April is National Poetry Month: Prayer for Peace

" One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. In this anthology, I have tried to include poems that reflect things that were important to her- a spirit of adventure, the worlds of imagination and nature, and the strength of love and family."- Caroline Kennedy in the introduction to The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

This anthology is a favorite of mine because of the mixture of poems collected that span from the Old Testament to Shakespeare, John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost just to name a few. There are poems that celebrate America, verses read to children, poems of love and romance, and a collection penned by Jackie herself.  I learned the following poem as a worship song, but the words express much by themselves.

Prayer for Peace
St. Francis of Assisi

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,
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may
   not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
To be understoon, 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.