Prayer for Peace
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, which is perfect and everlasting, that our souls may
radiate peace.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, that we may think, speak and act
harmoniously.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, that we may be
contented and thankful for Thy bountiful gifts.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, that amidst our worldly strife we may
enjoy Thy bliss.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, that we may
endure all, tolerate all, in the thought of Thy Grace and Mercy.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, that our lives may
become a divine vision, and in Thy Light all darkness may vanish.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord, our Father and
Mother, that we Thy children on earth may all unite in one brotherhood.
Origin of the Prayer:
This ever-timely Prayer for Peace was first published in the July 1918 edition of The Sufi,
a quarterly magazine edited by Inayat Khan in London:
Who wrote this prayer?
In general, it seems rather clear that most of the content of the magazine
was not actually written by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. I suspect that the
magazine was largely produced by the murids, and that in general Murshid
probably just glanced over the content to see what they had produced and offer
comments and guidance. As such, his title of Editor may have been somewhat of
an honorific title, more than a functional title. But that is just my opinion,
not a fact.
Obviously the horrors of World War I would have been weighing on the
hearts and minds of everyone in Murshid’s organization, and in response to the
on-going struggles, the Prayer for Peace was created. But, who wrote it? Clearly
this prayer is written in the same general style as other
prayers written by Hazrat Inayat Khan, but it
seems to me that there were a number of his murids who would have been capable
of
creating such a prayer to include in their magazine. Or perhaps it was even
created by multiple people who each created various verses by revealing their
own hopes and aspirations in prayer form while were working on the content for
that edition of the magazine. However, since there is no attribution to any
specific author, and no known form of this prayer in any earlier form (such as
class notes or notebooks), it remains unclear to me who should be credited with
authorship.
A printed version:
Here's a quite lovely presentation of the prayer, from
The Abode of the Message circa 2000, although the second
verse has "speak" and "act" in reversed order compared with
the prayer as published in The Sufi magazine: