Greetings ST, ‘Ettes, ‘Sieurs, and All!
Recent events have brought old questions, and old restlessness to mind and heart. Fortunately an out-of-state friend reminded me of the unlikely power and peace to be found in an attitude of relinquishment and serenity. Through our conversation, I recalled some lines that have strengthened and supported me for decades. Here they are:
God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace;
Taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that You will make all things right
If I surrender to Your Will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You
Forever in the next. Amen.
~Reinhold Niebuhr (ca 1944, adapted)
Several years ago, an online acquaintance of mine had read a review of a book on Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings on religion and politics in a nationally-distributed newspaper. Reading the review led her to ask this humble theo-geek how Niebuhr might relate to his near-contemporaries C. S. Lewis and/or G. K. Chesterton. Admittedly, these were deep waters for a long-ago chaplain panda at the time. But, I accepted the challenge, using the “long version” of the well-known Serenity Prayer, quoted above, as my point of reference.
Pastor Niebuhr’s much-loved prayer seems to encapsulate his ‘operational theology’ (spiritual worldview) rather nicely. He composed the prayer for his then-congregation in a small, rural church in western New York. The prayer in its original form was meant to offer solace to – and inspire resolve in – those devastated by the deaths of family members in WWII. One can sense in the text Niebuhr’s commitment to a sort of Christian Stoicism that lives in the present moment, accepts hardship as a consequence of human sinfulness, and embraces the necessity for delaying personal gratification. In this stance, Niebuhr squares off against the emerging “liberal Protestantism’s rosy view of man and willfully blind optimism about human progress”, as the original review put it.
C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (Oxford University Press, 1943) and its iconic, elegiac chapter, “Men Without Chests” – as we’ve explored in some detail earlier here – laments the emergence of a post WWI generation enamored of two extremes: a dry, desiccated mastery of facts and a confining of emotion to the private realm of personal, subjective feelings – that neither migrate from the head to the heart – nor connect the individual to others. Let alone connecting one to something larger like Truth, Beauty, Family, Nation (or, horror of horrors, to God.) As we’ve seen before, he puts forward – as a remedy to their disappearance – the notion of the Tao (in an almost anthropological way) as a lens for seeing and understanding the working out of the the natural law across cultures. In this cultural codex [appended to the book’s text], Lewis includes concepts such as: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, and faith. Lewis’s focus on these shared tools for daily interaction connects him to Niebuhr’s championing of the social impact of living out one’s life of faith as a Christian.
It also harks back to another titan of literature and chronicler of then-contemporary culture: G. K. Chesterton. As concerns the interplay of Judeo-Christian values and cultural change, Chesterton’s Heretics [1905] and Orthodoxy [1908] chronicle his responses to the likes of Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, in their steadfast support of the perfectibility of man and the inevitability of human progress as a good. Chesterton’s answer to soulless modernism is a worldview – often reduced to a merely economic system – clumsily termed ‘distributism’. In this view, one can find recourse to the idea of ‘subsidiarity’. Subsidiarity suggests that perceived needs should be met/problems solved in the most local, most immediate/direct way possible. For our purposes, this probably makes Chesterton the most “Catholic” of the three, but they all stand firmly opposed to the recurring errors of their times – and ours.
I think the current invocation of a kind of tribal conflict between ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ would look eerily familiar to all three gentleman whom I’ve profiled here. I also think that Niebuhr’s prayer is both a comfort and a call to action for those who cherish the American Idea and the gifts of Western Civilization.
Thanks for reading! Looking forward to conversation in the comments. Oh, and: “Serenity – Now” is my hope for us all.
ST UnWoked & UnVaxxed! 