as when a person is harmed by an unjust law. Our provocation, questioning, and disruption are goods when oriented toward specific ends — in this case, highlighting the unjust law so it can be replaced with a just one.

In the original St. Francis Prayer, it is our active consoling, understanding, loving, giving, and pardoning of others that result in our receiving consolation, understanding, love, and pardon. We must give before we receive. It is a leap of faith that we make with our own hands and feet.

The Reverse St. Francis Prayer is entirely different, though it attempts to imitate the structure of the original. For example, the opening lines read, “Dear Lord, make me a channel of disturbance. Where there is apathy, let me provoke.” The author could have written, “Where there is apathy, let there be concern or care.” Instead, he asks to be a provocateur. The author of the Reverse St. Francis Prayer sees the worst in every situation but doesn’t have the gumption to advocate for any specific moral norm. The pattern continues: “where there is compliance, let me bring questioning; where there is silence, may I be a voice.” Compliance, it seems, is taken to be a bad thing in itself. Likewise, silence is something that must have been imposed on people, and not something people desire on their own.

The prayer continues, “Where there is too much comfort and too little action, grant disruption. Where there are doors closed and hearts locked, grant me the willingness to listen.” As with compliance, comfort is taken to be a bad thing, but, interestingly, action is taken to be an unqualified good. Whereas the original prayer uses adjectives that orient the action toward specific ends, the Reverse St. Francis Prayer uses action as a noun. This language game signals that something deeper and more nefarious is going on. It is interesting that the anonymous author would pray for the willingness to listen to closed doors and closed hearts when, riffing on the original prayer, he should have requested that his own door and heart be unlocked. Instead, it is the doors and hearts of others that are the problem and require reform. There is no inclination toward personal conversion.

Unsurprisingly, our anonymous know-it-all has the solution to what ails the hearts of others, which he outlines in the second stanza: “When laws dictate and pain is overlooked…when tradition speaks louder than need…grant that I may seek rather to do justice than to talk about it.” This is a noble enough sentiment, but notice the things he identifies as problems — laws and traditions — which are taken to be out of step with the needs of the people. This is a plausible criticism, as laws and traditions can be out of step with the needs of the people in a given time, but the prayer continues, “Disturb us, O Lord, to be with, as well as for the alienated; to love the unlovable as well as the lovely. Lord make me a channel of disturbance.” Among the laws and traditions Christians developed are protections for the sick, the infirm, the orphaned, children, and women — those who were alienated and unloved in prior societies. Why are these now bad?

The final line about being a channel of disturbance, which parallels the opening line, helps to make sense of the many contradictions and half-truths contained in the prayer. Our anonymous author entreats God to make him a channel, a conduit by which disturbance might be transmitted. We are left to wonder: To what end?

In the original, we ask for the ability to sow love, which the prayer makes clear is only possible by actively loving our neighbors. The Reverse St. Francis Prayer perverts all this. It requires no sacrifice and offers nothing of positive value. Whereas Christ would have us do good, even to those who persecute us, the Reverse St. Francis Prayer entreats Christ to assist in disturbing, provoking, questioning, and disrupting the very same neighbors we are commanded to love. This is not simply a different way of delivering Christ’s message; it is a perverse reworking of the economy of grace.

The Reverse St. Francis Prayer is not a prayer to bring the world into better alignment with Christ; it is not a prayer of personal repentance or a prayer of reformation. It is an attempt to remake the world in the image of the unnamed author, of whom no sacrifice is required because he has made himself into a god. This last point should be especially troubling to the parents of college-age or college-bound Catholic students.

Parents must be aware that the faith and beliefs they send their kids to college with are not merely challenged on campus but are often twisted, repurposed, and oriented toward other ends. For example, your son might easily be steered from loving his neighbor in front of him to love of humanity in the abstract. The former requires hard work and sacrifice, while the latter only requires lip service — or “virtue signaling,” in today’s parlance. If you wish your child to leave his Catholic college with a stronger faith and on more solid moral ground than when he arrived, you must be willing to question him about his classes and coursework. Better for you to know when he is drifting away or stranded on an island of relativism (as I was for ten years) so you can take the steps to bring him back into the loving embrace of Mother Church.

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