The New Year is a Prayer

Image from jasonwahler.com

A prayer that has fascinated me for decades is Dr Rheinhold Neibuhr’s Serenity Prayer that Alcoholics Anonymous teaches its members. I came across this prayer in late 1970s and it has remained in my heart until today.

I don’t claim I have attained the serenity that the prayer offers. I have learnt to accept the things I cannot change. I keep changing the things I can. I hope I know the difference between what can be changed and what can’t.

I don’t much seek to change the external reality. There’s very little that I can do about that. I’m just an ordinary mortal in a very complex and complicated country that is governed by people who are too powerful for anyone to influence. I wish I could change a lot of things around me. If God appeared and gave me a boon to change what I wanted, my list would be quite endless.

But I know that even God is helpless in this regard. Does God weep over what people do in His name? Well, I don’t believe in any anthropomorphic god. So my prayer is not addressed to such a god at all. My god resides in my heart. He is a spark that lights up the dark ways that I am destined to tread here on this sad planet. He is the serenity and the wisdom that the prayer offers. He is not ‘he’, in fact.

As I plod on this weary way called life, moving into yet another new year, I feel I have arrived at a turning point. I am confronted with a choice. If I do the same things I did last year, I will get the same results. I don’t want those results, however. I need to take a less trodden path. That is the challenge the new year offers me. The new year metamorphoses into a prayer in the core of my being.