Say what you will about the church

(I'll almost certainly agree with you, after all)
I will grant, however, that Francis of Assisi was a pretty damned good poet.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Leaving out the 'lord' and the 'divine master' bits, I think it's a pretty damned nifty phrasing of the golden rule- just taken to a wider scale.
Sort of a step beyond doing unto others and so forth.
Help- because you can. It doesn't have to be because you're trying to do God's work, as it were, but because... well, because you can.

My brain chemistry is pretty screwed up right now. Everybody who needs to know, knows. The really short version is, I tried something to make a thing better, and it only made other things worse.

Anyway.
I stumbled across this little ditty as performed lyrically by Sarah McLachlan, and it really struck a chord with me.
I'm not entirely sure why. It probably hearkens back to a time when I believed I could make the world a better place.

/end quasi-emo gush of the night.