The Serenity Prayer is the popular name of a prayer for peace of mind, written by the American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and first used around 1934. Peter Doppler invokes it when he arrives at the bunker, having resisted the temptation to visit Benni on the night of Mikkel Nielsen's disappearance.
The prayer has many different versions, but all read similarly to this:
- God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
A meditation on the productive use of one's mental energies, similar sentiments can be found in various sayings in different cultures. The prayer was adopted for use by Alcoholics Anonymous is frequently invoked in various self-help and addiction recovery programs. As such, Peter would have been familiar with it even if not devout, from his work as a therapist.
In Germany, the prayer was falsely attributed to 18th-century theologian Friedrich Oetinger. Oetinger was associated with theosophy, a Christian esoteric movement seeking direct knowledge of the universe from occult wisdom, a goal shared by hermeticism.