I went down a rabbit hole when I went looking for the “album version” of the Serenity Prayer. You know what I mean? In the days of Top 40 radio, there was the three-minute version of a song that the radio played and was released as a 45 rpm single, and then there was the much longer version that appeared on the album. The best example I know is “Light My Fire,” which clocks in at 2:52 in the #1 single but runs more than seven minutes on the album The Doors, with extended organ and guitar solos.

So there’s the short and sweet version of the Serenity Prayer, attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr OR — as I learned in the rabbit hole — another theologian, Winnifred Wygal. It appears Wygal was a student of Niebuhr who wrote in her diary a quote from the end of a longer prayer in which he said, “The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.”

Wygal then published a prayer in the March 1933 edition of the YWCA magazine The Woman’s Press, and the Santa Cruz Sentinel of March 15, 1933, published it as: “Oh, God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what can not be helped, and insight to know the one from the other.”

From there it evolved into the form familiar to me — 

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Alcoholics Anonymous is said to be the source of the “album version,” which has a comma, not a period, after “difference” and continues:

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a 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.

It was in search of this addendum that led me down the rabbit hole, only to discover that, as lovely as the long-form version might be, they were not part of the original intention. Niebuhr’s daughter Elisabeth Sifton wrote of the additions that “their message and their tone are not in any way Niebuhrian.”

As I climbed out of the rabbit hole, I realized all of this dissection tends to obscure the original thought, which is somewhat essential to sanity: There’s stuff in life that we can fix, and there’s stuff that’s out of our control, and there’s wisdom and insight in figuring out which is which. We ask God to give us the courage to fix what we can fix and the peace of mind to accept what we can’t. 

I tend to think, however, that we never know what we’re capable of changing until we try. When we feel like we’re getting a nudge from God to do something, it’s easy to give it a little try and then say, “Oh, well, that didn’t work, I guess I have to accept this.”

If we don’t find ourselves feeling a true serenity of acceptance, and instead still feel uncomfortable, maybe it’s something we’re actually capable of changing and we need to muster a little more courage to change it.

If God doesn’t grant us that serenity — that peace beyond understanding and acceptance — then apparently we really are praying the Courage Prayer and we need to work harder for that change.