Sherry Chandler » I could call this post—
I could call this post—
nothing is sacred
or
women do everything and men steal it
Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene.
For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.
His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an “ordinary Sunday service” at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers.
Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.
Not, mind you, that I’m accusing Reinhold Niebuhr of stealing. It’s all a little more complicated than that. Most things are.
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7 Comments
1. Helen Losse replies at 11th July 2008, 5:37 pm :
Well, well, well.
2. sherry replies at 11th July 2008, 6:15 pm :
You know, Helen, I’d never seen the prayer attributed to Niebuhr. I always thought it just belonged to AA. So I learned in one fell swoop first, that Niebuhr may have written and second, that he may not have.
3. koshembos replies at 11th July 2008, 9:48 pm :
If you learn one thing about famous people, it is that they are as flawed as anyone else and often much more so.
4. Helen Losse replies at 12th July 2008, 11:54 am :
One thing I learned while conducting research for my thesis on King is that many pastors “borrow freely” from each other to the point that they often don’t know if something is original or not. They don’t see that as important.
5. sherry replies at 12th July 2008, 7:42 pm :
Sort of like the blues, eh Helen? Or, I suppose, any folk, which is to say, oral tradition. The notion isn’t to be original or to own the art.
6. Helen Losse replies at 13th July 2008, 12:39 am :
Black sermons contain “set pieces” that are used over and over in different sermons. They are combined at the pulpit in new and creative ways. At some point in the sermon the pastor must improvise and “make borrowed works his own.” Not sure if I’m being clear. This is, of course, an over-simplification. For example, King used his “I Have a Dream” sequence both before and after his famous speech at the 1963 March on Washington. His first use was in Rocky Mt., NC.
7. Helen Losse replies at 13th July 2008, 12:40 am :
But the dream idea was a familiar one in black preaching that didn’t originate with King.
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