Serenity, come gently

The famous Serenity Prayer penned by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1932 has woven itself into my life from the very start. Growing up as a minister’s daughter, the prayer appeared to me in prayer books and greeting cards, on motivational wall hangings and embroidered pillows. 

When I went away to college, I lived in a dorm named after Rev. Niebuhr, who was a pastor, theologian, and ethicist. My father wrote me letters addressed to Niebuhr Hall, and he would tuck a copy of the prayer he had clipped from a church bulletin. On the back, he would write with his customary post script: “You may keep.”

A copy of the prayer is taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet where I keep the “good stuff” like coffee, chocolate, and cones for ice cream. I glance at it at least once a day, and recite it under my breath as a sort of mantra:


“God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Twelve-step programs use this verse to support recovery. In this version, the verse is said in first-person: “God grant me the serenity …” Other versions ask for serenity to accept the people we can’t change. The words are changed, reordered, simplified, even turned into memes, but for the most part, Niebuhr’s original meaning holds fast.

My husband, my gentleman friend, has already celebrated his 50th birthday, and I have only a few more months to go before my 50th birthday. We are teetering on two planes: one who has crossed over and one who has not. My gentleman friend has fully embraced being 50. In the past months, he’s said things to me like, “You know — I think I’m starting to get the hang of teaching!” (He’s been a public school teacher for 28 years.) I’m seeing a change in him, too. He is more confident, but not because he thinks he knows everything. He seems to have settled into a calm existence of knowing what he knows, and accepting that perfection is no longer the goal; that the only endgame in life is to continue growing and learning — continue living — preserving a bit of humility along the way for the things we can’t change.

It turns out Reinhold Niebuhr was 50 years old when he wrote the serenity prayer. I’m not surprised. Even though I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about the prayer, I think at the cusp of 50, I’m finally beginning to grasp its meaning.

Seinfeld’s Frank Constanza seemed to give it a nod when his misguided attempt at anger management resulted in his infamous quip, “Serenity now! Serenity now!” 

Unlike the Costanza version, the Serenity Prayer is not a demand or a plea. It is measured and polite, wearing the colorful patina of time, experience, loss, and understanding. It captures the way age smoothes out the rough edges, replacing it with an inner joy that is only deepened and enhanced by grief and disappointment.

The bravado of my youth is behind me, and in its place, I’m beginning to see the world and my life in its entirety: a broken, beautiful, chaotic mix of humans and nature clumsily bumping into each other, making mistakes and almost accidentally creating humanity. It’s like the Japanese concept of Kintsugi — the beauty of broken things — when a crack in a beautiful piece of pottery is repaired not with an invisible glue, but with a shiny gold lacquer that catches the light, that announces that this broken object is perhaps even more beautiful than originally thought. 

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