For me, serenity is waking early, sitting on the deck, looking across the lake, and watching an eagle soar high in the blue sky. No worries. I've not eaten yet, so weight-guilt is absent. I'm not yet beset by money woes. Still unplugged from the news, I fret not the state of the world. For you serenity may come in other shapes and times: skating, knitting, dancing, listening to sweet music, petting your cat, making love.

Serenity is calmness, a dearth of fret, a great stillness of mind and body.

Serenity feels good, and it's good for you. A web search for "research on health benefits of calmness" brings up many relevant items. An NIH research report reviews ninety-one prior reports and concludes that: "meditation interventions may be effective in promoting good decision making and increasing prosocial behavior." A Harvard site notes that "A number of physiological changes occur during the relaxation response. Heartbeat and breathing slow down, the body uses less oxygen, and blood flows more easily through the circulatory system. Blood lactate levels, which some researchers believe are linked with anxiety attacks, decline markedly." Dr. Kathleen Hall of The Stress Institute, claims that with serenity, "Your blood pressure goes down, your immune system gets a boost, and you slow down the aging process."

Withput serenity, the world is a scary place. If nature doesn't get you with a storm, a fire, or an earthquake, you may get sick, defrauded, or murdered. If you constantly catastrophize, you cannot live a calm life. Your fears will come to paralyze you. You will be miserable. You will be the coward who dies a thousand deaths while the courageous die but once.

Most religions offer some pathway to serenity. Prayer and meditation are almost universal, as are many aids such as kneeling, incense, chanting, and the dance of the whirling dervish. You should feel free to adopt any of these practices that help you. You may want to recite Rheinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the Serenity
      to accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

To understand the serenity precept of the Church of the oly Quantum, we need to delve into the nature of quantum reality. Specifically, the wave-particle duality. This principle states that every particle can behave in some experiments as though it were a wave. Sometimes it's a particle and sometimes it's a wave. We are accustomed to thinking of light as waves and material objects as particle. But if everything is a wave, there are no material objects. Hence the CQ precept,

It does not matter.

Whenever calamity strikes, it may help to remember this precept, "It does not matter." Consider the calamity from the perspective of others, or those at a distance in space or time. In a hundred years hence or a hundred miles away, who will even know or care. Can you perhaps bring yourself to imagine a time when you will be able to laugh about it?

But, some events do matter. Then you may need to rely on the solace offered by your other religion. You can believe an assailant is destined to Hell or will be reincarnated as a banana slug.

As in any religion, your fellow congregants are there to be with you. Just to hear what you want to say. Or to listen very carefully and quietly while you say nothing. They must remember that it is not necessary to speak to someone needing solace. You most certainly should NOT remind them that, "It does not matter." If you absolutely must say something, follow the sorts of advice you can get by web-searching for something like, "Solace for grief."