Pamela Jean Owens off-line

“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.”

So reads what is known universally as “The Serenity Prayer” as it is used in 12-step groups all over the world. So wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, or so the story sometimes goes, on an envelope, or the back of the bulletin, or some other random piece of paper, during the morning service one Sunday in 1942, or thereabouts. It was only the opening stanza of a longer prayer he would deliver in that service, after a sermon on Practical Christianity, never dreaming it would have a life that extended far beyond his own.

Although in later interviews, after “the prayer” had become famous, Dr. Niebuhr did take credit for the prayer, he also admitted that the ideas in it may well have been “floating around for centuries”; research has shown he was correct in that statement, although he never revealed whether he recalled the source from which he had borrowed the ideas. Whatever its true origins, within a few short decades the prayer had taken on a life of its own, and a title: “The Serenity Prayer.”

I’ve always had a problem with the Serenity Prayer. In fact, I’ve rejected it much more often than I’ve prayed it, a fact that almost everyone I meet finds close to heresy. Rejecting the Serenity Prayer has become the unforgiveable sin against modern civil religion, against “common knowledge,” tantamount to blasphemy against the public manifestation of all that is holy. To question the Serenity Prayer is seen as speaking against the very fabric of the self-help movement itself. The reaction of people ranges from shocked disbelief to outright pity, so I don’t mention my heretical thinking often.

Far be it from me to suggest that the word “serenity” is only one of three petitions lifted up in the prayer, and not the one in the ultimate position, syntactically. I am well aware that if anyone “Googles” the phrase, “Serenity Prayer,” there is not a single doubt that this is the only prayer to which thousands of links will direct their browser. Thousands of websites present the Serenity Prayer, probably tens of thousands, if not millions, in every language imaginable, in words I can’t pronounce and scripts I do not know.

Google took just 0.14 seconds to tell me that there are “about 721,000 results,” for “serenity prayer,” but I think that may just be the ones in English. If some are in some other language, I know Google translator can translate them for me, but I don’t need it to. No matter the language, I know what it says and what it means to whoever posted it on the page. Googling “courage prayer” or “wisdom prayer” will also return thousands of results, but they will point to all manner of prayers posted for all manner of reasons. No one can quote “THE” Wisdom Prayer or “THE” Courage Prayer, even if many of us might have our own nomination for each of those designations.

“Serenity: the quality of being serene.”
That’s what the dictionary says “serenity” means, which only begs the question.

In all the times I’ve heard the prayer said, it has seemed to be almost forbidden to ask what “serenity” actually means. I’ve always felt as though I’m just supposed to intuitively know, yet if there is one thing I do know it is how very NOT intuitive I am. Ask a recovering alcoholic about serenity, and you’ll probably hear the word “sanity” in his definition. Ask a recovering battered wife at an Al-Anon meeting, and you might well hear “survival.” Ask a group of adult children of alcoholic parents, and you would probably hear something about coming to terms with their childhoods as they were, instead of wishing childhood had been the way they wished it had been.

Going a bit further with the dictionary search uncovers this as the meaning of “serene”:
1. a: clear and free of storms or unpleasant change “serene skies” b: shining bright and steady, “the moon, serene in glory” (Alexander Pope)
2: august — used as part of a title, “his Serene Highness”
3: marked by or suggestive of utter calm and unruffled repose or quietude, “a serene smile”

I don’t think the “august” title is relevant, but both of the other meanings intrigue me.

I can hardly imagine a life clear and free of storms. Not in this world, anyway. And unpleasant changes are hard to avoid. So how can one even imagine the state of being serene as a human quality? “Unruffled repose or quietude”? How very boring that would be, other than for periods of deliberate meditation and prayer.

The Serenity Prayer actually petitions for more than serenity: it also requests courage and wisdom. Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I cannot. Serenity is prayed for in a particular type of situation, when there are things “I cannot change.” If I can change it, then I ask for courage, or at least I do in the Serenity Prayer. Sometimes I feel like those lines are simply being quoted by rote. Like “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Who really wants to only be forgiven to the extent she is willing to forgive others? Not me! What I should be praying desperately is to be forgiven in much greater measure than I have been able to forgive others! But who is thinking that in the Sunday service, half asleep, when responding by habit to the intro, “Our Father…”?

Back to the Serenity Prayer: ultimately, if I pray that prayer, I am asking for wisdom. Specifically, “wisdom to know the difference.”

Ah, that is the rub. Knowing the difference. Wisdom is much harder for me than courage. I can do courage. But how do I know when to call on it? How do I know the difference between serenity and mere resignation? By wisdom. And isn’t wisdom much harder to gain than serenity? Might not it be that what some people call “serenity,” others would call “giving up integrity”?

All the years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, had it been wise for black people in Alabama, and elsewhere, to take their appointed seats at the back of the bus, serenely accepting what they could not change? Should Rosa Parks have continued accepting Jim Crow laws as something she could not change? Had it previously been wise to accept, or had the people simply lacked the courage to change the things they could? Was it that Mrs. Parks was wiser than others, or was she simply crazy? Believe me, I ask that question with absolutely no disrespect. Is the wisdom to know the difference the product of rational analysis? Or is it the stuff of daydreams? Or, rather, might it be the craziness of patience stretched beyond endurance? Is wisdom the knowledge of the right time, or is it eternal truth, outside of time and space?

Most times that I recall having demonstrated what others called “courage” in my life, I thought I was simply doing that which I could not not do. At the time, courage did not enter into it. I didn’t decide to organize women to get rid of “women’s hours” at Vanderbilt University. I simply did what I had to do not to lose my sanity, as well as my patience. Later my friends would tell me that they only went along with my outrageous ideas because I was acting so bizarrely they were afraid if they refused, I might just jump out the window. I don’t remember it already being “after hours,” so I think I could have still walked out the door, but maybe that wasn’t really what they meant.

It struck me as very funny when they told me later how I had looked to them that day. I don’t remember it that way at all. I remember being very rational in devising a strategy and carrying it out: petitions, floor meetings, picketing, finally a rally. I remember endless discussions of what would be most effective and what we needed to do to get enough women to join us, so as not to become marginalized. I also remember being positively evangelical about it, and I remember consciously knowing I was using many techniques of leadership that I’d learned in Training Union as I was growing up at Gaston Avenue Baptist Church. I don’t remember anyone at my church ever telling me that women were supposed to be silent in church, that’s for sure! The Daves and the Withers and the other leaders taught us to stand up for what we believed and never mind the cost.

That first afternoon of what we would come to call “the campaign,” when I received a letter from my friend Judy Johnson who went to a small Lutheran college in Iowa, telling me they had just successfully gotten rid of hours for women at their school, I do remember storming into my friend Mary’s room waving the letter, and I probably was shouting. I still remember what I said, more or less anyway. “They’ve managed to abolish women’s hours at some little Lutheran school in the middle of nowhere. If they can do it there, we can do it at Vanderbilt.”

I am almost certain I know what the answer would have been that afternoon if anyone had telephoned the chancellor, or the members of the Board of Trustees, or certainly the parents of many women students, and asked if there were any possibility that before the year was out women at Vanderbilt would have successfully petitioned the Trustees to abolish the long-held tradition of women’s being required to sign in and out whenever leaving their dorm at night, much less successfully challenge the idea that the university was entitled to, even perhaps responsible to, set the hour by which “co-eds” must be safely stowed away in their dorms. I am very doubtful that anyone, except possibly Chancellor Heard, who seemed almost prescient at times, would have said it was remotely possible. Now truth be told, I think our Dean of Women was quite delighted with the events as they unfolded. I already admired Dean Cunningham for having been one of those rare women who had the chance to earn a Ph.D. in the roaring twenties, never imagining how long-lasting would be their echo. I’ve often wondered if she and her cohort of feminists had any idea how long it would be before another decade would roar as loudly for women as the twenties did.

Was what I did courageous? I hardly thought of it that way. It was exhilarating. It was remarkable. Perhaps it was brilliant. I know it was fun. But courageous? Not that I recall.

And was I wise? If that means, “Did I act because I was wise enough to know that rules could be changed?” the answer is certainly “no.” But I believed they could be changed, if we did it right. It was 1968, after all. The summer of love had faded to the summer of rage, and change was in the very air we students breathed that fall when we returned to our campuses. I hadn’t been at the Atlanta Women’s Conference, but I knew it had been important.

I hadn’t been to Chicago, to the Democratic Convention, but I had touched Bobby Kennedy’s hand as he came down the aisle when he spoke on campus the previous spring, and I’d cried when I woke up one morning that summer to hear my clock radio telling me he was dead. But I had also looked out my dorm window in the spring of 1967 and seen the National Guard tanks process by as they headed to take up their positions in Centennial Park for the night on which Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael were speaking from the same stage on the Vanderbilt campus, anticipating unrest that never occurred.

Last November we elected Barak Obama, voting for “change we can believe in.” But before we could believe in it, we had to imagine it. And before we could work for it, we had to have the wisdom to recognize what could be changed. To tell the difference in what could be changed and what should be serenely accepted. Is wisdom knowledge? Or is wisdom dreaming big dreams even when those around you scoff?

I’m glad Rosa Parks did not serenely take her seat at the back of the bus that day in Montgomery. I’m glad I did not serenely keep following the rules laid out for women at Vanderbilt in 1968. And I’m glad the American people did not serenely accept the common wisdom that our country was not ready for a black president “yet” in 2008.

They say Neihbuhr prayed the “Serenity Prayer” at the end of his sermon on Practical Christianity. I’d be interested in reading that sermon. I may see if I can find it anywhere.

Who ever heard of such a thing as “practical Christianity”? How can belief in the impossible being possible be practical? How can belief that life can overcome death be “practical”? The very idea strikes me as absurd. Maybe Neihbuhr explored how one can live Christianity, as a practical matter. Maybe the sermon was really about the practice of Christianity?

Refusing to move to the back of the bus was hardly “practical” in Montgomery, Alabama, in the era of Jim Crow. “Practical” was serenely riding to work, any way you could get there, and being glad you had a job in the first place. “Practical” is “going along to get along.” Challenge to the way things are is seldom practical. It may be courageous. It may even be wise. And it may be the only way for some people to ever achieve serenity.

The wisdom to know the difference. That is the prayer I think the world needs. Otherwise we run the risk of calling something “serenity” when it should be labeled as what it truly is: giving up.

I make no claim to understand economics. None whatsoever. Never took a course in it, have no “investments” other than the Pension Fund and the Credit Union accounts, and have no idea what “retirement” would even look like.

But I’ve been doing some thinking, since watching the Super Bowl ads on Sunday and thinking about Cokes. Cokes Then, like the famous Mean Joe Greene ad, and cokes Now, Coke Zero, as in the new remake of the same ad with the current nice guy of pro-football, (somebody please send me his name before I have to google him).

When I was a kid, a coke cost a nickel. It didn’t matter if you got a fountain coke at the soda fountain at the drug store, or the lunch counter at Woolsworths, which was also known as the “dime store” or even the “five and dime,” or from a machine in some public place. As far as I can remember, a coke probably cost a nickel at the picture shows as well, and pop-corn a dime, but I can’t swear to that.

I’m not just talking about the 1950s here. I’m talking about the 1960s as well, when I went off the college. Every morning I went downstairs in my dorm and bought a coke from the machine and took it with me to breakfast, where I poured it over a cup of ice, just like I’d been doing since I was a teenager. Back then in the C-Shop (the central campus snack shop and quick lunch place), an ice cream cone also cost a nickel, or a dime for a double dip. As far as I knew, that was what ice cream always had cost and always would, a nickel a dip.

Then the president put a boycott on Cuba and the price of sugar soared sky high. Coke machines doubled their prices to a dime, and I toyed with boycotting the coke machine in the basement of the dorm, buying mine in the grocery and bringing them back, but with no car, there was really no percentage in trying to do that. Friends who could went to Cuba on Venceremos Brigades, and die-hard Coke addicts like me bit the bullet. After all, Carolyn Candler, one of the heiresses to the coca cola fortune, was in my class at Vanderbilt and on Lupton 1300 with me freshman year, and they were doing the best they could just to scrape by. Sort of like the Wall St. barons are doing today. Who could begrudge them an extra nickel per coke? Of course that was double the old price, which seemed to pay for a bit more than higher sugar prices, but, hey, the machines couldn’t very well charge 6 cents could they?

Actually, there were some places, like church offices, where the machine was owned by the place, not by the vending machine distribution company, and regular people put the drinks in and took the money out. They couldn’t change the price so easily — who’d have ever thought they’d need to do that? — so they came up with various solutions. Most popular was putting a box on top of the machine and trusting everyone who got a drink to put in an extra penny! I’m not kidding. I well remember the machine in the Christian Church in the Southwest Regional Office in Ft. Worth still had that system when I was there years later, around 1978 or so.

I remember at Vandy we soon discovered that at the BSU the campus minister had decided not to raise the price, so more and more of us started ducking through there on the way across campus to buy a coke. Trust those old mainline Southern Baptists to get us in their door one way or another (that was in the days when Baptists were BAPTIST, not fundamentalists…. but that is another story). Anyway, God bless old Pitts Hughes (that was a woman), for saving us anyway she could. I haven’t forgotten her welcome offer of salvation on the pass-through to one and all, that’s for sure. (That last sentence was for those of you who didn’t catch the bad pun in the previous sentence, sorry.)

Back to the price of coke and the economy: somewhere by the time I got to grad school at Chicago, coke had climbed to a quarter, then gradually to fifty cents, depending on who owned the machine and where it was. We addicts had an internal compass to the cheaper machines again, and once again, leave it to those immersion baptizers to get us in: at the University of Chicago, the last 25 cent hold out was the Disciples Divinity House basement. That wasn’t quite as easy for the general public to make use of on the pass-through, since you had to have a key to the front door or know someone to let you in, and you had to go back out the door you came in, unless for some reason the fire exit to the alley was open, so it was a little harder to be subtle about your reason for being there. But for those of us who were House or Out-House Scholars, it was a cheap fix and the Disciples didn’t ask nearly as much in faith as the Baptists had done. (Just kidding, they didn’t really ask us to believe anything at all at Chicago, so I exaggerate in saying they only asked “not nearly as much.”)

Ok, I finally got my ph.d. in 1997, and by then I think the DDH had gone up to at least 35 cents, by close vote of the House Council, and machines across campus were running anywhere between fifty cents and seventy five. Hotels had gone up to a dollar a coke on the machines in their hallways, and movie theaters were out of sight with what they were charging for drinks, and for popcorn too. Restaurants, however, were really all over the map, and of course by then that included pepsi and a host of flavors, amounts of sugar and caffeine, and even fruit flavors in the cans, not just at soda fountains where they added real limes or cherry syrup. Moving from the south I discovered that some strange people thought “coke” only referred to a coca cola, not all soft drinks. What a strange idea that was the first time I heard it!

Another new idea was born, as restaurants tried to decide what to charge: the idea of soft drinks as being a drink that entitled you to refills, like tea or coffee or water. That certainly would have been laughed at if anyone had suggested it back when coke was a nickel. Of course, cokes were a LOT stronger back in the fifties, so a large coke, which cost a dime, was about all the caffeine any kid could handle. Somewhere in there fast food restaurants came alone and the size of sizes began to change almost day to day, along with the price.

Raise your hand if what Wendy’s now calls “small” was what McDonald’s sold as “large,” not so very long ago. Really, it wasn’t long ago at all. The old “small” is now “senior size” or even “kid’s size,” depending on where you are. Current “large” didn’t even exist until after it had been introduced as the “super size” for hot summers in the south. Most places do offer free refills now, which seems to give at least a nod to the idea that coffee and tea drinkers might well be using as much sugar as coke drinkers, which I argued back in 1967 or so! Why didn’t they raise the price of coffee, I asked, as I watched friends stir spoonful after spoonful of sugar into their nickel cup of coffee, and its free refills, while I paid a dime for my one coke and never thought of getting a free refill. Well, of course they didn’t raise the price of coffee because people would never have stood for it. Remember that argument?

It was related to the “people will stop driving before they pay $2.00 a gallon for gas,” or was that $3.00? or maybe $4.00? We didn’t find out who would stop driving if it got to $5.00, at least not where I live, but the common wisdom was defeated with all the other increases, so that one would have probably gone through too. Now more people complained about the price of gas than complained when coke went from a nickel to a dime, but that was only a matter of scale and of who was doing the buying, I want to argue.

The reasons for coke going to a dime and on from there and gas going to — well, whatever the oil barons want to charge — are just about the same. We boycott Cuban sugar so coke goes up. We subsidize oil companies and sleep with the shieks, so they can charge whatever they want, and brag about it to congress, and pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses to go with the higher prices of everything.

That’s my nickel’s worth on the economy. I don’t bother watching for the Dow Jones numbers. I know what’s happening by the price of a coke. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it. That’s making me thirsty, so I’m headed to get a coke now, check you later.