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The Serenity Prayer
Accounts of the origin of the serenity prayer abound. In our research, we turned to Niebuhr's daughter Elisabeth Sifton as a reliable source. She writes in her memoir of her father, entitled The Serenity Prayer, that he wrote it in the middle of World War II. The Niebuhr family's neighbor, Dean Robbins, suggested that the prayer would be useful in a collection of material he was helping the Federal Council of Churches to assemble for use by army chaplains. Reinhold Niebuhr gave Robbins a copy, and Sifton reports, it appeared in a book of "prayers and services" for the armed forces. She says shortly after its appearance in this pamphlet, the prayer was adopted by the fledgling organization Alcoholics Anonymous, with her father's permission. Alcoholics Anonymous adapted and simplified the text to the version now commonly known.
In "A View of Life from the Sidelines," which was originally written 1967 and published posthumously in 1984, Niebuhr wrote about the prayer:
I must confess my ironic embarrassment as I lived through my depressions, which had the uniform characteristic of an anxious preoccupation with real or imagined future perils. The embarrassment, particularly, was occasioned by the incessant correspondence about a prayer I had composed years before, which the old Federal Council of Churches had used and which later was printed on small cards to give to soldiers. Subsequently Alcoholics Anonymous adopted it as its official prayer. The prayer 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."
Many friendly and inquiring correspondents asked for the original inspiration of the prayer, whether I was really its author, or whether it had been Francis of Assisi, or even an admiral who had used it in a shipboard worship service. I received about two such letters a week, and every answer to an inquiring correspondent embarrassed me because I knew that my present state of anxiety defied the petition of this prayer. I confessed my embarrassment to our family physician, who had a sense of humor touched with gentle cynicism. ?Don?t worry,? he said, ?Doctors and preachers are not expected to practice what they preach.? I had to be content with this minimal consolation.
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