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.
....
Amen.
--Reinhold Niebuhr
This is a prayer that all Lebanese should keep in mind when discussing
There are powers that are much bigger than us in this world. If we are not able to understand our place in their game and act accordingly (in a prudent and wise manner), we will destroy our selves - just as we did in the civil war. Within those restrictions and limitations however, there are a million things that can be done to improve the wellbeing of the average Lebanese and the prosperity of our country.
These are the activities we should focus our energies and even discussions on because they are the ones that, in the end, will reward us with the largest dividends.
2 comments:
Years ago, my mother taught me that prayer, and helped me understand how it was applied in practice.
Later, I tried to find who first wrote it. A Jesuit priest told me it was written by St. Francis of Assisi, There are many other attributions for the prayer, and now you say it was Reinhold Niebuhr. It may have been him; I don't know.
But in a search for the author, I entered the WHOLE prayer into a Google search, in quotes, and found that they counted 62,900 websites which contained all those words!!
It surely gets around!!
Barney
It's a prayer that applies to everyone who has the desire to change what he or she perceives to be a "difficult" status quo. The question is: have people always had the desire to challenge the status quo? Or is this desire a product of our modern (or some other) age? I suppose that if we are able to answer those two questions, we might have a better idea of the prayer's origin.
What I am sure of is that the prayer touches me in a very powerful way because it is extremely relevant and pertinent to my life. For I am one of those fools who believes in change for the better... or, as some people would rather refer to it, progress: an utterly modern concept, which is translated rather disappointingly in Arabic as "taqqadum" (literally, moving forward).
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