Photo: Ernest Hamlin Baker
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.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Serenity Prayer
The tension on which my last post ended opens up another way to think about the articulation of wisdom and serenity that goes beyond the perception of dispassionate acceptance as an index of wisdom. Specifically, I am thinking of German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, now most commonly understood as quoted above.
In her important essay on the Serenity Prayer, Niebuhr’s daughter Elizabeth Sifton relies on a different version of the prayer: “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 one from the other” (16). Sifton justifies her use of the first personal plural here by noting that it is “expressly intended to go to the heart of the possibilities and impossibilities of collective action for collective benefit” (29). With that point firmly in mind, and recognizing that the Serenity Prayer functions well in a secular context, I would propose what we can and should seek—be it from God or our own value system—is “the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Wisdom is thus not just an attitude of serene acceptance but the capacity—among individuals and communities—to judge when serene acceptance both is and is not appropriate.
Photo: Tom Cook
Although the Serenity Prayer has been variously attributed to Augustine, Aquinas, Boethius, several ancient Persian poets, the eighteenth-century pietist Friedrich Oetinger, and YWCA official Winnifred Wygal, the scholarly consensus today is that Wygal’s mentor, Reinhold Niebuhr, formulated an early version of the prayer in 1932 (“Origin of the Serenity Prayer”). The prayer’s insistence on the “courage to change the things we can” was eminently topical. Over the course of the 1930s, and despite his fundamental pacifism, Niebuhr became an ardent proponent of American engagement in the fight against Nazism. In so doing, he was “deeply at odds with the leadership of most Protestant and Catholic churches, which had failed and were failing… to give heed to the present dangers and to the hideous threats posed to democracy and freedom by totalitarian forces everywhere” (Sifton 27). At the same time, again in the words of his daughter, Niebuhr was an
active skeptic about conventional liberal optimism, an active opponent of conventional conservative disregard for social justice, [and] a deeply devout man who wrestled daily with the problem of how to relate his innermost religious commitments to the public life of the community. (Sifton 29f.)
A debunker of the hypocrisy of those, believers and not, who approach all matters of the world with an unshakeable conviction of their own righteousness, Niebuhr was brutally honest in his analysis of the complexities inherent in most human collectivities and in the individuals that compose them. Thus this committed antifascist could go so far as to say that “Hitler is a brother to all of us in so far as his movement explicitly avows certain evils which are implicit in the life of every nation” (qtd. in Sifton 56). Small wonder, then, that Niebuhr saw Abraham Lincoln, who in his fight against the evils of slavery well understood the all-too-human impulse to exert power over others, as an exemplar of the wisdom inherent in the Serenity Prayer (Sifton 65).
As is so often the case where overtly wise sayings and pronouncements are concerned, the Serenity Prayer has had a colorful, if somewhat ironic afterlife. Winnifred Wygal published a version of the prayer in a 1933 YWCA periodical. Alcoholics Anonymous first integrated the prayer into its twelve-step program in 1941. With Niebuhr’s blessing, the U.S. Army included the Serenity Prayer in its 1944 A Book of Prayers for the Armed Forces. Unbeknownst to Niebuhr, and with no apparent awareness of the historical irony in so doing, the postwar German Bundeswehr chiseled the words of this committed antifascist onto a rock at its training facility (Sifton 63).
Finally, thanks in large measure to its popularization by AA, the Serenity Prayer entered into its kitschy afterlife, appearing on Hallmark cards; on “bookends, tea towels, [and] pieces of etched stained glass to stick on library windows”; and even “painted on the side of a Swiss chalet” (Sifton 60). In a strip from Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin says he prays for “[t]he strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can’t, and the incapacity to tell the difference” (Watterson). And humorist Erma Bombeck modified the prayer’s end to read: “… and the wisdom to keep my mouth shut when I don’t know the difference” (“Origin of the Serenity Prayer”).
Photo: Etsy
In what remains of this section, I will examine the pertinence of the Serenity Prayer for two novels. To my knowledge, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is the only major novel to make a version of Niebuhr’s prayer integral to its ultimate meaning, although it does so in ways that echo the prayer’s kitschy afterlife and are deeply ironic in the context of the novel’s thematics. By contrast, Louise Erdrich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Night Watchman makes no mention of the Serenity Prayer and scant reference to the concept of wisdom. Yet in ways that build upon wisdom traditions in Indigenous American spirituality and thought, it brilliantly exemplifies the spirit of Niebuhr’s prayer and the understanding of wisdom that subtends it.
