The Serenity Prayer has been variously attributed to an ancient Sanskrit text, Aristotle, St. The full Serenity Prayer text has stronger religious overtones.Īlso there are conflicting accounts of the prayer's origin. There are several versions of the Serenity Prayer, each with slightly different wording that support groups have adopted. And, although the origin is thought to be Christian, the Serenity Prayer is applicable to your daily life regardless of religion or spiritual belief system. The Serenity Prayer meshes perfectly with the spirituality of AA's Twelve Steps. In fact, these 25 words are heard in most every AA meeting and widely taken as a succinct statement of a path to sanity and sobriety. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous have enthusiastically embraced this prayer-known as the Serenity Prayer-almost from the moment they discovered it. AA, the Twelve Steps and the Serenity Prayer So that I may be reasonably happy in this lifeĪmen. The Full Serenity PrayerĪccepting hardships as the pathway to peace Below, we provide the full Serenity Prayer along with an examination of its history, meaning and importance so that we all might carry its lessons closely and transform common hardships into a calming surrender. The Serenity Prayer serves as a focal point for the very spirit of AA, anchoring its members to its quintessential teachings about surrender and acceptance. Although its origins are a bit unclear, its impacts are not. This often used AA prayer is an excerpt from a longer prayer commonly attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr. God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.These simple words ring clear through the hearts and minds of Alcoholics Anonymous members across the world: Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.” The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. “Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |