The Serenity Prayer is perhaps the most famous prayer in the world and the cornerstone of A.A. Almost everyone has heard it or read it:
God grant me the serenity to
Accept the things I cannot change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
The prayer is sometimes attributed to St. Anthony or is said to have its origins with the Greek Stoics. Actually, it was written in 1943 as a kind of sermon note by the famous professor, theologian and preacher Reinhold Niebuhr. We know this because Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, a well-known figure in American publishing, has written a biography of her father based on the origins of the Serenity Prayer: The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in the Time of Peace and War (Norton, 2003).
And guess what: the prayer has some of its origins to a famous episode in Bisbee, AZ.
Niebuhr was a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City and he was very influential in the years between WWI and WWII and beyond in the long struggle for justice for labor, for blacks, for Jews, and in promoting a realistic view of Christian ethics as it was practiced in the public sphere.
According to Sifton, the beginnings of the influences shaping the Serenity Prayer can be traced to events in Bisbee, Arizona when the famous Deportation was staged to quell a miner's strike!
This is the prayer as originally written by Niebuhr:
God give us grace
to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
Niebuhr’s version is different in important ways, including that clunky last sentence.. It is in the first person plural; the prayer is for us, a communal prayer. Also, Niebuhr’s prayer was not for wisdom to divide up the individual’s problems into the hard or easy to solve. Nor was his prayer about self-improvement, not directly anyway.
Niebuhr was interested in social or communal ethics and not so much in individual spiritual growth, although in my view his prayer might remind us that we grow a great deal in our life together, even in recovery. Niebuhr in his prayer focuses on those aspects of human nature that are enduring and endlessly troubling: our innate self-aggrandizement, our group pride, and our complacency that our social and economic arrangements are the ultimate and best of all possible worlds. The temptation to aggrandize one’s own group and to exploit the other is deeply rooted in human nature.
Two of Niebuhr’s great friends were an Episcopal Bishop, Will Scarlett, and Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court justice. But in 1917 Frankfurter was a young law graduate and he was sent to Bisbee by President Wilson after the Deportation to sort out the many different claims between the mine owners and managers and the strikers. Scarlett was an Episcopal priest in Phoenix.
Bisbee in the fall months after the July Deportation was still hot with threatened violence. Frankfurter was allegedly visited in his rail car by Bisbee deputy Frank Johnson who called Frankfurter a “Jewish son-of-a-bitch” and ordered him out of town. Westbrook Pegler, a right wing political columnist of that time, decades later called Frankfurter a “Commie sympathizer” for his role in the Deportation.
Will Scarlett was the only prominent Arizona clergyman on the side of labor and the Dean of Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix. Jack Greenway was in his congregation. One day, on visiting his Bishop, he was told that James S. “Rawhide Jimmy” Douglas was just in the Bishop’s office demanding that the Bishop throw Scarlett out of the church or “they [the mining bosses] will sue them.”
James S. Douglas was Walter Douglas’s brother. Both were sons of Dr. James Douglas the founder of the Copper Queen Mine. Scarlett was later to become an Episcopal Bishop but not in Arizona. (The colorful details of the last two paragraphs were taken from James Byrkit’s book, Forging the Copper Collar.)
Back then, both Scarlett and Frankfurter stood up to the copper owners, and Frankfurter’s report calmly found that Phelps Dodge and its president Walter Douglas, local law enforcement and hired thugs were the cause of violence and not the strikers. This despite the fact that many prominent progressives like Teddy Roosevelt supported the mining companies and the Deportation.
It was this seminal episode during WWI that Elizabeth Sifton sees as the beginnings of a coalition of friends and associates convinced of the powerful forces opposed to social justice in the United States and the need for a realistic and tough social philosophy to combat those forces, one that stresses a strong role for government to intervene on the side of the weak and the powerless.
Frankfurter, Will Scarlett, Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, other church leaders, and prominent labor and social activists joined together in cause after cause, supporting each other and standing as a small but courageous minority against the complacency, the racism, the anti-union feelings, and other injustices in the United States during much of the early and middle of the twentieth century. In the summers and over the years, many of this small group gathered in Heath, Massachusetts to vacation and visit and plan.
Sifton says in her book that Niebuhr generously allowed A.A. to publish its version of the Serenity Prayer without attribution but he was clearly unhappy with its individualist spirituality and its overly inward focus.
Today, we need to remember not just the history of the prayer and its origins in episodes like Bisbee’s Deportation. We also need to remember that the original Niebuhr’s Prayer is permanently current, the best text to understand why one of our two great parties is hard at work dismantling some of the most important achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society, from Medicare and Social Security to the environmental and public health legislation of the 1960s and early 1970s. And the other party is often clueless and spineless at preventing that dismantling.
The Serenity Prayer warns us to accept the bleak fact that injustice is written in the human heart and that the battle for social justice will never be over. And yet, and despite these terrible odds, it is our task to find the grace and courage for taking up the struggle once again and again.
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