Reinhold Niebuhr - Serenity Prayer

Serenity Prayer

The earliest known version of the prayer, from 1937, has been found in a Christian student newsletter ("The Intercollegian and Far Horizons"), which claimed to reprint the prayer from an earlier edition of the newsletter, and attributes the prayer to Niebuhr in this form:

"Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."

The most popular version, whose authorship is unknown, reads:

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can change, And wisdom to know the difference."

The longest version has these additional lines:

"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."

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 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.'"

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. He demonstrated that the prayer was in circulation by 1936 but not attributed to Niebuhr until 1942. However, he acknowledged the possibility that Niebuhr introduced the prayer by the mid-1930s in an unpublished or private setting. 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. In 2009, Duke University librarian Stephen Goranson unearthed the copy of the prayer from 1937 (above). In response to this finding, Shapiro conceded that "The new evidence does not prove that Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, but it does significantly improve the likelihood that he was the originator."