The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of the AA program dedicates part of Step 11 to the prayer of St. Francis and to the practice of meditating on it. The prayer in question has all the advantages and disadvantages of being familiar. Among its advantages are the fact that it is widely known and well liked. It's a Christian prayer, and most of us in the West are Christians; but there is not much there to offend an agnostic either. Its chief disadvantage is that we know it so well that we don't really pay attention to what it says.

The requests in this prayer are just two-fold: that I be made an instrument of God's peace, and that God "grant" unselfishness. That's not how most of us hear the prayer. We think instead that it is a set of pious intentions which, if we succeed in mastering them, will make the world a better place.

If it were possible to make the world and ourselves better by trying harder, few of us would need a 12-Step program. At the core of the Prayer of St. Francis is the acknowledgement that of ourselves we can do nothing. None of the wonderful things mentioned in the prayer can come about without the pre-condition of our total surrender to God as we understand God.