These days, serenity is in short supply

This has hardly been a serene week. The COVID-19 virus has quarantined whole nations -- imagine Rome without crowds, Venice without tourists, and soccer games with empty stands!

Stock markets took a dive off the high board and haven’t even hit the water yet.

And Saudi Arabia and Russia dumped oil on the market until the price of crude dropped from around $60 a barrel to around $30, Which makes Canadian crude worth less than $10. Which makes Teck Resources look smart by cancelling their proposed tar sands operation, and makes Jason Kenney look foolish for counting on Teck royalties to Make Alberta Great Again.

As Scott Gilmore editorialized in Maclean’s, “It’s not the end of the world, it just feels that way.”

Gilmore recalled his childhood days, reading a framed poem on a church wall. He assumed it must be “a piece of ancient wisdom, a psalm from the Old Testament.”

It was neither. It was a prayer written by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in the 1930s:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.” It’s commonly called the “Serenity Prayer.” Alcoholics Anonymous popularized it. Other self-help programs have picked it up.

Are prayers the answer to today’s chaos? I used to think that prayers could persuade a heavenly godfather to fix things.

Usually, to fix things for me, but occasionally for someone else.

I held that belief, even though God didn’t bring me a Maserati, until the Indonesian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. Some self-professed Christians declared that they had called out to God, or Jesus, or someone, as they were being swept out to sea. And God obediently flung them back up on the beach.

And I wondered why God hadn’t saved 400,000 others who, presumably, also prayed to someone, or something, and didn’t get saved.

Was God only the God of Christians?

Does God respond only to the right passwords?

Is God a harsh judge, who saves only those who deserve to be saved?

Or does God, in fact, not intervene in natural events?

I don’t, by the way, argue that there is no God to intervene anyway. I remain totally convinced that there is something, which I happen to call “God” but for which others may have other names, that pervades the universe.

But I no longer expect that “something” to act as a supernatural Mr. Fixit.

Even so, despite my skepticism, I would far rather have a lot of people praying for me than praying against me. Or supporting a cause than opposing it.

So where does that leave me?

With Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, I suppose. If fixing’s needed, I need to do whatever I can. If it’s beyond me, I simply need to accept that fact.

Which is pretty much what another “ancient

piece of wisdom” stresses. This one is called Desiderata, written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. Some lines will be familiar:

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste… Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be… In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul…”

Like Jason Kenney, nothing you and I can do will jack oil prices up again. Not even Warren Buffett can rescue the stock markets by himself. And we wouldn’t recognize a corona virus if we met one on the street. But that doesn’t make us helpless. Scott Gilmore offered his own solution. He wrote, “We are inarguably in the depths of a global refugee crisis, a global environmental crisis, a global public health crisis, and a global economic crisis. It feels like it’s all coming undone.

“It’s times like this that I unconsciously repeat the Serenity Prayer to myself. And it helps. There are things none of us can change right now. But there are many, many things we can do.”

Things like washing our hands. Leaving the car in the garage. Giving a few dollars to charities who are doing something. Wasting less. Volunteering at the Thrift Shop or Red Cross. Washing our hands.

Gilmore called such actions, “Simple things. Banal actions that seem almost pathetic in their smallness. Tiny things, none of which really matter in the big picture. And yet, almost magically, when we do them together, do them day by day, they do matter.”

Maybe prayer is like doing those simple things. Together.