Fear is a corrosive emotion, which has dominated and run our thoughts and lives. Most of us have had moments of this in our lives. Particularly our sober lives, when we have no longer the “comfort” of drink to drown these feelings. In fact, most of us can remember when drink no longer took fear away, but magnified it ten fold.
Bill talks about fear a number of times in our literature and in letters. He particularly wrote about self centered fear and its effects on our defects. This self centered fear he describes as especially dangerous, because he says it eats away at the very foundation of the lives we’re trying to build. Fear that can cause pride to take over our lives. Pride followed by anger, jealousy, greed, lust, and the rest of the deadly sins, which can pull us down and take away the freedom we have found through this program.
Yet in the end, Bill admits we may never truly free of fear. We’ll always have some fear. In a sense, it is normal to have certain fears.
Centuries ago, a man wrote a letter, stating the cure for our fears. Most of us have been told that fear can be eliminated or at least limited in its effects by faith. This man said no. It’s not faith, which conquers fear, but love. What kind of love can do this? The very kind of love we learn in this program. The love we have begun to have for our Higher Power, which springs from the gift He has given us. Freedom from alcohol. This program and the people, who have enabled us to achieve and maintain this precious gift.
The gift of love, this man wrote about comes from God’s love for us. He wrote the reason we should love God is because God loved us first. And those of us, fortuanate enough to have achieved sobriety, know we have to have gratitude to the God of our understanding for what He has done for us. This gratitude, when turned into action, is just that; an act of love for the One, who has empowered us, not just to be sober by abstinence alone, but also by being able to live and enjoy a full life, once denied us by our obsession with alcohol.
More practically we experience this love by expressing it with the act of self forgetting in working with another alcoholic like ourselves. By reaching out and giving away what was so freely given to us. We have seen that kind of love expressed in the actions of our founders and all, who helped establish this program. We have experienced it first hand in those, who so generously offered the hand of hope and help to each of us. And everytime we extend our hand to another suffering alcoholic, be he new or an old timer, we express this love ourselves. We truly have the joy of living, which stops the effects of our fears.
One sainted lady once said, “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing afright you. All things come from God. Without God there is nothing.” I have thought about her words through the years and have let them comfort me in stressful times.
Tonight we read the story of the man, who established AA in Canada. His final words in telling his story was about putting his hand in the hand of God. My sponsor told me much the same.
There was much talk of feelings and emotions tonight. Fear was a dominant thread. That’s why I took time to think about this.