Disturb Us, O Lord: The Misattributions and Authorship of a Prayer

Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

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According to numerous sites and internet citations, the prayer above was written by Desmond Tutu. But then, interestingly, there is a subset of pages that insert a footnote clarifying that they have since learned it was not, in fact, written by Tutu, but by the 16th century English explorer Sir Francis Drake. A few also note that they have been told that it was actually Drake, but further evidence suggests it was truly, actually, first found in print in a book called The Minister’s Manual in 1968, by the author M.K.W. Heicher. That’s closer, but still wrong.

The book The Minister’s Manual is a collection of useful things for ministers to have and the Lutheran Rev. Martin Klammer William Heicher was its editor for many years. The 1962 version of The Minister’s Manual is the earliest version I’ve found to contain the prayer in question, and there it is listed as “A Prayer for the Day” and attributed to Addison H. Groff.

Curiously, this misattribution issue seems not to be just an internet problem. The Episcopal Church in the U.S. used to publish a magazine called The Witness. In the March, 1986 issue they included the prayer, calling it “Let Us Pray,” and attributing it to a David Hardman. In the July/August issue of the same magazine, they published a reader letter from a David Groff, who wrote in to correct the record and clarify that the prayer in question was written in 1945 by his grandfather, the Episcopal priest, Rev. Addison H. Groff, D.D and the intended title was "Disturb Us, O Lord."

Why it was misattributed to Hardman, Drake, and Tutu is unclear, but I think Groff deserves his due.