Adventures in Prayer #2: The Peace Prayer

Most of us have at one time or another heard of the “Peace Prayer.” It has commonly been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, but he almost certainly did not write it. According to The Franciscan Archive:

The first appearance of the Peace Prayer occurred in France in 1912 in a small spiritual magazine called La Clochette (The Little Bell). It was published in Paris by a Catholic association known as La Ligue de la Sainte-Messe (The Holy Mass League), founded in 1901 by a French priest, Father Esther Bouquerel (1855-1923). The prayer bore the title of 'Belle prière à faire pendant la messe' (A Beautiful Prayer to Say During the Mass), and was published anonymously. The author could possibly have been Father Bouquerel himself, but the identity of the author remains a mystery.

Around 1920 the prayer was published on the back of a holy card bearing the image of St. Francis of Assisi with no attribution to the saint. Nevertheless, the prayer came to be credited to him.

I think it is fitting that the authorship of the Peace Prayer is uncertain. I prefer to think of it as a gift to us from God. Certainly, it was divinely inspired. To me, it is one of the most perfect expressions of Christianity ever written:

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.

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.

Although this prayer is a prayer for God’s grace, it is not a prayer for our own benefit but, almost uniquely, for everyone else's. If we are hated or injured, we must repay with love and forgiveness. Likewise, in the face of doubt and despair, even our own, we must learn to sow faith and hope. We must become beacons in the darkness. And, yes, we must even learn to sow the seeds of joy, for joy is also one of God’s wishes for us.

The profoundest words of this prayer yet follow, counseling us not to seek first for love and understanding, but instead to give those things to others for it is in giving that we receive. It is in the giving that those things will return to us. The payoff may not be in kind, it may not come in a form recognizable to us, but God will repay. If we learn to forgive, we can expect forgiveness from Him.

The last two lines are the essence of this prayer, and perhaps the essence of Christianity. They are profoundly mystical, for a literal death is not necessarily called for. Jesus did not call for all of us to be martyrs, but He did say “whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matt. 10:39. He also said to his disciples: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matt. 16:24-25. The death Jesus calls for must first come in life just as His did before He offered up its ultimate expression for all of us.

If you don’t already know this prayer, learn it. Say it often, either silently or aloud. Live it, work it into the fabric of your soul. Become recollected in it, and the life you seek will be found.

On Writing, Fatherhood and the Olympic Ideal

O’Hare International Airport is about as far removed from the peaceful waters of Lake Three or our quiet forest home in northern Wisconsin as any place I can imagine. Yet last week that’s exactly where we found ourselves, sitting in the waiting area of Gate C16. Our daughter, Alicia, was talking with a friend, who suddenly looked at my wife and me and asked, “How did you get past security?”

“It wasn’t easy,” I joked. Melba and I were probably the only people there not about to board United Flight 851 to Beijing, China. Alicia and a few of her friends from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point were going to Beijing as volunteers under the auspices of Community Collaborations International to help with the Olympics. I had been dreading this day for months.

When your child asks for help to volunteer at the Olympics, how do you say no? No was never an option, and yet there were times when I hoped she would change her mind, even if it meant forfeiting thousands of dollars. I am not an intrepid traveler, and Alicia had only traveled by plane once, to Orlando with her high school choir, amply chaperoned by parents and her teacher. Even then, I monitored the flights there and back on the internet, breathing a sigh of relief each time the plane safely touched down. At Gate C16, I was cheered that she had run into a few friends, that we would not be putting her on a plane entirely alone to fly halfway across the world to the most foreign of lands. I was finally beginning to relax a little.

Gate C16 was a potpourri of races, nationalities and styles of dress. Announcements prattled on in both English and Chinese. Several men clad in the bright yellow, blue and red of Colombia, with matching sport bags, were talking business-like near the entry. Immediately behind us, Gary D’Amato of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel was interviewing the family of our youngest Olympian, ten meter synchronized diver, Mary Beth Dunnichay. Of course, at the time, I only knew there was a large contingent of people wearing matching logoed sport shirts proclaiming “Mary Beth, Our Olympian,” who were being interviewed. I had a number of things on my mind. I later stumbled across Gary’s article almost by accident.

For the past several months, I had not been at all unmindful of the many reasons for discomfort sending our only daughter to Beijing. First, there was the matter of conscience, of China’s involvement in Sudan, its policies in Tibet, its human rights record. There was the threat of terrorism. There was the matter of the air pollution. I had concerns for her safety in general as an American traveling overseas. I had the usual concerns of a parent when one’s child (actually, at 21, a young woman) travels to a place where her parents could be of little assistance in case of emergency. And then there were all of my own manufactured anxieties. I did not consider putting her on a flight from Duluth to get her to O’Hare; we would take her, via Madison where we would stay quietly and cheaply with Alicia’s grandmother. Yet, I had never driven to O’Hare, and had little idea of what to expect. Our daughter did not even know from which terminal her plane would depart, much less which gate.

Our adventure had not unfolded without a few hiccups, but in the end, after waiting in many lines, a kindly woman saw fit to bend the rules slightly and give two nervous parents security passes to reunite with their daughter across the security line. We waited at C16 until the place was empty and the huge plane taxied away and out of sight with Alicia on board, and then we waited some more until we saw it roaring down the runway and out of sight again. In the mean time seeing dozens of planes flawlessly taking off and landing had soothed my throbbing nerves just a little more.

Two days later Alicia called to say they had made it safely to their apartments. There were about ten of them, and they had just gotten back from watching the spectacular opening ceremonies, which we did not watch until later that night. As that spectacular event unfolded unbelievably before my eyes, I began to remember back to the late 70’s when the Olympics had meant something special to me, when I had tried to apply my narrow vision of the Olympic Ideal to my writing.

Between jobs, with a little savings, it seemed like the time was right. I was still inspired by the ’76 Olympics of the year before. I leased a one-bedroom efficiency apartment overlooking the lower campus of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, which I liked to think of as my garret. For six months I had nothing to do but write, to see just how good of a writer I could be. I would apply the singular dedication of an Olympic athlete to the tip of my pen. This was my time.

In retrospect, it would be easy to conclude that I wasted my time. Six months of my life vaporized like a dream. Sure, I wrote, but only about three hours a day. Hardly an Olympian feat. Afternoons I read the classics, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment. Must-reads for any aspiring novelist, I admit, but in retrospect, something of an escape from the far more difficult task of writing. I sneaked into the Natatorium a couple of days a week to lift weights, or I jogged to keep my body in shape and my mind fresh and creative, or so I told myself. Evenings I took a course in researching local history or attended readings…or sometimes I really broke training and walked downtown for a few beers. One night found me in the tepid light of The Bull Ring talking with a young black man I’d just met, and he asked me what I did. The words tumbled over my tongue. “I’m a writer.” He was amazed, euphoric even, because he said he wrote too. He said over and over that he wanted me to read some of his “shit.”

Shit. What a crude derision of one’s creative efforts, I thought. Why would I want to read shit? Back then, I was enamored of anything written in my own hand. Changing something seemed like an admission of defeat. Erasing was simply murder. I was a two-draft writer at most. What I wrote was not shit.

It was, I just didn’t know it. It took me far longer than six months to realize that. Real writers should not be afraid to write badly…and endlessly. Not to the point of developing bad habits, of course, but certainly in pursuit of the appropriate amount of humility. Just as musicians must practice their scales and just as aspiring Olympic athletes must hone their bodies, the aspiring writer must prepare himself for the seemingly endless and pointless tedium of learning his craft. He must prepare himself to throw away most of what he writes, or at least set it aside. He must prepare himself for tireless revision. He must prepare himself to write even when thoughts flee like leaves in the wind and words seem heavy as stone. He must prepare himself for few rewards. He must remember that the process of becoming a writer is not finished in six months or six years, it is the work of a lifetime.

As the colorful pyrotechnics exploded across the TV screen, thoughts were also going off in my head. When was the last time I had written a word when I didn’t feel like writing? When was the last time I had worked on a short story? Or strung words aimlessly across a page just for the sake of stringing words? When was the last time I had taken the trouble to edit something that had been waiting months or years for editing? When was the last time I had done much of anything I did not want to do? That to me was the embodiment of the Olympic Ideal, the self-sacrifice that it takes to be the best you can be at something, be it the 200-meter freestyle or writing or parenting or taking out the trash.

In the broader sense, the Olympics to me are a coming together to celebrate and share this ideal, which transcends race, religion, nationality and politics. The “Olympic truce” means far more than a guarantee of safe passage, it means the freedom of the world to come together in some small symbolic way to be just ordinary people, simple and unlabeled. I love George Will, but when he calls the Olympics a “charade of international comity” and scoffs at the IOC for holding them in a country governed by a “tyrannical” regime, he is missing the point. The Olympics and the Olympic Ideal are not about place. Did Pierre de Coubertin not say that “Olympism is a state of mind”? The Olympics are intended to transcend physical, political and ideological boundaries. Do they always? Probably not.

It’s easy to criticize the Olympics. The games are not perfect just as people are not perfect. People cheat. Judges sometimes judge unfairly. A small child lip-synchs a song. Politics stain behavior. The host country is governed by a totalitarian regime with a dismal human rights record. So do these games then serve no purpose? Only if one expects something organized on such an enormous and diverse scale to be perfect in an otherwise imperfect world. I would venture to say there are some 11,000 athletes in Beijing who believe the games serve a purpose. Do they all like each other? Do you like everyone you work with? Or everyone on your block? Out of 11,000 people there is bound to be some bad eggs. Even some who simply don’t deserve to be there.

But among 11,000 people, there will also be shining examples of courage and dedication, of sportsmanship transcending human differences. I will see people who are just plain better at being who they are than I am. That’s why I will watch and wonder and hope and be inspired. The Olympics are, perhaps, a microcosm of a world trying to get along. We’re doing it imperfectly, but most of us are trying. Like it or not, the world needs the Olympics, be they in Beijing or Chicago, because when we stop trying for and aspiring to something better, even in a small way, hope is lost.

As I continued to watch the ceremony and all its remarkable choreography (to George the subordination of individuality to the collective), it suddenly seemed so very right that part of my family was in Beijing for such a remarkable occasion. For so many months, how had I not seen that?

Reflections from Lake Three: On Fishing and Parenthood

It's the fishing!

Bait, poles, tackle boxes, licenses, life jackets…check. Drain plug? Just about every fisherman has put his boat in the water without replacing the drain plug. I’m no exception. There are lots of things to think about before we even attempt fishing, especially when taking the boat. This was to be its first time in the water this year. I’m perfectly happy bringing the tent camper and fishing from shore, but my son, John, likes to get out in the boat and fish other lakes.

As we pulled out of our camp site something was wrong, a thumping or dragging, I couldn’t quite tell. I downshifted hoping it wasn’t the transmission in our twelve-year old Suburban. No effect. We circled the small campground and parked in front of our site. A flat left rear tire. I was almost relieved…but also angry. It was the third flat for this tire, the third strike as far as I was concerned. John, impatient to fish, insisted on changing the tire, since he’d just done it a couple weeks earlier and said it would take ten minutes. He just about made it.

How had we not noticed a flat tire? We’d both walked around the truck several times getting ready. I’d mentally checked off everything I thought we’d needed from past experience and failed to notice something right before my eyes. How often does that happen? Our brains don’t readily jump from one form of thinking to another.

John said he didn’t care if we stayed at Lake Three to fish, although I knew he was a little disappointed. I just wasn’t crazy about driving more miles in the backcountry than necessary without a spare and cell service. I didn’t want to turn a small disappointment into a large one. The advantage, I told John, was that we could just beach the boat when we were done and fish after dinner.

Putting the boat into the water is far easier than getting it back on the trailer. I made sure the safety clip was in so the motor would start, pulled out the choke, turned the throttle and pulled the cord once…twice…three times and it chugged to life just like it always did on the third pull, even after a year of disuse. This year I was a little surprised. Normally, I loosen the plugs in the fall and spray the chambers with WD-40 to combat the moisture of changing winter temps in the garage. This year I hadn’t done that until I asked John to do it a few days before we’d left. The reliability of this fifteen-horse Evinrude motor is not typical of the efficiency with which I run my life. Normally, mechanical things and I don’t get along. I know this is solely a matter of attitude.

Is there a right way to fish? It depends. Is there a wrong way to fish? Most certainly, many wrong ways. I’ve practiced most of them. We chugged into the small bay opposite the campground. It was a gloriously sunny day with a mild breeze, ideal for being on the water but not necessarily for catching fish. The bass would be retreating to deeper, shadier places for the day. In all the years we’d fished this lake, I’d only caught one largemouth, that one on a floating popper about seven in the morning across from the landing. Lake Three was full of small panfish that would bite any time of the day on just about anything.

I put the motor in neutral and let us drift, then put us in reverse to stop our momentum at the most centrally located spot while John dropped the anchor. I like the boat to be as stationary as possible when we dropped anchor, so there’s less anchor line out and we can stay close to where we want to be. In our case, that meant being within good casting distance of the weed lines where I knew most of the fish were.

I’d brought leeches to tempt the walleye at the much larger English Lake, though they’d not caught me a thing the year before; but I’d never used them at Lake Three. John used a leaf worm while I tried a leech. We were using bobbers, which I hoped were set at a proper depth. I slipped a hook on a snap swivel, which I knew I should not have been using. This is where we have to stop and consider. The only genuine purpose of a snap swivel is to keep your line from being twisted by spinning lures and baits. It serves no purpose with a suspended hook except perhaps to discourage fish and save the lazy, vision-challenged fisherman from tying the hook directly to the line. I’d have a better chance of catching a bass without one.

I like to catch fish, but catching fish does not motivate me to the same degree as some men I’ve fished with. I like to consider fishing being time. I like to think that time I spend fishing doesn’t count against my allotted time on earth. Catching fish is just a bonus. I don’t like to fish hard. By that, I mean changing baits and lures, tying and re-tying knots, not to mention moving about the lake until I start catching fish. I’ve seen musky fisherman standing on the bow of their boats, working their electric trolling motors with a foot pedal while they cast the shoreline over and over. Not for me. I’m perfectly content to sit watching a bobber or drifting in the breeze.

Thing is, even the lazy fisherman should pay attention to what he’s doing. That’s not too much to expect. When that bobber begins to move, you had better be ready at any instant to set the hook. That means making sure you’ve taken up the slack in your line, so you’re not pulling up line while the fish is pulling your bait off the hook. We cast as close to the weed lines as we could without getting our tackle tangled in them. Both our bobbers twitched, probably small perch. This lake was full of them, and they could sometimes steal a worm without even disturbing your line. But I was encouraged that even my leech was drawing interest. We wouldn’t set our hooks until the bobbers went completely under.

Sometimes I found my attention drifting, like the boat swinging around in the breeze. I’d set my hook only to find too much slack. The leeches were tougher than worms and harder to steal, but sometimes I lost them too. Not as often as John lost his worms. We both pulled in some small perch and let them go. They were too small to eat, and dinner was not our mission. Our mission was simple: just fishing. Sometimes we caught a scrappy little pumpkinseed, which ounce for ounce is probably the fightingest fish that swims. Around 11:30 my bobber went down again, and I set the hook. This time I had something bigger. A swirl near the surface told me what I wanted to know. Largemouth like to break the surface when they fight. After you hook a fish, you have to keep the line taut, lest the hook remove itself from the fish’s mouth. I’ve failed in that category on occasion too but not this time.

Ideally, John should have been ready with the net, which was resting under my seat. I’d had no plans to use it, and just getting the fish to the boat was victory enough for me. It was not a large fish, and I had no problem boating it. Bright green, black eyes, strong and beautiful, it struggled little while I hastened to remove the hook and return it uninjured to the water.

“Wow,” I said to John, “in the middle of the day…on a leech.” I was feeling pretty good about myself, catching a bass on a leech, snap swivel and a bare hook while the sun was high. I was just lucky. I wished it had been John. I desperately wanted him to catch a bass instead of the worm-robbing panfish we’d caught there for years. “Want a leech?” I asked. He declined.

We moved the boat a couple of times after that and to give my neglected Evinrude a rare run. We battled the panfish for another 2 ½ hours and didn’t catch another bass. We decided to beach the boat in case we wanted to give fishing another try after dinner.

Between building a fire and fishing after dinner, John chose fishing. That was alright with me. The dwindling twilight offered another chance to catch a bass. We chugged the boat slowly over to the first place we’d anchored that morning. It wasn’t long before another small bass nailed my leech. I was having great fun, but not as much fun as if it were John catching the bass. That’s what I wanted more than anything. Minutes later another bass slammed my leech, and this one was larger and stronger. He broke the surface and tail-danced briefly on the water. Seeing a bass break the surface is probably the biggest thrill I’ve had fishing. He fought me hard but was no match for my line, and I netlessly boated him as well. John said he was about the size of the one he’d caught at English Lake last year by himself. I was at least glad for that, that he’d caught a bass once, even without my help. Once again, he declined to use a leech. He caught a small crappie, and then started casting a popper to jerk across the surface like a water bug.

I lost a couple of leeches to the piranha-perch and saved the last two just in case John changed his mind. He caught another crappie on the popper, while I was losing worms until I finally cast my hook into the weeds and broke my line. I didn’t have my reading glasses, which I needed to retie my tackle, but I had brought a spare pole with a snap swivel ready to take my hook and bait. One of the few things I do right, as a fisherman. As the sun dipped beneath the trees, I hoped John would have some success with his popper, and I even tried one myself, still saving the leeches. I asked him one more time if he wanted one. No. I wondered why. My macho son was 6’4”, 210 pounds, and was going to be 20 that week; I was sure he wasn’t squeamish about leeches. I knew he’d love to catch a bass, and the panfish were beating the bass to his worms.

After we retrieved my broken tackle from the weeds, I misplaced the hook while re-rigging the spare pole. I’m not sure I misplace things any more now that I’m 57 than when I was a kid, but now it aggravates me more. Of all things, a hook. How stupid! It could be found in a variety of wrong ways. One of the things I find most difficult fishing is controlling my temper. When I fish, Murphy, that bastard, rules. Decades of past aggravations bubble to the surface, tangled lines, stray hooks, poked fingers, lost fish. The labeling process begins: I am a hopelessly bad fisherman. A hopeless individual. I can’t do anything right, and so on. On this occasion I tried to choke this back. Setting an example for my son, who also has a temper, was one of the non-fishing objectives of this trip. I found myself losing it a little. The burgeoning darkness was not helping me locate the hook. Senile old fart. Finally, I found it sitting atop my tackle box. Just another example of the need to pay attention while fishing. Paying attention to your line and tackle is just as important when it is out of the water as in.

Once I was finally convinced John was not going to use a leech, I used the last two and lost them. John’s line inexplicably tangled in about three different ways, and so I handed him my spare pole, which now had a popper on it. He fished while I discovered in the vestigial light that his line was a hopeless cause. Once again, that spare pole was serving a purpose, even though John was not catching anything. With the mosquitoes closing in and it soon being too dark to see, we made our way back and glided noiselessly onto the grassy shore.

We’d fished for five solid hours that day in perfect weather. It had been a good day in the boat, better and more trouble-free than most. Still, I regretted that I’d caught three bass and John had caught none. I would have given anything to reverse that. He would not tell me, even the next day when I asked, why he would not use a leech, even after he saw me catching bass. Had he been saving them for me the same way I’d been saving them for him? Had he just wanted to fish in his own way, beyond the influence of his father? I said there is, in some sense, no right way to fish. It depends on what your objectives are, what you want from it.

Our kids don’t always fish their way through life in the way we think they should. I’ve gotten advice from far better fishermen than I am, and sometimes I just wished to be left alone. I wanted John to catch fish and, mostly, to have fun, and I think he did. I think he enjoyed my catching those bass almost as much as I would have enjoyed him catching them. Taking the boat had been his idea, and maybe what we’d done was quite enough for him. I don’t know. He’s not very open about some things. I do know that when it comes to our kids, there comes a point, far sooner than we expect, when we have to let them fish in their own way. We hope they catch fish, but we also have to remember that maybe actually catching fish isn’t the most important thing in life. It’s the fishing!

For a different perspective on our little fishing trip, see my post at The Night Country.