God, grant me the serenity to accept the things
I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Most of us are familiar with these words, which are often referred to as the “Serenity Prayer.” Its adoption by Alcoholics Anonymous in the middle of last century and its incorporation into other 12-Step programs has brought this prayer into nearly universal awareness. What’s not as well known is that this is not the full and complete text of the prayer that was written by Lutheran pastor and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It continues like this:
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as the 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.
That I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.
There is a lot to unpack here, but before I start to do that, I want to acknowledge a couple of things. First, the Serenity Prayer, in either its condensed or its complete form, has been literally life-saving for hundreds of thousands of people over the decades it’s been in use. Its power in peoples’ lives is immeasurable and it is treasured by them. If you are one of those people, I want to honor and respect you as I talk this morning, and I want to say how incredibly happy I am that you are here. Second, I need to tell you that I am not one of these people. Because I’ve never been part of a 12-Step program, I feel a bit like an outsider looking in, and I feel my qualifications to even talk about the Serenity Prayer are suspect at best. That said, I may be able to offer a somewhat unbiased opinion about it, and I hope that has some value. And, as you’ll see, while we’ll use the Serenity Prayer as a jumping off point, I hope my message this morning will speak to all of us, both those who have been or are engaged in a 12-Step program and those of us who haven’t been or are not.
So when we look at the Serenity Prayer we see that it’s really three prayers in one. This is, perhaps, what makes it so powerful. In just 27 words, it encapsulates the heart and soul of our human condition. The first sentence is about being in control. As hard as it is to admit it sometimes, we know we are finite and fallible people and that, therefore, some things are beyond our control. We seek to gain acceptance for those things. The second sentence reminds us, though, that not everything is beyond us. As individuals with at least some power and volition, we are also able to exercise our agency over some of our circumstances. We seek the determination to seize and act upon those opportunities when they arise. And then, in the third sentence, we name yet another central fact in our lives: That, as one of the readings in our UU hymnal states, “the way is often hard, the path is never clear and the stakes are very high.”[1] We seek the power of discernment, an unmuddling of our minds, the conversion of confusion into clarity. We ask for wisdom.
At the same time that the Serenity Prayer is three prayers in one, it’s also one prayer in three. Trinitarians have good reason to love this prayer, for its structure if for nothing else. The three impleadings are intimately connected and interwoven. We cannot achieve the serenity of the first movement or the courage of the second without achieving some measure of the wisdom we seek in the third. But enough about structure. Let’s dive into the content.
We could spend lots of time talking about what we can or cannot change. About the scope of our power and the magnificence of our impotence. About how our image of ourselves as independent actors, in control of our lives is often at odds with our circumstances. We could reflect on what form courage takes. Courage to make a change. Courage to stick to what we’ve always done. And I could do several sermons just on what we mean by the term “serenity.” What it looks like, what it feels like, how to achieve it. How screaming “Serenity Now” is not the best way to invite serenity into our lives.
But this month’s Soul Matters theme is “Wisdom.” So, for the next few minutes I want to focus on that part of the Serenity Prayer, the third movement, if you will. The prayer in which we seek the wisdom to know the difference between the things we can change and those we cannot.
This part of the prayer raises the challenging question of discernment, or our ability to distinguish between things. Between what we can change and what we’re powerless to do. Between right and wrong. Between good and evil, even. When we’re talking about discernment, we’re usually not talking about simply making a simple either/or choice. About taking a sheet of paper and dividing it down the middle and putting the pro’s on one side and the con’s on the other, then toting them up to see which side wins. Wisdom and discernment are altogether different. They imply a deeper quality of what I’ll call “knowing.” Knowing not in the intellectual sense of certainty, but in the gut level sense, the heartfelt sense. As the Rev. Scott Tayler puts it in this month’s Soul Matters packet, “the math of wisdom is often the opposite of what we think. It’s more a game of subtraction than addition. Often, accumulation of knowledge doesn’t get us closer to wisdom; it’s just in the way. There’s a sorting,” he says, “a simplifying and stripping away that needs to occur. It’s about unknowing as much as knowing.” The simplest way I can explain the difference between knowledge and wisdom is to point to the difference between a newspaper article and a poem. Both tell the truth. But they tell them in different ways, and they reach different places within us.
So, where does wisdom come from? How do we gain the wisdom to know the difference? Since the Serenity Prayer is a prayer, maybe that’s a good place to start. I know that many Unitarian Universalists get squirrely when you start talking about prayer, but I think we simply need to get over that. Because too often we pigeon-hole prayer into that tiny little box of what’s called “intercessory prayer.” Those are the kinds of prayers where we ask God to intervene in our lives so that we can achieve a particular outcome. “Please God,” such a prayer goes, “help get Timmy out of the well” and “God, help me find a good parking space.” But prayer is so much more than just wishful thinking. I define prayer as an opening up to all that is beyond us and outside of us. It’s about making connections with both the known and the unknown. It’s admitting that we’re finite, but that we’re a part of an infinite system of wonder and mystery. When we can “plug in” to that system, when we can experience our unity with it, we’re opening ourselves up to its wisdom. Maybe the words you’d prefer to use are “Meditation” or “Contemplation” or “Intuition.” It doesn’t matter what we call it, but we can access or gain wisdom from creating opportunities to allow ourselves to open up to the rhythm and melody of the Universe, and to be able to actually hear it.
If that’s all too “woo-woo” for you, if you’re afraid that plugging into the wisdom of the universe is too esoteric and you’re worried that I’ve gone off my nut, there are certainly more concrete ways we can gain wisdom. Experience can be a source of wisdom, if we are wise enough to recognize it. I’d like to think that, with age comes wisdom. After all, there has to be some benefit to aging! But experience can be a tough teacher, and sometimes we’re not such great learners either. In his book Callings, Gregg Levoy puts it this way: “Our powers of discernment – of clarity – are routinely clouded and informed by all manner of impulses, hankerings, emotions, ulterior motives, and intuitions.”[2] We’ve all been there, haven’t we? That place where we keep trying and trying something, hoping for a different result, even long past the point where we know it’s not going to happen. Like when we try to change or control our kids or our spouse or our boss or our co-workers, when we know, deep down, we can only change or control ourselves, our own reactions, our own responses. So, yes, experience – our own or that of others – can be a source of wisdom. But sometimes, maybe even often, even when we wish it to be so, experience does not inevitably lead to wisdom, discernment, or clarity.
In his book A Hidden Wholeness, educator and author Parker Palmer describes a tool for gaining clarity, for supporting discernment, for helping us tap into the wisdom that exists both within us and all around us. It’s a Quaker process called “Clearness Committees.” As dry as that sounds – who wants to discern anything by committee? – I’ve both led and experienced Clearness Committees, and I can personally attest to their power. Palmer explains: “’Clearness Committees’ are based on the simple but crucial conviction that each of us has an inner teacher, a voice of truth, that offers the guidance and power we need to deal with our problems. But that inner voice is often garbled by various kinds of inward and outward interference. Clearness Committees are not intended to give advice or “fix” people from the outside in but rather to help people remove the interference so that they can discover their own wisdom from the inside out.”[3] Essentially, the person seeking clarity or discernment brings together a group of trusted friends or colleagues who listen to them closely and then ask thoughtful questions. They don’t provide answers, direction or “fixes.” But they often leave the person with ways to access their inner wisdom that may have been blocked or overshadowed by fear, anxiety or other negative emotions. Clearness Committees have a lot of silence and an intentionally slow and deliberate pace to them. They are more shared spiritual practice than they are committee meeting as we’ve come to know and despise those beasts.
“The wisdom to know the difference” – between what we can control and what we can’t, between who or how we want to be and who or how we don’t, between what we want to do and where we want to go or not – deep and abiding wisdom can be gleaned from a variety of sources. But I believe that ultimately it comes down to a single spiritual practice: listening. Listening to what others who have our best interest at heart are telling us. Listening to what our intuition, our heart, our soul is telling us. And engaging in practices that creating channels for the songs of the Universe to penetrate through all the noise of our lives and to reach us in our deepest, in-most places.
It’s been nearly 20 years since I discovered my call to ministry. I didn’t figure it out by listing all the pro’s and con’s of quitting my job and going to seminary, although I tried that. It happened when I started paying attention to the signals that were all around me. Maybe they were there my entire life, or maybe they showed up just when I needed them to. But once I started paying attention, once I stopped letting my conscious mind control the process, once I allowed myself the dangerous luxury of letting my intuition, the Universe, God – however you want to put it – guide me, what I needed to do became crystal clear to me. Yes, it was scary. Yes, it made no practical sense. But the path opened up as clear to me as any mountain trail that beckons. I choose to call that the wisdom of the Universe, and I choose to believe that that wisdom is available to all of us, all the time, if we but stop, look, and listen.
This day and every day, I wish you
peace. Amen.
[1] Rev. Wayne B. Arnason, Singing the Living Tradition #698
[2] Gregg Levoy, Callings, p 36.
[3] https://www.uua.org/sites/live-new.uua.org/files/documents/guestkristin/1006_3045_clearness.pdf
Closing Words
Our closing words today come from M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled:
The unconscious is always one step
ahead of the conscious mind – the one that “knows” things…If you’re willing to
sit with ambiguity, to accept uncertainties and contradictory meanings, then
your unconscious will always be a step ahead of your conscious mind in the
right direction. You’ll therefore do the right thing, although you won’t know
it at the time.”[1]
[1] Quoted in Gregg Levoy’s Callings, p. 37.