Everyone is familiar with AA’s Serenity Prayer: “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 Serenity Prayer was written by America’s most famous theologian of the past century, Reinhold Niebuhr. It was written as a part of a summer sermon when Niebuhr was preaching at a local church during his vacation from his post at the Union Theological Seminary. This was during WWII.
I have written elsewhere about the surprising connection between the Serenity Prayer and Bisbee, Arizona. This connection was made in the book about Niebuhr written by his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, a prominent editor in the publishing field. Sifton's book is titled, The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War.
Niebuhr's original version is more a prayer that we pray together, not a prayer primarily for individuals.
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.
I have heard the prayer for decades now and I have always thought I have known what it means.
What could be simpler? We should come to accept the things we cannot change and instead concentrate on those things you can change. And we should develop the wisdom to know the difference.
Today I would say that this is a very limited view of this famous prayer.
Don’t get me wrong; the prayer as I have understood it over the years is still wonderfully practical and helpful; we spend way too much time obsessing about those things we cannot do much about, returning to them over and over again in our minds, forming a resentment.
If we drop these resentments and obsessions and turn our attention to those things we can fruitfully change, this is all to the better.
But I think that we sometimes bring to the prayer an unconscious assumption that limits its full power and meaning.
To get a different slant on the prayer, we should view "things" as standing for something like "situations" or "conditions" or "projects."
If this famous prayer is only about sorting out the situations we can change from those much bigger conditions or situations that we cannot change, it doesn’t deserve a place among the more profound insights into the meaning of the spiritual. This view narrows the Serenity Prayer and ignores its larger meaning.
"Things we cannot change" refers also, perhaps mainly, to the gift of life itself, to life as it is constantly becoming, shifting, changing. This reveals that the prayer is not just about doing or getting, it is about being and becoming and dreaming.
Much of life itself comes from others, from our relationships. Our "relationships" are not just with people, we are also related to and radically dependent on the world, to the entire biotic realm, and to the universe. It is through our relationship to others and to everyday life that we have our being and our becoming, life itself.
We are subjects, not lords, in life itself.
At least as I see it, the Serenity Prayer is a prayer to stop seeing the world and life itself only as a collection of projects or conditions that either can or cannot be manipulated, reshaped, and refashioned. This is narrowing how we look at the world to the sum total of things to be fixed or changed, things that are measured by "doing this to produce that."
The Serenity Prayer is also meant to recall to our minds and awareness how much of life is a gift, how life itself is ultimately not "fixable" but only "receivable." To me, that's the core meaning of "acceptance" in the prayer.
The prayer should be read to say: Life doesn't belong to us; we belong to life. Receive the world as the gift that it is, and all that is in it, gifts that we cannot change and can only accept with gratitude as part of our becoming. God grant us the grace and serenity to accept life itself, dreaming and changing what must be changed to receive more life ourselves and to give more life to others.
That's kind of clunky wording but I think this is the nub of the prayer.
Leslie Farber in his book The Way of the Will makes this point in an interesting way.
Farber says that we suffer from a confusion of realms. We modern men and women confuse two different realms of willing. By "willing" Farber means something like "desiring."
We can will or desire specific objects like a car, or a raise, or to lose weight. In this instrumental realm much of what we will to have or possess is like “doing this to produce that.”
But there is another realm filled with states of affairs which we cannot ever "do this to produce that."
This is the realm of gift, states that come from others or from life itself. We cannot will a reputation or admiration or the love of a child. That is a gift. To this realm we can only bring a willingness to receive, to be changed, and a willingness to dream, as Eduardo Galeano argues.
Indeed, the two different realms or ways of being can be termed the realm of willing and the realm of willingness, the willingness to allow one's self to be chosen, to be changed.
So much of what we truly desire is only ours as a gift. When we will for ourselves that which cannot be willed we suffer anxiety, frustration, and too often some form of addiction.
As Ernest Kurtz points out in his book The Spirituality of Imperfection (where he explains Farber’s treatment of the two kinds of willing), we can earn congratulations but not admiration; we can perform meekness but not humility, we can purchase pleasures but not happiness and we can win knowledge but not wisdom.
Admiration, humility, happiness, love, and wisdom cannot be possessed or bought; we can only have these things given to us as grace, as gifts flowing from the profound mystery of our existence and of our life together.
Where the Serenity Prayer prays to "Accept the things we cannot change" we should think of that huge part of life that is largely a gift, including our gift of existence at all.
And a huge part of life itself that is a gift is our common dreams.
All we can do in this realm is express our gratitude, our thankfulness for our dreams of how the world might be otherwise.
The truly important things in life are gifts, states of grace. And we should ask for them, even beg and pray for them, but always and ever remembering that we cannot will them as objects or things to have and keep.
They are gifts of God or of our Higher Power or what I like to refer to as life itself.
As Ernest Kurtz says, "We are all looking for, but we find what we are looking for only by being looked for. We find miracle only when we stop looking for magic."
A very interesting take on the serenity prayer. I always thought more of this prayer as a way of recognizing and achieving self responsibility. God, grant me the serenity ( calmness in mind and action) to accept the things I can't not change (my boss coming in and chewing me out) the courage to change the things I can (Do I start yelling back? Do I cower and apologize profusely, begging for mercy? Do I follow the policy of restraint of tongue and pen with the intent of looking into what my part in this was?) and the wisdom to know the difference (Am I in control of my bosses behavior? No. Is it possible for me to be in control of my behavior? Yes. Will I be able to make more clearheaded choices in the future by looking at my part in the situation and seeing how I could have handled things differently? Yes.
Admittedly, I have been going to AA for a number of years, but I find it helpful to think of it more on a hands on practical level.
Posted by: Don Short | August 13, 2006 at 09:13 AM