War & Peace Quote by Francis of Assisi

A startling move for a man who renounced money, status, and even the ordinary protections of the medieval world: Francis asks not for safety or purity, but to be used. “Make me an instrument” turns spirituality into a kind of craft. An instrument has no ego; it takes direction, absorbs pressure, and produces something larger than itself. That’s the subtext of Franciscan holiness: not the heroic self asserting virtue, but the self hollowed out so peace can pass through it.

The second sentence tightens the ethic into a policy of presence. “Where there is hatred” refuses the comfortable, cloistered version of piety that stays away from conflict. Francis imagines the faithful as entering the hot zones of human life, not to win arguments, but to change the temperature. The agricultural verb “sow” matters. Love isn’t a mood or a slogan; it’s labor with delayed results. You plant it in hostile soil without guarantees and accept that growth may be slow, uneven, or unseen.

Context sharpens the stakes. Francis lived amid crusading fervor, feudal violence, and church authority that was both spiritual and political. His radical poverty and peacemaking were not quaint gestures; they were critiques of a society organized around possession and domination. The prayer’s intent is quietly insurgent: it asks for the courage to answer aggression without mirroring it, to practice a peace that doesn’t depend on power, only on disciplined, embodied counter-force.