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COLUMNS
To be reasonably happy as an American in the 21st century
April 1, 2010 | The Catholic Sun
It has been a tough year — or two — in America. Record unemployment, a stock market rollercoaster, and a housing bubble burst that found a huge chunk of Americans sitting on debt instead of the huge surplus they were reveling in only a couple of years ago.
Since this column is about “a better view” of tough times with a little help from God, our faith and the rest of humanity, I am always looking for any good, new ideas for how to accomplish that.
Well, they say that what’s old is new — a clever way of saying that reliable, proven or compelling human inventions and ideas have staying power. That proved true when I recently ran across a lesser-known version of an old, dependable prayer.
The “Serenity Prayer” is something you have probably heard a million times or read on a hundred different wall plaques over the years. Offering anyone looking for a little support when times are tough, this old mainstay includes these simple but meaningful words:
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.
That prayer has guided me through more than a few complex situations in my life when I just didn’t know what to do, or when there simply was nothing I could do but wait and pray. I am not the only one. The “Serenity Prayer” has been used by Alcoholics Anonymous and quoted in dozens of popular songs, books and movies by the likes of everyone from authors Kurt Vonnegut and Dan Brown to pop rock icons like the band Boston to singers Whitney Houston and even rap artist 50 Cent.
Forgotten wisdom
But a few weeks ago when I went to download it to make a copy of the prayer for a presentation, I discovered an unexpected treasure. The original version written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr sometime in the late1930s to early 1940s — a time of far greater difficulty than any of us now can even imagine — was a whole lot longer and offered a few more interesting and forgotten tidbits of wisdom that could really come in handy in these trying times. Here’s the rest of the prayer — pay especially close attention to the fourth line from the bottom:
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 right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.
Amen.
“That I may be reasonably happy,” just doesn’t seem to fit into our bigger-than-life desires here in America in the 21st century, does it?
What if we discovered that for us to take care of our families, our communities, our nation and to help our world, we were all going to have to struggle, to endure and only be “reasonably happy” for a while, maybe even for decades. Would that truly satisfy a modern American?
Now obviously the abbreviated version of the prayer is easier to remember and to quote, and that’s probably the reason why it was truncated, especially in a nation that has come to like things easy and convenient.
But maybe it’s time to make things a little tougher — at least on our memories — and inspire ourselves with a deeper reading of this prayer and the seemingly archaic ideas. That might just help us in these tough times to look at our lives and our aspirations a little bit more humbly.
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