In my previous blog post, I recommended watching Michael Dowd’s 25-minute YouTube video titled “Serenity Prayer for the 21st Century.” Since watching that video a couple of weeks ago, I have been thinking more about the serenity prayer and I invite you, too, to take a longer look at it.
Looking at the Serenity Prayer
In its shortest form, the serenity prayer consists of three simple petitions, artistically presented as follows:
As you probably know, the serenity prayer is the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) prayer recited at
the end of each AA meeting.
AA.com also has a link to a 12-page
pdf titled “Origin of The
Serenity Prayer: A Historical Paper.” In spite of similar statements made by
various people, the conclusion is that American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
(1892~1971) penned the prayer in its present form.
Even though Niebuhr’s prayer is universally
known as the serenity prayer, it actually includes petitions for three things: serenity,
courage, and wisdom. It is also noteworthy that serenity is linked to
acceptance. Denying or struggling against the inevitable always destroys
serenity.
This prayer, though, asks God for courage and
wisdom as well as serenity, so perhaps it should be called the
serenity/courage/wisdom prayer. Indeed, Niebuhr’s main intent may well have
been a call to courageous action, rather than a serenity that fails to work for
necessary changes in society.
Looking at the Longer Serenity Prayer
In the above-mentioned video, Dowd emphasizes the
next three lines of the serenity prayer that, he says, a lot of people don’t
know:
Living
one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace,
These are good words. Regardless of what we
have faced in the past or are going to face in the future, living and enjoying
one day/moment at a time is truly the pathway to personal peace.
Those words of
Niebuhr written in the early 1940s are similar to the emphasis on mindfulness
by Thích Nhất Hạnh, the venerable Vietnamese Buddhist monk who died on January 22.
He taught,
When we are mindful, deeply in touch with the present moment, our understanding of what is going on deepens, and we begin to be filled with acceptance, joy, peace and love.
These words by Thích Nhất Hạnh, as well as the
three lines in the serenity prayer that are not widely known, do nothing to
help solve the crisis of global warming or the likely collapse of industrial
civilization. But they do help us to live calmly and at peace in spite of looming
crises.
Looking at the Longer Serenity Prayer
The longest version
of the serenity prayer as given on the website of
Alcoholics Anonymous (and elsewhere) includes all of the lines cited above followed
by these words:
Taking,
as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make things right
If I surrender to His will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the next.
Amen.
These final lines of the serenity prayer regularly
spoken by AA members are even less widely known than the three lines mentioned
in the previous section—and are not mentioned by Dowd at all.
What does it mean to be “supremely happy with
Him [God] forever and ever in the “next” life? And how come Dowd, an ordained
Christian minister, didn’t mention these words at all?
From New Testament times on, Christians have
affirmed the reality of a coming “world without end.” Why is that emphasized so
little in so much of contemporary Christianity? This is what I will continue to
ponder as I prepare my next blog posting.
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