Serenity Prayer

The Serenity Prayer is the common name for an originally untitled prayer by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.[1] The prayer has been adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve(12)-step programs.

The best-known form is:

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.

The original, attributed to Niebuhr[1], is:

        God, give us 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.

        Amen.

[1] Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr ( 1892 – 1971) was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world, and created the theo-philosophical perspective known as Christian realism. Christian Realism exerted a strong influence on American foreign and domestic policy in the Cold War era. He attacked utopianism as ineffectual for dealing with reality, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944):

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible;

but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."