The Serenity Prayer

Who would have thought that people could get out of sorts over the authorship of a prayer? Particularly a prayer as magnificent as this one: "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 out of sorts some are, ironically over who should get the credit for an eloquent composition about serenity.

In all likelihood this is currently the best known prayer in the English language, with the obvious exception of the Lord's Prayer. Reinhold Niebuhr, a much appreciated Protestant moral theologian of the last century, was long thought to have composed it, sometime during the Second World War. Lately, his authorship has been cast into doubt by discoveries from new databases suggesting that the prayer was already in circulation --- with slightly different phrasings and from very different sources --- as early as 1936.

Although Niebuhr frequently referred to himself as the prayer's author, he also was open to the possibility that he simply assimilated its basic ideas from earlier, forgotten sources. However, Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, is more protective of her father's authorship; in fact, she wrote a whole book about the prayer as embracing the vital center of his thought. (The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War). In subsequent interviews, she has tended to get a little testy with her questioners.

I hope that this "controversy" resists going anywhere. The prayer stands on its own, whoever its author may have been, and with all due respect to Ms. Sifton, Niebuhr's reputation has hardly anything to do with his uses of it. The goings-on, however, have gotten me thinking again about some of the many things that I have learned from reading and listening to Reinhold Niebuhr, this time with the Serenity Prayer in mind. One thing that Ms. Sifton is surely right about is that the context for this prayer and for her father's writings was something very different from "the prevailing self-congratulatory cheeriness" of twentieth-century American Protestantism.

The sad truth is that this attitude is still the norm in most American organizations today, from the proliferation of restaurant franchises all the way to the construction of taller and taller skyscrapers and church steeples. More is better, and there is no reason why people everywhere should not be enjoying still more. The Kingdom of God in America, to borrow a reference from Reinhold Niebuhr's brother, Richard, is still a kingdom primarily for the up-beat, for whom only growth should count, only profit should matter, and only optimists should flourish. It is a kingdom whose truly faithful members, in the phrasing of one University president for whom I once worked, never retreat (he hated the idea of pre-school year "Retreats") but only advance. They never flinch from grabbing greater market share, other churches' members, and other countries' resources and even their sovereignty. They never waver in their conviction that in the eyes of God, the good life is there for the taking and that every day, in every way, the world should be getting better and better.

For Reinhold Niebuhr, serenity, courage, and wisdom are anything but there for the taking. All three are threatened with compromise from moment to moment by the self-centeredness of a culture that has become even more narcissistic than it was when Christopher Lasch first diagnosed it with this term, and by the co-opting of social organizations and governments for purely selfish purposes by people --- religious people included --- who are absolutely certain that divine and natural laws are cooperating fully with their every venture. From this perspective, serenity means only satiation; courage means only aggression; and wisdom means only calculatedness.

If Niebuhr did not in fact pen the Serenity Prayer, it would still be true to say that no one understood better than he did why it has to begin the way it does. It is a petition to God to grant to us, not because we deserve them, but because God is gracious and merciful, virtues that we do not in fact have and can never develop wholly on our own. Left to our own devices, we are more likely to seek serenity from a bottle, courage from Swift-Boating super-patriots, and wisdom from anyone and everyone who never disagrees with us about anything. As Niebuhr knew only too well, it is by grace alone that we have any real hope of seeing these virtues as God does, and developing them in ourselves as God wants.