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 may have simply 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 how it appears to me, not a fact.

In 1918 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: