Sunday’s Reflection
ACCEPTANCE is not a glamorous virtue. It’s easily confused with passivity. It can be an excuse for not acting on one’s own legitimate behalf. I spent some years resisting wiser people’s advice to accept particular setbacks or (others’) obnoxious behaviors or limitations. Acceptance seemed unimaginative and week where it seemed confrontation or action might work more to the purpose.
It was at an Al-Anon meeting I attended when in distress about a family member’s alcoholism that I began to recognize the largeness and the wisdom of an attitude that had seemed so bland and pale. The “serenity prayer,” recited at all AA meetings and reproduced on plaques and posters and greeting cards, may suffer from overexposure, but its power is evident when one runs up against the real limits of human effort.
When someone you love is suffering an addiction you can’t cure, the prayer for “serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference” offers healing clarity and that goes well beyond empty assurances.
- Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Weavings, May, June, July 2011
From “What You Get for the Price,” by Marilyn Chanler McEntyre, page 18 in Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual LifeMay/June/July 2011. Copyright © 2011 by The Upper Room. All rights reserved. Used by permission. http://www.upperroom.org/bookstore/. Learn more about or purchase this book.
Today’s Question
Do you agree that acceptance is a virtue? Share your reflections.
Today’s Scripture Reading
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