Prayer for Generosity
I begin every campus day with my kindergartners in the same way. When everyone settles into their neatly arranged rows, I greet them by saying, “Good morning, class,” and they respond, “Good morning, Mrs. Strange.” I ask them, “Are you ready to learn?” to which they reply, “Yes, ma’am!” Some are more enthusiastic than others with an occasional emphatic salute, and sometimes it takes a few tries before everyone is awake and truly ready.
When I know I have everyone’s attention we fold our hands, close our eyes, bow our heads, and pray this prayer together:
Dearest Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve You as You deserve.
To give and not to count the cost,
To fight and not to heed the wounds,
To toil and not to seek for rest,
To labor and not to ask for reward,
Save that of knowing I am doing Your will,
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
This beautiful prayer was given to me the first year I began teaching at VCS. It was simply called Opening Prayer along with a different Closing Prayer in our curriculum. I had said it with my students more than a hundred times before I became curious about its origin. I assumed it had been written recently by the administrators at our mother school, Trinity Classical School in Houston, Texas but they directed me to Memoria Press who published the curriculum we use for language arts. When I couldn’t find the name of the author from their website, I turned to Google and typed in the first line to see what would turn up. What I found was a deeper, wider history than I ever expected.
It turns out that many scholars have attributed the Prayer for Generosity to St. Ignatius of Loyola who lived during the time of the Reformation, even though no reference to the prayer has been found before 1897. Whether or not he actually wrote it, it is universally agreed that it is Ignatian in style, form, and content. The imagery in the prayer has always conjured up for me a soldier preparing for battle, and now I know why.
Ingatius was born in 1491 in the Basque region of Spain. At seventeen, he joined the army. He loved the military exercises, the fancy uniform, the code of chivalry, and the excitement of living out the stories he loved from El Cid to the knights of Camelot to the Song of Roland. But his successful military career came to an end when his leg was shattered by a cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona in 1521. He was forced to return home for a long recovery.
For months Ignatius underwent several surgeries and was confined to bed. The only books he could get his hands on were stories of Jesus, the history of the saints, and other religious texts instead of his usual tales of knights and battles. It was here that he had a spiritual conversion and felt called to give his life to ministry.
When he could walk again, Ignatius made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and later enrolled at the University of Paris to prepare for a life of service to God. Interestingly, John Calvin also studied there at the same time, although it is not recorded that he ever met Ignatius. Ultimately, the two men ended up on different paths. Calvin went on to write the first systematic theological treatise of the reform movement. Ignatius of Loyola went on to found the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, a religious order of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Jesuits were devoted to education and scholarship and were committed to bringing their message to other cultures through missionary endeavors. They were known for being as devoted to the Pope and his orders as soldiers are to their commander. Apparently, Ignatius’s love of the military never quite left him and in fact the opening lines of the Jesuits’ founding document said that the society existed for “whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God to strive especially for the defence and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine.” The society was nicknamed, “God’s soldiers,” and “God’s marines,” due to their willingness to serve in any condition.
After reading about Ignatius and the early years of the Jesuits, the Prayer for Generosity made more sense to me and the rich, deep history now provides a colorful backdrop and a stage for its imagery. It reminds me of Ephesians 6 in which Paul uses the picture of putting on armor to prepare for battle. He admonishes his readers to remember that the fight is not against flesh and blood. Our battle is against the schemes of the devil, the present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil, and flaming darts of the evil one. Our weapons and defense are the Word, the Spirit, prayer, truth, the righteousness of Christ, and the gospel of peace.
Every day in my classroom, we do battle. We fight against the darkness of this age and we fight our selfish flesh to seek instead the truth, beauty, and goodness of Christ. Every book we read, every lesson we tackle, every fact we memorize, every letter we form with beauty and excellence is an offensive move against our enemy. May our Lord do more than we can ask or think to uphold us in the battle.
Sources:
https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/teach-me-to-be-generous/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Loyola
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus
Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A History of Christianity: Beginnings to 1500, Volume I, Prince Press, 2005, Peabody, Massachusetts.