![]() ![]() The Huffington Post asked Sifton what she would say to a room of AA members about her father’s famous words. In “Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age,” Bill Wilson states says that AA counts the Serenity Prayer author (Niebuhr) among our great benefactors. According to “Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age,” an AA history book written by the organizations co-founder Bill Wilson, the Prayer ended up being adopted as the unofficial mantra of Alcoholics Anonymous in the late 1950s when the organization was barely a decade old. He allegedly printed 500 prayer cards and the legacy and tradition evolved from there. ( AA members do not use full last names) asking if he could make some wallet size cards with the Serenity Prayer on it. Hock wrote an AA member and printer named Henry S. ![]() Wilson’s Book claims that their first secretary, Ruth Hock, saw the Serenity Prayer printed underneath a routine obituary. ![]() The first report of the Serenity Prayers use outside church walls was in 1944 when it appeared in the Book of Prayers and Services for the Armed Forces which was published by the Federal Council of Churches after a member of Heath Unions church congregation asked Neibuhr permission to reprint that little prayer about grace, courage and wisdom he heard one Sunday. Paula Schwartz, who leads the food addiction recovery program, told The Huffington Post that the Serenity Prayer summarizes the way we need to be in the world and in recovery. At the Realization Center, an outpatient addictions treatment program in New York, the Serenity Prayer is often used to close the programs twelve step meetings. These days, the prayer is more often used to help bring about individual peace and personal well-being. Sifton told The Huffington Post that her father’s political concerns were the same as his spiritual ones: to pray for the strength to change unjust, selfish policies which gave rise to war, social unrest, and economic woe to pray for the strength to help fashion a more fair, just, and peaceful world, and to work for that end. The original prayer was longer and contained a second verse that contained more explicitly Christian references. It was a run of the mill Sunday morning service at Union Church in Heath, a farming village in a remote corner of northwestern Massachusetts where Niebhur was a seasonal pastor. The first time the Serenity Prayer was prayed was at the height of the war against Germany in the summer of 1943. The Serenity Prayer addresses the inconsolable pain, loss and guilt that war inflicts on the communities that wage it it goes to the heart of the possibilities and impossibilities of collective action for collective betterment that is to say, to the heart of the possibilities for peace. His daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, author of The Serenity Prayer, Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War wrote: The Serenity Prayer was composed during wartime by a 51-year-old pastor named Reinhold Niebuhr. Yet freedom from substance abuse was not the prayer’s original intent. The Serenity Prayer is best known as a central prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery programs. The words to the familiar prayer are: 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. If you are looking for it, the Serenity Prayer is everywhere. ![]() The Serenity Prayer’s Journey From Wartime To Recovery – credit: Huffington Post ![]()
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