God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
AA Serenity Prayer
I'm deeply moved by the Serenity Prayer which most of us know through the work of Alcoholics Anonymous. People who take an interest in its origins know that much is contested, although there appears a general consensus regarding the bigger picture.
Its deep history is probably the collective insight of the human condition. The version we call the Serenity Prayer in a couple of different versions has been attributed to a number of people. These include St Francis. Actually, AA’s versions originally attributed the prayer to the Medieval friar. Possibly, at least in part, due to how it can be seen as complementary to his prayer.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Which, incidentally, doesn’t appear to have been written by the saint either. Not to descend down too many rabbit holes, that prayer probably dates no earlier than 1912, and may have been written by a Catholic priest, Esther Bouquerel.
This noted, the broad consensus is that the actual author of the Serenity prayer is the Twentieth century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It was first published in 1932 as
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.
Of course, that’s not quite the AA version we mostly know, the one that people in all sorts of situations have found to provide comfort and guidance is, as I noted at the beginning
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
Both versions have been shared widely.
The shorter version appears to have come into AA through an early member, Jack C, who in 1941 read it in an obituary in the New York Herald Tribune, and who showed it to friends at his meeting. It ran like a wildfire through AA and has been associated principally with the organization ever since.
One can make arguments for why each version might be more useful. The first-person frame of the AA version speaks to the immediacy and deeply, profoundly, personal prayer of someone coming to terms with addiction. While the “we” of the longer version can remind us that in some very real ways we’re never alone in this world.
I and we, these are two truths. And like the greater two truths of phenomena and emptiness, while from several angles they cannot be squared, the relentless assertion of the wise is that in some fundamental way they are not two.
Additionally, and maybe more importantly, I find myself drawn the fact that the shorter version puts the onus on serenity, while the longer gives place of importance to grace. Each of these frames speaks to me and pulls me into this reflection.
I find a profound connection between grace and serenity. And it’s worth taking a little time to look at it. Especially what it can say to me as a person on the Zen way, but who is deeply committed to finding guidance in other traditions that touch the deep matters of our hearts.
Serenity is defined as a state of calmness, peaceful, and untroubled. In some spiritual circles serenity is understood as seeing things as they are. This serenity is a kind of peace that doesn’t deny hardship or even horror; but arises as a sense of harmony within the apparent or maybe even real chaos.
Grace is a tad more complicated to define. Merriam Webster defines it as “Favor; good will; kindness; disposition to oblige another; as a grant made as an act of grace.” In theological circles I’ve heard grace defined as “undeserved favor.” That would be my favorite.
One of the more famous aspects of Zen is how the onus is so much put on the individual. I put my bottom on the pillow. I take up the koan. I attend retreat. I draw my wandering mind back. This emphasis goes back to the foundations of Buddhism. In the Dhammapada, which purports to contain sayings of Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha of history
By oneself is evil done; by oneself is one defiled. By oneself is evil left undone; by oneself is one made pure. Purity and impurity depend on oneself; no one can purify another.[1]
We also hear it in the five remembrances captured in the Upajjhatthana Sutta.
I am of the nature to grow old;
there is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health;
there is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die; there is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change;
there is no way to escape being separated from them.
My deeds are my closest companions.
I am the beneficiary of my deeds.
My deeds are the ground on which I live.[2]
The responsibility is upon us as individuals. With a little help from our friends, of course. But again, it’s me meditating and dealing with the mess of my head. Our tradition rightfully emphasizes this, and constantly calls us to step up.
The project is to find our true nature, to front into it, to be present to it. The Zen tradition teaches that it isn’t somewhere else. It is right here. And it has always been. So, the project is finding what has always been. We’ve just been confused, wandering lost. The Zen way, like so many other ancient spiritual traditions is about coming home.
One of the most common images for this is waking up.
But really, what is waking up? And how to we achieve it? While I come from a rigorous branch of the Zen tradition, driven by commitment to practices of presence, and especially the ancient path of koan introspection; there never is a hard causal connection between what I do, all that doing, all that my effort, and waking up.
My koan teacher, like many before him, and no doubt many yet to come, explain awakening comes to us like being hit by a bus. The word accident is sometimes used. All our practices do is make us accident prone.
The actual moment. Looking to it. Well, think grace. Free gift. Unearned. Always waiting. Always here.
Perhaps we can see grace most clearly in the Christian tradition. It has its origins in the ancient mysteries of sacrifice. The Buddhist scholar Alfred Bloom[3] describes how the apostle Paul “clearly articulated (grace) as the basis for salvation in Christianity in his interpretation God had incarnated himself in Jesus who became the sacrifice for all humanity to reconcile them to God. His presentation offered a grand vision of Divine Grace where, in effect, God sacrificed himself for the world.” Think of it as a story that pulls our attention toward something.
As a Unitarian minister I do need to note this is not the only understanding of that something, of Jesus and his incarnation. But that story is the normative view. And it does draw us in ways that are complicated and However, another way of engaging grace in the Jesus story arises out of God’s love and that terrible story of Jesus as the meeting of the God and humanity, and his suffering is a meeting of the phenomenal and the totally other. No punishment. Just how it is in this world of choices and lives and deaths. Although connected to another, where the words all burn away.
The link is love. Grace and love are intimate things. They are ways we humans encounter within all our messiness the empty, the not conditioned, the vast openness, the boundless. As love. As grace. Both stories try to show how grace works. And that is grace comes to us by another, and it comes freely.
And so Bloom also notes how grace is also a Buddhist teaching. I need to note Alfred Bloom was a Shin Buddhist priest and professor and dean at the Buddhist Churches of America’s seminary in Berkeley, the Institute for Buddhist Studies. When I was a student at the Graduate Theological Union on the cusp of the 1990s, I took a couple of classes there, and had the privilege of meeting him.
In Japan this Pure Land Buddhism is called Shin. Shin is a word with multiple meanings. It can be understood as mind. But in defining this school of Buddhism it usually is translated as heart. So, Heart Buddhism.
The story of Pure Land Buddhism is that in one of the many universes the Buddha Amida make a vow, a great vow, sometimes called the primal vow. And it was that anyone who called on his name would be reborn into the Pure Land, where awakening come like stretch out one’s arms in the morning. In our degenerate age, where awakening seems impossible, this is a gift of grace. Many people have noticed those points where the Christian story and this Buddhist story touch as manifestations of love. As explanations for the fact on the ground that we human beings sometimes, if we’re fortunate, find our healing.
The bodhisattva ideal and specifically Amida Buddha’s vow as Professor Bloom tells us… “comes about through the working of the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha, without any meritorious contribution by the objects of his compassion. It is clearly an expression of a Buddhist understanding of Grace. It arises from the unconditional compassion of the Buddha and embraces without exception those from the most spiritually advanced to those desperately evil. It is unmerited favor.”
Tanluan, a 6th century Chinese founder of the Pure Land school seems to be the first teacher to dig into the apparent and real differences in the ancient disciplines like Zen and the ways of surrender. In his reflections on this Tanluan made the distinction between paths calling on “self-power” and those calling on “other power.” Other-power in Chinese tāli and in Japanese tariki. Self-power in Chinese zili and in Japanese jiriki.
Professor Bloom likens these differences in approach as like “the cat and monkey view of salvation in Indian tradition. The baby monkey must hold on to the back of its mother by its own power, while the mother cat carries its baby by the nape of its neck, suggesting Other Power.”
From this perspective contemporary scholar and Shin priest Mark Unno suggests “What if we realized that that compassion is always there, not something we have to conjure but waiting for us, to receive us with warmth and compassion.”[4] I believe this is critical. I think this is it. Grace. Love, if you will. Grace.
For me, the point is that awakening doesn’t just come through grace. Grace itself is awakening.
When I think of the Serenity prayer in both its versions, I find myself thinking of grace as the opening. And with that, I find myself reflecting on serenity. And what it might mean.
It is used with slightly different twists, it seems, in Zen and Shin schools. In Zen we speak of satori or kensho, while in Shin the term is shinjin. Satori means “to know,” kensho “to see into one’s nature,” and shinjin can mean “faith” or “trust,” but is experiencing the mind of Amida, a Buddha’s heart-mind. These are grace.
Where this encounter leads is anjin. It’s a Japanese Buddhist term, anjin. It is most commonly translated as “peaceful awareness.” Think serenity.
I certainly think serenity. I hear the prayer and I find the way for all of us. When the rubber hits the road, when we need to discern and decide what action or no action is called for, well, the peaceful awareness that arises out of grace, out of our awakening into the functioning of the mystery as this world, is critical.
It is here we see how we can meet the world. It is here we can discern between what we can and what we cannot do. It is from here we can live in this world a blessing.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
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.
Amen.
[1] Dhammapada, verse 165 https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.12.budd.html
[2] Five Remembrances, Empty Moon Zen Liturgy https://www.emptymoonzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/EMZ-General-Liturgy-5th-Edition.pdf
[3] Alfred Bloom, Amazing Grace: Christian and Buddhist https://bschawaii.org/shindharmanet/bloom/ab-writings/amazing/
[4] Mark Unno, Understanding Self Power & Other Power https://www.lionsroar.com/understanding-self-power/
the image is the Conversion of St Paul on the Road to Damascus, Hans Speckaert, painted somewhere between 1570 and 1577.