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Q & A
Q&A: Balancing acceptance and courage Mary Jacobs, Sep 8, 2009
Eileen Flanagan
Many Christians have found comfort in the words of 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.” But that last line? You could write a book.
Eileen Flanagan has done that with The Wisdom to Know the Difference: When to Make a Change and When to Let Go (Tarcher/Penguin, September). She draws on her Quaker faith to offer insight on developing discernment about what we must accept and what we can change. Ms. Flanagan spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
Let’s take this prayer line-by-line. First, how do we begin to accept the things we cannot change? It’s not something we can do with willpower. We can develop acceptance by having a strong community network, by developing our faith, by knowing yourself. A lot of times it’s our insecurities, our desire to have everything be perfect, to prove something to the world, that makes it hard to accept both the things that mess up our plans.
How does acceptance benefit someone with faced with an unchangeable reality? An example is an illness or a diagnosis that you just must accept. Acceptance means having some kind of faith, being open to learning a lesson, whatever it might be, trusting the that maybe something good will come out of it. People in the medical field say that acceptance could help. Stress is difficult on the body; if a lot of energy is going into feeling stress over a diagnosis, it can be harmful. Of course, it’s natural to feel anxiety, but the longer you stay in that mode, the more it can hurt you.
Someone once said that the cancer patients who do best are those who accept the diagnosis but not the prognosis. They accept what’s happening, but still pursue treatment, eat healthy, join a support group—do all the things they can to help themselves. It’s the combination of accepting your circumstances, but not in a passive way. It’s not like, “Oh, I accept I have cancer, I’ll just stay in bed now,” but it’s also not, “I’m going to fight, fight, fight this thing.” It’s coming to peace, and then asking what things you can do.
Why does it take courage to make needed changes? Why is that so difficult? In terms of our personal lives, we get stuck in patterns. Even if it’s not the best pattern for us, that pattern might seem less scary than trying something new. Sometimes changing our behavior might shake up relationships with the people around us. If we’re going to do something different, are we going to lose the support of those people whose approval we want?
One of the people I interviewed in the book really feels called to work on environmental sustainability issues. She worked very hard at changing her own consumption, but she’s also trying to challenge our society. That’s hard because people don’t want to change. Her fear is being judged as preachy or not accepted because she has a difficult message.
Your book focuses on the third line of the prayer, finding the balance between “serenity” and “courage.” Why is that balance so crucial? It’s easy to waste a lot of effort trying to change those things we can’t change, or just being anxious about them. Like the weather. I can’t change that, so it’s not something I want to spend a lot of time complaining about. It’s a waste of my mental energy.
It’s amazing how, when we really listen to ourselves, we really do spend a lot of energy focused on those things—complaining about a person at work we’re never going to change, that kind of thing. But I also think sometimes that people accept things that they could change with just a little bit of effort. So the idea of thinking through that lens of the Serenity Prayer is very appealing. It helps me see, “Where should I put my energy and my time? What do I want to focus on?”
Can religious faith be a source of “conditioning” that leads to imbalance between serenity and courage, to err one way or another? Coming from an Irish-Catholic family, there’s quite a bit of that in my background. My mother used to laugh when she quoted the strict nun who taught her in school: “You were put on this earth to suffer for the glory of Christ, and the sooner you get used to it the better off you’ll be.”
But it can go both ways, depending on how people interpret faith. Martin Luther King Jr. was told by white ministers in the South that he was wrong to speak up about segregation. On the other hand, faith was an important part of what strengthened King and many people in the civil-rights movement. Faith can both be used to silence people or to strengthen them. What are some sources of discernment from the Christian tradition? The practice of prayer, finding quiet and solitude are a few. Going on a retreat or making some space for solitude and silence in our lives can be really helpful in letting go of our anxieties and also in developing clarity.
I always love the “fruit of the spirits”—peace, love, joy—as a test of discernment. I might not find joy in the moment when my child wakes me up at night, for example, but I love him and feel called to be a parent. So that is something that is pretty easy to accept when I think of the big picture. But there might be something else going on at work that seems really unfair, and when you sit with it, you don’t feel at peace about it. If you can’t feel that peace, maybe you are supposed to do something to change it.
So the test is watching your own reaction, and your ability to experience the fruit of the Spirit, given your different choices? Yes. If you’re considering a course of action, do you feel at peace with it? Does it result in love? Does it ultimately lead to joy?
As Americans, is there a way that we typically err on the serenity/courage spectrum? I was in the Peace Corps in Botswana. Our cultures are very different on this front. People in Botswana are much more at ease with accepting the train that’s late, and maybe even in accepting things that they shouldn’t: something that’s not working well that really could be fixed. That made me much more aware of how Americans expect the trains to run on time. There’s a certain good in that, but it also points an area in which faith could help. Americans have a high rate of anxiety in our society. We don’t necessarily integrate faith into the fiber of our whole lives, to really trust that things are going to be OK, that there is a God in the world and we don’t need to anxiously control quite so much.
You talk about “expanding your concept of God.” Some people will hear that and worry that could lead to a self-serving theology. Another test of discernment—particularly in the Christian tradition—is that our actions shouldn’t be good just for ourselves. Quakers say that something that is “rightly ordered” shouldn’t be harmful to me and it shouldn’t be harmful to anyone else either. Every lasting spiritual tradition teaches that it’s not just about me. There are self-focused, New Age-y spiritualities that view the universe as a vending machine to provide you with everything that you want. I don’t believe in that image of God.
Spirituality should make us more concerned with community; more connected, more willing to serve other people rather than just serve our own selfish agenda. That to me is the yardstick. Quakers have a long tradition of using different names for God—talking about “the seed” or “the inner teacher”—and I found that very appealing. But always, there’s this idea of something greater than us, something that calls us to be our best selves.
Eileen Flanagan
Why does it take courage to make needed changes? Why is that so difficult? 
