Popular ‘Serenity Prayer’ calls us not to work, but to wait, yield control

Published: April 16, 2022

By Judy Hoelzeman
St. Edward Church, Little Rock

When I was young, a prayer card rested on the window ledge in our kitchen. From the looks of it, the card had fallen into the sink more than once. For years it stayed in the same place, dirty and dogeared. I read it from time to time but never asked anyone what it meant. Come adulthood, I became familiar with the prayer. And I began to wonder how many times my parents (with nine children) must have turned to that prayer on the windowsill called “The Serenity Prayer.”

It reads: “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.” The most widely accepted author of the prayer is Reinhold Niebuhr, an American Protestant theologian. He first used the 27-word prayer in a 1934 lecture. It spread extensively as Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs began to use the prayer. In 1944, it was included in “A Book of Prayers and Services for the Armed Forces,” distributed by the USO.

The Serenity Prayer is easy to remember and almost poetic. But oh, what a challenge. We are called to accept, to let go of, to yield to the things we can’t control. This is new. Since childhood, most of us have been trained to be busy and productive because hard work can fix the things that distress us. It turns out that our favorite “things” to fix are other people. But no matter how many ways we try, we cannot change people. At best, we might be able to influence them.

We can only change ourselves, which requires being honest with our feelings and actions. Secondly, we tend to dwell on things from the past: losses and failures, disappointments and people who have harmed us. But no matter how much I mull over it, I will never have a loving, gentle first-grade teacher or get back my lost college scholarship. Maybe what Franciscan priest and author Father Richard Rohr has said is true: “The mind is always bored in the present.”

We can make our prayer easier simply by remembering that God is always in charge of prayer. We find this truth in many places in the Scriptures: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 55:8-9), “But the wisdom from above is first of all pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits …” (James 3:17) and this from Psalm 27:14 will be perhaps the hardest for us in our rush-around society: “Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted and wait for the Lord.” To realize the life God wants for us, we will have to give up thoughts like “What if,” “If only I had,” “He should have” and “How could she?”

God knows our struggles with other people and with the past, but God wants much better for us. God will tell us what and when to try to change and stay with us on our journey. Maybe, little by little, there won’t be room for obsessing about other people and the past. Instead, there might be new gifts from God for us to dwell on, and we will use our prayer time saying simply, “Thank you, God.”

Judy Hoelzeman is a member of St. Edward Church in Little Rock.

This article was originally published in Arkansas Catholic April 16, 2022. Copyright Diocese of Little Rock. All rights reserved. This article may be copied or redistributed with acknowledgement and permission of the publisher.