12 Years Ago Today: The wisdom to know the difference

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 15, 2008, without an image.]

A cousin wrote me yesterday that she’d meant to call some of our relatives in Arkansas to see whether they were okay in the wake of Hurricane Ike, but that “like always” she’d put it off and not done so. I told her that either our relatives are okay or they aren’t, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
    Her reply surprised me:

I really LOL [laughed out loud] at what you said. I guess you’re right, there is really nothing we could do about it. If something was wrong with any of them, we would have heard.

I trusted that her LOL was owing to her relief at realizing that, indeed, we can do nothing about most things, so we might as well free ourselves from the illusion that we can.
    In this connection, I had already been musing about people’s practice of praying for other people, as though they could thereby improve their lot. I think people pray for others in order to demonstrate that they care while at the same time absolving themselves of any responsibility for the actual outcome. After all, they generally acknowledge that god isn’t bound to act on their prayers. They believe that god will either do something or “he” won’t. Or, as I say, the people they are praying for will either be okay or they won’t. Prayer doesn’t come into it.
    We’re all familiar with something known as the serenity prayer (commonly attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr):

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....

The serenity prayer is itself a prayer, though not on behalf of other people. I suppose that many people who utter it and subsequently think they have come to know the difference would be unsure whether to pray less, or more, in the future, not knowing whether to attribute the effect to divine intervention or to purely psychological mechanisms. (I attribute it to the latter; “god” has nothing to do with it.)
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When I called my sister in northwestern Arkansas, she told me that she and her family are doing okay, “thank the Lord.”

Copyright © 2008, 2020 by Moristotle