Who first wrote the Serenity Prayer?

The Serenity Prayer was first composed by the North American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). The shortest and most well-known version is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

A fuller version, attributed to Niebuhr in 1951, says:

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

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.

Niebuhr himself admitted that the prayer ‘may have been spooking around for years, even centuries.’ In fact, there are hints of it in Epictetus in the first century CE:

“Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions-in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing.”

The 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar Shantideva reasoned similarly:

If there’s a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there in being glum?

Finally, the Jewish philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol wrote, in the 11th century:

‘And they said: At the head of all understanding – is realizing what is and what cannot be, and the consoling of what is not in our power to change.’

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