Thomas Griffin 2/21/25
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Let Us Begin: New Book on the Life and Power of St. Francis
St. Peter Damian (1007-1072) was a deeply intelligent man who decided to handover the entirety of his life to poverty and prayer. All that he did after making this decision had its aim in being able to more clearly experience the real person of Jesus Christ.
Peter was an orphan at a young age. One of his brothers took care of him, but treated him horribly. Later in life, another brother took Peter under his care. He sent him to good schools and Peter later became a professor. After some time teaching Peter felt called to live a radical life of prayer and poverty. He became a Benedictine monk.
Because of his wisdom, spiritual life and commitment to following Christ he would become a future abbot and then a cardinal serving as a bishop in Ostia, Italy. He was viewed as an important advisor to Pope Stephen IX and Pope Gregory VII. Most importantly, Peter was called to help reform the lives of the clergy through stressing the importance of a life of prayer, poverty and celibacy. He would later become a Doctor of the Church.
Investigating some of his most powerful words will give us insight into who this man was while also inspiring us to become more like him. If we do so, we will also be placed in a position to better know who God is, and who we are called to be.
He always spoke about the centrality of knowing Jesus. “Therefore Christ must be at the center of the monk’s life,” he wrote “Christ be heard on our tongue, Christ be seen in our life and felt in our heart.”
For Peter Damian, there must be no confusion about the most important aspect of your life. Through the way that one speaks and acts, others should be able to clearly see that Jesus is the most important thing in your life. This is not done so that others can view you as pious. This is simply the litmus test for whether or not you are truly following him.
Being perfect is also not a requirement for making Christ the center of your life, however. Peter said, “It is not sinners, but the wicked who should despair; it is not the magnitude of one’s crime, but contempt of God that dashes one’s hopes.”
To proudly and boldly proclaim that faith is the most important thing in your life does not mean that you will never mess up. Clinging to prayer does not automatically mean that you will never sin again. Being a Christian is not complex, but it is the most challenging thing to do if we are truly following what Jesus asked us to do.
Damian notes that it is not being imperfect that should bring us to despair – the only reason for despair lies rejecting that God is real, or denying who God is. When we place Jesus at the center of our lives, it is impossible to do this.
In order to live out our relationship with God, Peter recommends that we practice diligence and accomplish our daily tasks. Everyone is invited to pray and perform their work of the day. When we do so we are following God’s will for us, and we are better able to find him exactly where we are.
“The best penance,” Damian explains. “is to have patience with the sorrows God permits. A very good penance is to dedicate oneself to fulfill the duties of everyday with exactitude and to study and work with all our strength.”
Do exactly what your responsibilities require of you. Doing so can be an offering that brings us into contact with the living God. The biggest responsibility of every Christian is to live a life of intense prayer. This means that we must be attracted to silence and carve out time each day to be quiet with our God.
St. Peter Damian explains the essential nature of silence and its impact by noting the following:
“The divine temple grows in fact, in silence, because when the mind of man does not dissipate in conversations with others, the summit of the spiritual edifice rises on high; and the more it grows and rises upwards, the more it is guarded by the discipline of silence and is not distracted by what is outside.”
Here we can view the wisdom of Peter. To place Jesus at the center of our lives, means that we must be silent because it is in this space that we block out everything in order to see him, hear him, and feel him. Committing oneself to this daily responsibility of prayer will enable one to grow in ways that he or she never thought were possible.
This means that we will often have to choose prayer over other good things. We will be challenged to forgo long hours of idle conversations or social experiences so that we can find time to be in silence every day. When we sacrifice in these ways so that we can spend more time with God, we are living out the cross. And, as St. Peter Damian writes; “He does not love Christ, who does not love the cross of Christ.”
So, what or who resides at the center of your life? Make it Christ by clinging to silent prayer today. And doing so, you will become like St. Peter Damian in the process.
Thomas Griffin is the chairperson of the religion department at a Catholic high school on Long Island where he lives with his wife and two sons. He has a masters degree in theology and is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Empty Tomb Project: The Magazine. He is the author of Let Us Begin: Saint Francis’s Way of Becoming Like Christ and Renewing the World.
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