Praying Hands

Before I knew about Alcoholics Anonymous or the “Serenity Prayer” of Reinhold Niebuhr or Durer’s “Praying Hands”, a pretty, sad-eyed, white-skinned and dark-haired teenage girl gave me a silver keychain with Durer’s image on one side and Niebuhr’s verse on the other. I still remember the look on her face as she gave it to me, because I did not understand it.  I was in college; she was young enough for me to consider her as a little sister rather than a source of infatuation.   I saw in her face a calm that seemed like resignation as she placed the keychain in my hand.  Calm and resignation were not in my adolescent arsenal.  I thought, like Archimedes, that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, I could change the world.  As I looked admiringly and quizzically at the beauty of the image and the words, she said “It’s the Serenity Prayer.  Alcoholics Anonymous uses it.  My dad gave it to me.”  I used it most of the way through college, and have no idea whatever happened to it.  I think of that silver keychain whenever I see the Serenity Prayer, or Durer’s artwork.  And now reflecting on it, I wonder whatever happened to Susan of the sad eyes. 

While in Frankfurt helping our son tie together loose ends for his return to the US, I worked my way through Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace.  Recommended by a good friend who lives a life of courage and wisdom in the serenity of Grace, I found it to be not so much about addiction to alcohol that I fear in others, but addiction to what May calls “stress”.  I have a hard time stopping.  I’m constantly in the need of an accomplishment fix. 

The image above from Japan struck me.  To be still amid chaos, to know that stillness and inactivity are at some moments more honestly human than activity, and more loving…is perhaps the wisdom that knows the difference, and both the root and the flower of serenity.  It shows a resignation, perhaps like Susan's, that is not a retreat from reality, but a graceful standing in that place, a presence that changes the world without the need for leverage or force, that accomplishes all that is possible without the need for stress.

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.