The Serenity Prayer is one of the best known prayers in the world.
Written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to serve as part of a sermon
during WWII, it soon became a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and
all manner of recovery groups.
I have written about the Serenity Prayer before here and, on the origins of the prayer, here. Niebuhr's daughter Elizabeth Sifton, in her book The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, traces the origins of the ideas in the prayer to the famous Deportation Strike of 1917 in Bisbee.
Originally the prayer was a communal prayer, a prayer for groups. Niebuhr's prayer was meant to sum up his theology of "realism," of facing the injustice that is written in our hearts, and to get the churches more involved in changing society instead of saving souls.
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.
But in A. A. the prayer summarizes a whole philosophy of recovery and a stance toward daily or ordinary life, or what I call life itself. That philosophy and stance is known as "acceptance."
In the Serenity Prayer, the prayer is an individual's prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to
accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I
can,
and the wisdom to know
the difference.
Despite its plain language, as I see it the point of the Serenity Prayer is not only to divide reality into two classes: the things I cannot change and the things I can. The Serenity Prayer is about changing the way we look at all of life (or the world or daily life), about adopting a different stance toward the whole of life, including especially that huge part of life that we cannot change.
Thus, the Serenity Prayer is a daily practice, a practice meant to free us from how we think about and respond to daily existence.
The best summary statement about acceptance in the recovery movement can be found on p. 449 of the Third Edition of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. This is part of the “Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict” story, a section of the Big Book that has become hallowed ground among recovery groups. (My links are to an authorized, on line "Big Book" published after the Third Edition, so the page numbers may vary.)
And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, when I find some person, place, thing, or situation—-some facts of my life—- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.
I confess that I have always had some serious reservations about this passage, especially the part about “I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.” I will say more about this in a moment.
The author, who it turns out was Dr. Paul O., later wrote a book about acceptance,with Jack N., There’s More to Quitting Drinking Than Quitting Drinking, elaborating on this meaning of acceptance.
I would also like to skip over the part in Dr. Paul O. paragraph about "Nothing happens in God's world by mistake." There are far, far too many views about God and God’s involvement with the world to take up here. Again, more on this below.
There is a
way of shedding light on acceptance, on how we view daily life or life itself and the Serenity Prayer, from another source. This is Byron Katie's "The Work" as outlined in her book, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life.
Katie has developed a practice of inquiry into people's underlying beliefs about daily life and personal relations and reality that she calls The Work. I have more to say about The Work here.
Katie argues that there are three kinds of business, three domains of daily life that we deal with:
I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours, and God’s. (For me the word God means "reality.") Reality is God, because reality rules. Anything that’s out of my control, your control, and everyone else’s control, I call that God’s business.
Acceptance then, in Byron Katie’s scheme, has two facets: learning to stay in one’s business in daily life and also learning to accept or "love" whatever turns up, in daily life, either in other people's business or in what she calls God's business, things like earthquakes, when we're to die, the fate of the Republic, and so forth. She doesn't argue that we might be concerned or attentive to what other people do or to what happens in the Big Picture; she urges us not to get hooked on a "story" about either of these matters.
Story, to Katie, means a narrative about reality or other people that makes it all about "me." Reality and other people are not "about me." They may affect me, touch me, and so on, but they aren't social dramas in which we place ourselves at the center, and for which we develop major quarrels.
"Why didn't she think about me?" we say, or "When is Obama going to pay attention to the real issues in health care reform, the ones I learned the hard way?" we think.
Another interpretation of acceptance that I find particularly helpful, even though it doesn't focus on recovery so much, is Steve C. Hayes's Get Our of Your Mind and Into Your Life. Hayes offers a really clear explanation of how "thoughts" or what recovery terms "stinking thinking" can really rule your life, and, like the Buddhists, offers many practical techniques, including meditation for acceptance as a kind of willingness to accept pain without allowing it to turn into resentment and suffering.
What do we gain when we practice setting aside our quarrel with those
parts of daily life, including other people’s life?
We gain freedom because each time I get into those parts of daily existence that I cannot change, or what Katie calls Reality (what I wish she would call everyday life or life itself), I open up separation in myself---divisions within myself as well as separation between myself and others, as well as separation from God and all that happens to us.
With acceptance we begin to close this separation and begin to experience wholeness and a loss of the loneliness and isolation that living in other people's business entails.
Let me put what Katie and Dr. Paul O. are saying a different way, by referring to Paul Tillich's beautiful essay, "You Are Accepted," one of the most beautiful sermons of the past 100 years. The sermon is collected in Tillich's book of sermons, The Shaking of the Foundations. Tillich argues (following Paul) that "when sin abounds, grace does so all the more."
Sin to Tillich is separation, from God and others, and Tillich and Paul are arguing that when we grasp that we are already fundamentally accepted---the heart of the Christian message---when we understand right down to the ground that we are children of the universe, then what happens can't destroy us.
Separation or "sin" can't shake or undermine our confidence and we can then keep the connectedness to others and to all that is that is the very heart of sobriety and serenity and happiness. But when we quarrel or fight with reality we are really saying, "I am not accepted, after all."
When what others do shakes our sense of acceptance, or creates in us the feeling that we are being cast aside or ignored, resentment and divisions are created within us and without. And it is this sense of separation that we tried to close with drinking and drugging.
When we in recovery recite the Serenity Prayer, and pray for help in accepting the things they cannot change, we are praying to accept our own acceptance, to never forget it, to make it the foundation of our way of thinking and our view of the world.
Only then we can face what is the case and other people with equanimity and serenity.
That
Katie's work should help understand how acceptance in recovery works
should not surprise us.
Katie's life before she experienced recovery includes alcoholism, and she developed a "Four Questions" method of Inquiry that works very much like the steps of A.A. and other recovery programs.
In fact, Katie’s passage above is, to my lights, one way of restating the quotation from p. 449 of the Big Book of A.A.
Katie and Dr. Paul O. are both saying: we who are trying to recover and to wake up must learn to keep a certain detachment from the world, to be "in the world but not of the world."
The chief gain is not just a tremendous reduction in unnecessary suffering; it also can help build skill in reacting to other people calmly and with some measure of serenity and distance.
Acceptance also leads to a restoration to the underlying unity of all that is and our sense that we are accepted members of that unity. Katie's approach, like the steps in recovery program, help us to experience the beauty and wholeness of life itself even in the midst of bad or difficult times.
Acceptance as a practice leads to "loving what is" or the grace and miracle of everyday existence, of life itself, of God's world, or of the present moment because it helps restore our fundamental trust in life itself, our sense that we are accepted and utterly safe.
This is the spiritual side of acceptance, the experience of grace or "life meeting life" as Paul Tillich puts it in his sermon.
Jesus' admonition to "love your enemies" is put in a new light by this view of the Serenity Prayer.
If by love we mean accepting your critics or enemies and by keeping away from the internal (or external) harangue about them, we are released from the "story" of the critic and the enemies, and we are enabled to view them with realism and equanimity, which is a kind of love.
Niebuhr's original Serenity Prayer was meant to warn Christians that injustice was written in the human heart and that "to accept the things we cannot change" meant we had to be realistic and not foolishly idealistic in facing the world's tragedies.
He was deeply involved, during the 1930s, in getting the churches to recognize the Gospels as a social gospel and also to face up to the great dangers posed by Nazi Germany and also the Soviet Union.
The original Serenity Prayer was a kind of "wake up call" to the darkness that can come over our life together, both in the United States with its racial past and its antipathy to unions and so forth
While Niebuhr allowed A.A. to adopt is individualistic version of the Serenity Prayer, he was not happy with their removing "the things we should change" from the prayer. He would be especially unhappy with versions of the Serenity Prayer on the Internet like this one, which is a kind of pietist prayer that Niebuhr opposed all of his life.
The Serenity Prayer for recovery groups is more aimed at the spirituality of everyday existence and learning to live one day at a time, finding the kingdom in the everyday.
I think that there is room for both views of the Serenity Prayer and today, especially, I see "acceptance" as a kind of gospel of life itself, ordinary, everyday life.
I tend to go on about acceptance, here, here, and here. I spent most of my life involved in fighting for social justice in health and I have come to see, important as it is, there is a need for a spirituality of the everyday.
In my own struggle with acceptance I found that my concerns with social justice had turned into a "story" about health care reform that put me in the center of the social drama when it truth I am long removed from that center, if ever I was there. And this leads to a sense of separation, and then depression, and ultimately it can cause us to drink again.
My task is to be attentive to the things I cannot change with skill and equanimity and to find in what happens the beauty and the mystery that is always there, the mystery that always contains the grace that "I am accepted."
Thanks for this. I am not an alcoholic, or in a relationship with one. I have, however, recently suffered a personal loss as the partner I have been with for 20 years, and with whom I have a 6 year old child, on February 11 (the day before you wrote this) told me without warning that our relationship was over. I have in the past weeks been trying to internalize the concept that suffering equals pain multiplied (not added) by resistance, so that being with my pain without resistance (i.e., without trying to be in my former life partner's business, but instead just be in my own) may ease my suffering even though it need not cure my pain. But, saying these things is obviously easier than living them. Still, I am trying to find the ability to accept those things that are not mine to change (other people's business) so that I can grieve my pain, honor my loss, and hopefully reduce the level of daily suffering I am experiencing. Your thoughts on this are helpful, and I appreciate them.
Posted by: EngerSal | April 01, 2009 at 02:16 PM