Serenity & Angels

You'll see it in curlicue font, embossed and floral and tacked to a wall or inside a greeting card: 

"Grant me the serenity..."

Surrender to so many things outside my control, they are legion. I cannot control what people think of me, or how they plan on engaging with me. If someone wishes me harm, it's unknowable. It's surrender not to those things but to the fact that you'll lose your mind if you worry, obsess, or try to change them.

"To accept the things I cannot change..."

It's a clever little saying, nice internal rhythm. I cannot take back the fact of my birth. It's irrevocable. All I have now is the prospect of indeterminate years remaining. I cannot change harm I've done, I can't truly make amends. Pain never goes away. This knowledge feels so heavy. So dense. I have always been so prone to shame, often for no discernible reason. 

"Courage to change the things I can..."

I know I'm not a coward. I've been tested enough to know that. There are different kinds of situations and they require different kinds of courage. But to change what I know, or what I've known, is something other than scary: it's fundamental. Courage is what you do when you're afraid. 

"And the wisdom to know the difference."

Maybe it's a matter of scale. The bigger the thing, the less likely you can change it. It's easier to push a squirrel than an elephant, but then again squirrels are super fast. But the elephant could kill you. The squirrel could, too, if it were rabid. So, there's always risk and danger. It seems unfair. 

In the final scene of Angels in America by Tony Kushner, the characters are sitting around the statue of Bethesda in Central Park. It's January 1990. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The characters, sounding more like pundits than living people, wonder aloud what all of this means. The excitement, the uncertainty of Russia's future and the future of the former Soviet bloc. 

Looking back on the scene, reading it now, I realize they also discuss Israel and Palestine. The hope for true Palestinian sovereignty.

It's been 34 years.

Prior, ostensibly the protagonist, has been living with AIDS for five years by the final scene of the play. 

"We won't die secret deaths anymore," he says of people like him who, throughout the 80s did exactly that, died tucked away in corners. We're all capable of secret deaths, not all of us are marginalized but we're all more than willing to hide what's killing us. 

As the other characters ramble in the background about the bright, end-of-history future, Prior turns to the audience:

"You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins."

I used to think that Prior simply meant this literally: more life. More time added to your stay here on Earth. More corporeal existence. But that's not a blessing. It's not extraordinary. The Catholic Church certainly wouldn't recognize it as a miracle.

So, maybe he means life in the figurative sense. Whether you live 25 years or 95, there's less pain, less suffering, more love. Maybe that's what Prior means all those years ago, looking with eager eyes toward the 1990s. We live in such a different space, now. 

But life should still be full, and maybe part of that is knowing the difference between what you can and cannot do.