The Prayer of St. Francis

by Fred Vilbig


Whenever St. Francis of Assisi would enter a church, he would look at the cross and pray, “I adore You, O Christ, and I praise You, for by Your Holy Cross You have redeemed the world.”

If you look around the world, it is easy to see that the world needs redemption. Yes, we are surrounded by the beauty of God’s creation, and, if we look hard enough, the beauty of people (some more evident than others). But we also see a lot of suffering. We see a lot of selfishness and self-love that distorts and perverts the beauty of creation. Yes, the world needs redemption.

Yet I don’t see redemption as a sort of legalistic type of reality. Our God is not the great accountant in the sky measuring and weighing our vices and our virtue; our sins and our acts of charity. That would be a cruel God, an uncaring God.

Our God is a God of love. He loves us more than we can possibly imagine. In a real sense, God longs for us in all love, truth, and beauty. He doesn’t love us in any kind of a selfish way. He already has the entire world, all the stars in heaven, and all the hosts of Angels adoring Him. What could we possibly add to Him or His Glory? No matter what society (or your mother) told you, you and I just really aren’t that important.

God loves us, because God is love itself. And all He wants from us is our love in return. He wants us to love Him fully and honestly and purely. He wants us to love Him perfectly, not because of what He gives us, or how we feel or what we get out of it.

He wants us to love him for His own sake, like Mother Teresa did. After Mother Teresa died, some of her letters came to light in which she discussed how dry her prayers had been for years, decades in fact. Some people were scandalized.

Others saw this as a sort of a blessing. Mother Teresa did not love the poor because of anything that it did for her. She loved and served the poor out of the pure, unselfish love of God. That is how God wants us to love Him.

That is how God loves us. He sent His only Son to us. He emptied Himself of the His Divinity; He was born in a stable to a Virgin into a poor family; He lived in a sort of a backwater community; and He died a truly painful, humiliating death.

Many saints have told us that He did this to redeem us, and although I don’t fully understand that, I think He also wanted to show us how to love. St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica says that Christ’s Crucifixion was appropriate for two reasons: first, because we needed to be redeemed; and second, as an example of His love for us. But it seems to me that these two aspects of Jesus’ Crucifixion are inextricably intertwined. He redeemed us by showing us how to love. That is the love that each of us as ambassadors for Christ are called to.

And so when we enter a church, maybe what we should pray is this: “I Adore You, O Christ, and I praise You, for by Your Holy Cross, You have redeemed the world by showing us how to love.”