#111 / Serenity Prayer

My name is Gary, but I am not an alcoholic.*

I guess I am reporting in because I am having some problems with the "Serenity Prayer."

My basic thesis about life is that "we ourselves create the human world we most immediately inhabit." That thesis tends to the conclusion that there is virtually nothing that we "cannot change." Like it or not, I have more or less accepted responsibility for changing anything that seems to need it, within our human world - or at least trying to change those things. So, I am having a problem with the Serenity Prayer right off the bat. Not to mention serenity itself, given the world in which we are living!

As to the second part, "changing the things I can," I am finding myself less successful at that than I would like to be, and I am also subject to what I think of as the curse of Saint Paul:

I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do.**

The third part of this prayer seems to make some sense: God grant me wisdom! I would welcome some wisdom, and some serenity, too. Right about now I find I am 0 for 2.

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*I make that claim with some confidence, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I can no longer claim that I "don't drink." Up until about two years ago, I never drank any alcohol at all. But now I drink one glass of red wine at night with dinner, on the basis of its purportedly anti-cancer properties. I don't think I am an alcoholic, but I do feel pretty inebriated after I drink that glass!

** That's from Romans 7:19.

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