Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Grace changes us and change is painful".”
“Change is the nature of God’s mind, and resistance to it is the source of great pain.”
Between the Bridge and the River (2006)
Variant: Change is the nature of God’s mind, and resistance to it is the source of great pain.
Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
2010s, Address to the United States Congress, Inauguration of the Jubilee Year of Mercy
Niebuhr's preferred form, as declared by his widow
The Serenity Prayer (c. 1942)
Variant: God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
“If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.”
2015, Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney (June 2015)
Context: Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past -- how to break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind -- but, more importantly, an open heart. That’s what I’ve felt this week -- an open heart. That, more than any particular policy or analysis, is what’s called upon right now, I think -- what a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.” That reservoir of goodness. If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.
“We need to change the meat, because we aren’t going to change human nature.”
Quoted in Nathaniel Popper, This Animal Activist Used to Get in Your Face. Now He’s Going After Your Palate. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html, New York Times, March 2019
Source: Costly Grace (1937), p. 45
2015, Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney (June 2015)
Context: For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation. Sporadically, our eyes are open: When eight of our brothers and sisters are cut down in a church basement, 12 in a movie theater, 26 in an elementary school. But I hope we also see the 30 precious lives cut short by gun violence in this country every single day; the countless more whose lives are forever changed -- the survivors crippled, the children traumatized and fearful every day as they walk to school, the husband who will never feel his wife’s warm touch, the entire communities whose grief overflows every time they have to watch what happened to them happen to some other place. The vast majority of Americans -- the majority of gun owners -- want to do something about this. We see that now. And I'm convinced that by acknowledging the pain and loss of others, even as we respect the traditions and ways of life that make up this beloved country -- by making the moral choice to change, we express God’s grace.
