Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Of course, What I was looking for was the Serenity Prayer... and Niebuhr, whom I read about in College.

The Serenity Prayer

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.

Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things rightif I surrender to His Will;That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with HimForever in the next.Amen.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

Serenity Prayer Notes From Wikipedia
Niebuhr is usually credited as the author of the Serenity Prayer, which in the version he is said to have preferred reads "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."[6] The prayer is frequently used by Alcoholics Anonymous, which uses it in a slightly different form. An Alcoholics Anonymous website reports: "What is undisputed is the claim of authorship by the theologian Dr. Rheinhold [sic] Niebuhr, who recounted to interviewers on several occasions that he had written the prayer as a 'tag line' to a sermon he had delivered on Practical Christianity. Yet even Dr. Niebuhr added at least a touch of doubt to his claim when he told one interviewer, 'Of course, it may have been spooking around for years, even centuries, but I don't think so. I honestly do believe that I wrote it myself.'"[7]
His claim to authorship was supported in detail by his daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, in The Serenity Prayer (2003), where she said that her father first wrote it in 1943. In 2008, Yale Book of Quotations editor Fred R. Shapiro cast doubt on Niebuhr's claim of authorship, showing that the prayer was in circulation by 1936 but not attributed to Niebuhr until 1942.[6] Shapiro suggests that Niebuhr most likely unconsciously adapted the prayer from existing formulations of unknown origin, although he acknowledges the possibility that Niebuhr introduced the prayer by the mid-1930s in an unpublished or private setting.[6] Sifton, in a response published with Shapiro's article, argues that the prayer must have come from one of the tradition's most gifted practitioners, which she believes could only be her father.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Niebuhr

No comments: