The Serenity Prayer — When Serenity Isn’t What’s Needed

It’s called the “Serenity Prayer” — and who doesn’t want serenity.

“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.”

It was authored by a major Protestant theologian, and was adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous for its wise guidance about how to live — guidance that describes the challenge that we must meet for a life of spiritual serenity: a proper combination of serenity, courage, and wisdom.

Wow! How often does so few words capture so much. I’ve always admired both its artistry and its deep insight.

But I’m wondering now how fully that captures the path of wisdom. I can see that I myself have not fully followed that spiritual counsel, and I’m not ready to say that my path is unwise.

The problem appears in the first part of the guidance, that part about ACCEPTING what one cannot change. How can one possibly know what one can or cannot change. The world is so beyond our understanding that it would be terribly immodest to imagine that we could possibly KNOW for sure what the consequences will be of what we do.

Consider the example of a Peace Corps volunteer I heard about recently. He did his apparently little thing in Korea and then, a half century later, found out what a profound impact his work had on that community, enabling it to develop in important good ways. “A Drop in the Bucket” was the name of the account– and it shows how far this Peace Corps volunteer inevitably was from being “wise” enough to judge what he could not change.

We can make our efforts, but we cannot know their results. Which connects with what Mother Teresa said about how she worked with the intention of helping the poor, and left the results of her labors for God to determine. “God knows” what the results will be, and one can hope that one’s efforts will make a difference.

So part of the problem is also in that “wisdom to know the difference.” One might decide that the courage to change what one CAN change also requires the courage to believe in possibility, in a world that is too beyond our understanding to know what is possible.

Sometimes, it seems, the most consequential actions are undertaken by people who might not imagine they’ll be triumphant. For example, I doubt that the people of Minneapolis imagined, when they decided to stand up to the Gestapo-like force sent to conquer their community, that they might accomplish more than the rest of the American body politic has done to slow this onrushing train of fascism. But with their moral stand, they now seem to be playing a historically significant role.

In moments like these, the Spirit speaks not of serenity but of protest against what is wrong.
Maybe the path of Serenity is not always the right path. Sometimes confrontation with the altogether UNACCEPTABLE should move one into a state more energized to fight for the Good than to remain serene.

Serene is good in a well-ordered world. At times when there is a battle over what the order of the world is going to be, we are called upon to set aside the peacetimes goal of Serenity and challenge the destructive forces regardless of the odds in Vegas that one will effect the change one wants.

In this context, I’ve thought about that brave young man in China, at the time of the massacre at Tienanmen Square, who stood in front of an advancing column of tanks being brought in by the ruling powers to crush the student pro-democracy movement.

Surely that young man must have known that the reimposition of the dictatorship’s coercive power was a given. He must have known that he was not going to stop the tanks from moving in to crush the young Chinese movement for democracy — even at a moment when freedom was spreading through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Did that young man then lack wisdom when he chose to put himself in the path of the advancing tanks?

But would it be right to say that the example of that young man compelling that column of tanks to stop, if even for a brief time, “changed” nothing? To say it “changed nothing” is to say “it had no consequences.” And I know it had consequences– it became an indelible image in my mind, of a courageous bearing witness for the good, the true, and the right. Behold, the courage of the righteous.

That image was presented around the world, again and again. Maybe a billion people saw it. Those little pieces of people’s thoughts and feelings might well add up to something big enough to say, “this young man’s act “changed” something.”

Bearing witness may not free the nation from the Evil of tyranny — whether it be in Beijin or in Minneapolis — but it isn’t nothing. It leaves the world in a different place than if everyone simply chose the serenity of accepting what they (presumably) could not change. One does not leave the Evil in UNCONTESTED possession of the world.

The times that try men’s souls are challenging precisely because they require us to sacrifice serenity: when the world is broken and Evil is ascendant, fidelity to what is morally and spiritually good forbids settling passively for the way things are, whatever our power to defeat that Evil.

Which brings me to my own apparent choosing NOT to follow the Serenity Prayer. Again, if my world were in good shape, I’d not be trying again and again to change something that almost certainly I cannot change. But I do it.

What I try to do, week after week for years, in opinion columns in newspapers in a region overwhelmingly dominated by Trump supporters, is to show them the nature of what they are supporting. In countless ways, I demonstrate — “beyond a reasonable doubt” — that what they are supporting is what they themselves would call Evil. It is so palpably true, and that truth manifests itself in so many ways, that one can actually issue such challenges in a wide variety of ways that are interesting as well as persuasive.

But I have EVERY REASON TO BELIEVE that the people I am challenging will go to their graves convinced that they were on the side of righteousness throughout this age when the people they vote for have been taking a wrecking ball to American democracy and in flagrant violation of all the moral precepts of Christianity. I’ve watched how their minds got turned into what they are now — impervious to evidence, unaware of their contradictions — and I’ve watched how they’ve been trained not to pay any attention to anything someone like me says. So the thing I’m pointing at that I would like to see changed — good people supporting Evil — seems completely unlikely to get anyone I’m trying to challenge to see the light. So is it unwise for me to be trying to change what seems highly unlikely to change?

First, that no switcheroo takes place doesn’t mean there are no consequences. I would bet that the recurring presence of my messages in the newspapers on their kitchen table has given me some space (however tiny) in their minds. In my imagining, the sea of political consciousness in my Trumpy region of Virginia is altered in some way by the voice I put out into their world, bearing witness to the tragic betrayal of values that has been enacted in Conservative America in these times. The world is NOT the same, whether anyone bears witness or not.

Just as the futility of the young Chinese man’s heroic actions did not make his message to the world inconsequential, I act on the belief that it DOES have some kind of worthwhile consequence to keep bearing witness to the broken state of things, rather than just “accept” that the world is broken and move on with some serenity.

I often rationalize what I’m doing with the argument that my liberal friends in that region like seeing their neighbors called out the way I do. And that would be sufficient reason. But the truth is that I want the truth spoken to them, whether they’ll listen or not.

The Spirit of the Truth will not remain silence, even if the national scene is dominated by the Spirit of the Lie. It is when the Force of Brokenness is too dominant in the world that the Serenity prayer won’t suffice. When Good rules, there is no need to fight. When Evil rules, all good people are called to come to the aid of their country. One does not ACCEPT what must be fought.