By Kevin O’Brien

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

Sitting in Meeting for Worship last week, I began to have a bone to pick with the Serenity Prayer.  It also led me to a beef I have with the Quaker spiritual truism of “finding God in all people”.  And while I am at it, let me take on the traditional interpretation of the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis.  When I consider the thread between all of the re-imaginings I am proposing, I realize they are all based upon a shift from a common, dualistic consciousness to a mystical consciousness.

The Serenity Prayer has provided me peace and comfort, as it has for many, when I find myself fighting with life, fighting to change things that can’t be changed.  That is all well and good, but when I sit longer with the first two lines, it feels as though it reinforces the notion that changing – doing – is still the most important mode of being.  “The courage to change the things I can” – wait, but why start with changing things I can?  “Accept the things that I cannot change” – still sounds like we come to acceptance only as a kind of surrender after losing the fight to change things.  It is as if we come to begrudgingly accept Yin after Yang fails us. 

I do find that is how I often live.  As a family therapist, it feels like my job is to make change.  People are coming because they don’t like what is happening in their lives – so I have to help them CHANGE IT.  As a person living in climate change driven “Goodbye Normal Times”, I feel like there is SO MUCH to change – how can I ever rest except when I can’t do anymore?

And yet living as such only perpetuates the cycle of suffering that got us all into the mess we are in.  It is the desperation to change things that fuels the belief that it is never enough. There is never enough; I am never enough; the word God created for us is never enough.

OK, now I am on to Genesis.  So often we hear the injunction of God instructing Adam and Eve not to eat form the Tree of Knowledge and leave out the last part “The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”.   When we include the full statement, we come to very different potential understandings.  Don’t eat form the Tree of Knowledge seems to imply that all suffering comes from human’s desire to know, to know more.  Perhaps there is some truth there, but let’s consider how our interpretation might change when we consider that the source of huma’s suffering comes from our desire to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  A more modern way to restate this is the Tree of Judgement.  For what is the knowledge of good and evil than judgement.  Of course this can refer to our tendency to judge others – he’s a bad person – but we also have this tendency almost every moment of the day.  “Eww, ycuk, I don’t like that, I can’t stand that…”  Or, “that’s great, I love it, I want that…”  I don’t know about you, but the moment I drop inside inner experience, I am bombarded by liking and not liking what life has set before me.  No wonder the Serenity Prayer emphasizes changing what I can first!  It’s so “natural’.  And yet, it is so core to my experience of suffering. 

I can sum up the whole of my spiritual practice as inviting a spirit of grace-filled acceptance of life – when things are “good” and when things are “bad” – in no small part because I am a terrible judge of what is good and bad.  I can look back now at a job loss, three years of uncertainty of whether we could ever have kids, even losing people I love, and know that good came from those “bad” things.

So let me end by taking on something closer to home for us as Quakers.  What could be wrong with finding God in all people?  I don’t have any trouble with God here, I have trouble with the word “in”.  “In” focuses my attention to some thing – I am looking for the good in me, in you, in others.  As distinct from what?  The bad?  The so so?  It is the same problem with a shallow understanding of “Inner Light”.  It makes me look for that which is light, from that which is not.  Kind of like eating form the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil!

I find the most peace when I sense that I am “of light”, not that light is “in” me.  When I am free of the delusion of separate self, even for a minute, I can KNOW, firsthand, that I am the light of consciousness.  I am space (light) for the world. 

The sooner I come to accept ALL, EVERYTHING as light, as good, the sooner I stop struggling.

What if we reimagined the Serenity Prayer now?  What might it sound like?

Here’s one possibility:

God, grant me the capacity to accept all as good.

Grant me the grace to move in harmony through the change I am called to move in and through.

And grant me the wisdom to know that there is no tension between acceptance and change.