The Serenity Prayer can be found in either the common shortened form or the longer, full version with portions of language altered. The most popular version is as follows:. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time, Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, Trusting that You will make all things right, If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Ultimately, the prayer requests the ability to identify which circumstances are amenable to change. God directs us. How then can anyone understand their own way?
The believer must accept His direction and influence before inner-calmness and peace can be experienced. There are some things we cannot change. Man does not have the ability to change his family tree, science, or factual history.
Debating and questioning factual matters are of no helpful consequence and only results in confusion and unrest. The weather cannot be altered regardless of human attempts to control it. When do we push ahead and when do we just accept where we're at? Also significant is that Niebuhr's original version asks for the courage to change the things that "should" be changed, not the things that "can" be changed.
Niebuhr's daughter, the literary editor and publisher Elisabeth Sifton, wrote a book about her father's prayer and believed that the original version went beyond asking what the individual "can" do to address what society as a whole must do in the name of justice. Part of what we're seeing in Niebuhr's original version of the prayer is, what are we doing as a group?
He was very concerned with what human groups could accomplish. When Niebuhr wrote the serenity prayer, he was a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City and was also a mainstay on the university speaking circuit.
Sabella says that Niebuhr traveled every weekend for decades to give sermons in different college chapels, and that he would often "hammer out" a prayer on the way to the gig. The earliest reference to the serenity prayer appears in Wygal's personal diary. On Oct. While the quote isn't an exact match for the three-part structure of the prayer, the sentiment is the same and it's attributed to "R.
By the early s, versions of the serenity prayer were beloved enough to be included in printed obituaries, which is where the AA first found it in the New York Herald Tribune. In , some AA members decided to have it printed up on cards that fellow members could carry in their wallets. The prayer was also shipped overseas during World War II and used in devotionals for American servicemen. By , the serenity prayer had become so well-known that people went searching for its author.
Niebuhr was fairly certain that he had written it, but was foggy on the details. He and his wife guessed that it was written in or , and Niebuhr admitted that he couldn't remember the genesis of the ideas in the prayer. No: he was too controversial for that. Still, his pithy, aphoristic eloquence was familiar to thousands of people, who heard him at dozens of university and college chapels he preached several times a year at Yale for decades and who appreciated his efforts on behalf of the inter-denominational and ecumenical organizations in which he was so active.
Niebuhr did this extracurricular work on weekends, when he left Union Seminary and his family to zoom around the country, so my mother might easily have been unacquainted with the earlier circulation of a prayer she knew well by — During the week there was his teaching and ministry at Union, which every spring sent out into the world newly fledged clergy who had been his students, had taken notes in his classes, had attended the daily services where he prayed with them or the Sunday ones where he preached, had asked him to preside at their weddings and at baptisms of their children, and had tried to emulate the essence of his work in their own efforts.
They always sat up and took notice when Niebuhr was around; he surprised, even shocked them with his austere, benign, but tragic view of human frailty, with his memorable calls to action and pleas for humility. Nobody else sounded like him.
Naturally enough, people copied his lectures, sermons, and prayers all the time. My mother told of hearing a sermon one Sunday in a New York church—my father was off ministering in another city—that was lifted pretty much word for word from the just-published Moral Man and Immoral Society. They did this because they valued his welcome challenge to the mushy pieties of the day; they wanted to expand and perpetuate his unusual ministry.
Nor would they surprise the countless divinity-school graduates, teachers, church workers, librarians, scholars, missionaries, YWCA secretaries, and just plain people whose paths crossed with Niebuhr's. Even when my father drafted his prayers rapidly or composed them right on the spot, he reworded them many times before deeming them in final form—standard operating procedure for clergymen. The Serenity Prayer was unusual in his oeuvre, then, only in the odd circumstance of its wartime publication and subsequent diffusion.
Readers respond The Niebuhrs I knew. While I have no new evidence to contribute, I do have several of what I believe are well-based opinions that are relevant to the current debate.
The Reinhold I knew would be totally incapable of making any false claim. His wife Ursula and I, moreover, were colleagues at Barnard College from until , during which time we taught a course together. Then and in years to come, Reinhold asked me to read and comment on several of his books in manuscript form, acknowledging the fact in the published version.
That is not something about which she would have been mistaken. This article is interesting. It is also disturbing. It is also characteristic of an academic approach to history. It is intriguing to try to establish who did something first. Doing something first, such as publishing a paper, can represent an act of importance. For Yale College, to have been the first American college to accept a student of African extraction was an important first.
It set a precedent. It was a courageous action. I recall a rumor that was going around Yale when I was a student that one of the professors in the chemistry department was as unpleasant as he was because he was the first one to synthesize a chemical of importance, perhaps morphine, but was cautious in publishing his results and somebody else beat him to the punch. Unfortunately, granting agencies pay a lot of attention to that, and not getting there first often makes it hard to get grant support.
Synthesizing previous material into a new form, especially one which becomes widely accepted and has a major impact, can be a first of enormous importance, and to denigrate its value seems petty, ungracious and excessively academic. The prayer appears to be a case of mixed oral and written transmission.
I found a publication with one part of the eventually-named Serenity Prayer—the courage passage may have come first, originally. It was written by a U. Guild wrote:. It must be added, many Southerners appear to have done little to erase the awful memories of the Civil War. Abandon all these local animosities and make your sons Americans. Thanks for the provocative pieces exploring the origin of the Serenity Prayer. Whoever first composed the Serenity Prayer surely was inspired by its true Author.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed,. Living one day at a time, Enjoying one moment at a time,. Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, Taking, as Jesus did, This sinful world as it is, Not as I would have it, Trusting that You will make all things right,. If I surrender to Your will, So that I may be reasonably happy in this life, And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
This longer version of the prayer is no longer used, but did appear in various forms throughout history. Niebuhr himself never used a 3-couplet version of the poem. Alcoholics Anonymous and other step groups have made use of the Serenity Prayer since at least While the original introduction of the prayer is not recorded, the official AA version is that a new member of the AA brought the prayer to the attention of William Griffith Wilson, co-founder of AA. Wilson, popularly known as Bill W.
Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other. Today, most step groups use the common version of the prayer. In most cases, the prayer is used to invoke a sense of detachment, that things that stress you are not immediately pressing or important, and that it is important to step back and recognize what can and cannot be changed.
Because many addicts often have difficulty coping with stress and difficulty, the prayer has remained relevant and in service in AA for over 80 years. While the current version of the Serenity Prayer was proven to have been written by Niebuhr, there are a variety of much older prayers or sayings that reflect a similar meaning.
Niebuhr may have been consciously or unconsciously inspired by any of them when writing, or may have written his own independently of any inspiration. The oldest dates to the 1 st century, to Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher.
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