As I prepared for this time, a colleague showed me a prayer by Sir Francis Drake... that's right, not St. Francis but Sir Francis—first Englishman to circumnavigate the earth, defeater of the Spanish Armada, and privateer (legal pirate). This prayer resonated with me at a very deep level, and expresses some of what I hope this sabbatical will accomplish.
Here it is:
"Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.
Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wilder seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask you to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push back the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.
This we ask in the name of our Captain,
Who is Jesus Christ."
—Sir Francis Drake, 1577 (the year he started his voyage around the world)
Very eloquent. My first thought is that it's hard for my little mind to reconcile "pirate" and "pious"
ReplyDeleteAnd, it captures how the perfectionists I know (and love, at least some of them...) see the world: "We are doing these particular virtues, avoiding these specific sins, and the best you can do is to imitate us." In other words, they define perfection as what they are already doing. And they are doing it very sincerely, so it's not for me to "DISTURB" them. Or is it....