Rita Sherma Convergence Spirituality: God Beyond Religion

The most widely circulated form of The Serenity Prayer, thought to have been written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, is as follows:

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.

Acceptance is a wonderful thing and the prayer is a beautiful thought. The problem arises in putting it into action. There are three kinds of actions we can take to “change the things we can change”:

1. Mental action (thought).
2. Communicative action (word).
3. Physical action (deed).

But there is a fourth type of action that we can undertake to change the things that seem beyond our capacity to change, and that is spiritual action. By “spiritual action,” I don’t mean petitionary prayer. This refers to the kind of begging, cringing, asking, and beseeching that passes for prayer all over the world.

Spiritual action—the kind that can change the things that you think you “cannot change”—requires commitment to sacred practices (praxis) that can endow you with discipline over your mind, body, and character, so that you can take the entire energy of your being and focus it on God.

God’s answering response is “grace” and with grace, many things are possible that are not attainable simply through “thought, word, and deed.”

Many forms of sacred practices were common in the early centuries of Christian history. But with increasing institutionalization and escalation of control by the clerical establishment, the wonders achieved by the desert fathers, and lay women saints, began to become the stuff of legends.

But now that the whole world’s wisdom is open to us, we can find our way back once again to the fourth type of action, spiritual action, by opening our minds, hearts, and souls, to an immersion in praxis, or systematic sacred practice.

Praxis takes us beyond what we can learn from reading and praying, or from preachings and teachings, to a place where we encounter our own intuitive knowing and inner capacity to change the things we think we cannot change.