When I was a child, whenever I came across a book I enjoyed (Cherry Ames, Pollyanna, Swallows and Amazons - to name a few) I immediately went to the library to see if the book was part of a series. If it was, I would read them all - I hated to part with the characters and their adventures.
My adult reading follows a similar pattern, except that now, when I come across a book I enjoy, I not only try to read all the author has written, but I follow references and quotes and try to read the books the author has quoted. Which is how I happened to be reading Now and Then by Frederick Buechner, a story of this novelist-turned-theologian's years in seminary and early ministry. I had come across references to his books and felt it was time to learn more about this contemporary Christian writer.
One of the interesting anecdotes in this book concerns Reinhold Niebuhr who had been one of his professors at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Niebuhr, best known - to me - as the author of the Serenity Prayer, had had a stroke, but he was still teaching. This is how Buechner remembers him:
I see Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance. in a beret with the wind ballooning out his raincoat as he walks his poodle along Riverside Drive. A stroke had left his speech slightly indistinct at times and one arm less than fully functional, but he always gave me the impression of great energy and wit, great involvement in the events of the time. He had been Roosevelt's adviser... There seemed to be ... no eminence that he couldn't have attained in any field where he'd chosen to attain it; but it was to the church that he gave himself in all its shabbiness, as well as all its glory, to his students, to the work of Christ, whom he served with all his urbanity and shrewdness - that tamed cynic, as he called himself, his bad arm tucked in against his chest and his speech slurred... It was the glittering breadth of his knowledge that I remember best, his gift for applying the insights of the Christian faith to the whole spectrum of politics, economics, international affairs.
As I read that, I wondered if this was when he wrote the Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Was it after his stroke that he realized he had to accept the things he couldn't change and simply get on with his life...?
But no, I discovered (thanks to the internet). It seems that he wrote the prayer much earlier. It had been sent to World War II soldiers and army chaplains as a prayer of comfort. His debilitating stroke came at least a decade later, in 1952 - at age 60.
Did the prayer offer him comfort or guidance at this time? I wondered. Did he ever think of it as a strange foreshadowing?
Again, the answer came (thanks to the Internet) in the link above, where Niebuhr tells of his depression following the stroke, and his embarrassment when people constantly reminded him of the words of the Serenity Prayer.
"I confessed my embarrassment to our family physician, who had a sense of humor touched with gentle cynicism," he writes.
"Don't worry," the doctor told him. "Doctors and preachers are not expected to practice what they preach."
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