Serenity

Today’s passage is the start of Step Twelve itself, as the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, sets the Step at the head of Bill W.’s essay on it. Today’s title isn’t in the passage. The essay comes to the word twice. Partway through, it asks whether members can take poverty, illness, loneliness and loss “with courage and serenity.” And at the very end, where the book’s essays on the Steps close, Bill hopes each member will come to grasp “the inner meaning of A.A.’s simple prayer,” and sets down the Serenity Prayer. Shortly before, among the lasting rewards he listed for a life lived well, he had named “the certainty that we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons.”

The word was in AA’s books before the prayer was. AA’s first book, in April 1939, uses it three times, two years before a member brought the prayer into AA’s office in New York, clipped from a newspaper. In “Bill’s Story,” the moment he accepts all that his friend proposed, there in the hospital, brings a feeling of triumph, “followed by such a peace and serenity as I had never known.” In “How It Works,” on fear, relying on God is what lets members “match calamity with serenity.” And in “Into Action,” among the promises that follow Step Nine: “We will comprehend the word serenity and know peace.” Today’s edition reads “and we will know peace.”

The Twelve and Twelve sets the prayer down twice. On Step Three, as something to say in any upset or indecision, it begins “God grant me the serenity” (November 20 tells of the line the book adds at its end). At the close of Step Twelve it reads “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change.” Bill remembered the clipping that way too, writing in 1957: in his telling, it asked serenity for “us.” As AA’s archives give the notice, it asked it for “me.”

Others kept the prayer as the clipping had it. By January 1950 the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, was printing it on its back cover every month, with “me.” In the Grapevine in December 1957, Bill told of a newcomer he called Joe, sober, his wife gone, and sure that sobriety was all he needed to go back to his old life and make money. Four years later, Joe told him neither the money nor his wife had come back. After a miserable year, he said, he had “quit giving lip service to AA’s Serenity Prayer” and begun to say it over and over, and as acceptance came, slowly, “my pain subsided.” In March 1962, writing about acceptance, Bill gave the prayer with “me” himself.

More on the clipping, the wallet cards and who wrote the prayer: The Serenity Prayer, in Keep Coming Back. On the word Step Twelve’s first line used until 1941: The educational variety, in The Educational Variety.