I have been going back and reading some of the original stories in the first edition of the BB. You would be right if you guessed that these were hard drinkers and hard bottoms these men went through. As I read, I couldn’t help but notice that the original presentation of the program to these men was pretty blunt. The men, who offered a solution to them, didn’t mince words. They told them their own stories and then immediately started talking about God.
I think it is fortunate for me, when I came in, that I was to find out what I needed gradually. Those “last gaspers” back in the beginning were so desperate that they felt they had no choice but to grab onto what was offered to them. But Bill W. and others were to learn that they were driving many men away with this approach. Bill was later to confess that his conviction that others had to think the way he did was the result of spiritual pride. With the writing of the BB and organizing what had worked for them into the 12 steps, the presentation today is one of a gradual process. Thanks to one of the early members, a then atheist, the words “God as we understood him” came in. A friend of mine often calls them “the five words which saved AA”.
If anything, when I first was introduced to this program, the presentation was like it is in the book. I had to find a higher power and lead a spiritual life or else I was fated to die an alcoholic death. Indeed that got my attention. I might have been numb and dumb from the effects of alcohol on my brain, but I heard those words and I sure didn’t want to go there.
For a long time after that, I went along with the program and gradually began to practice these steps. Though I truly might have been on a “spiritual path”, even back then, I never consciously thought about the meaning of a spiritual life. Not really. I just did it. It only came to me gradually. Slowly I began to become aware. What I had taken for granted began to surface and eventually slapped me in the face.
Maybe this was all because none of us seemed to sit around and talk about it, other than occasionally uttering the words. Maybe it’s because it is such a personal matter. In truth it is up to us to find our own way and the help we need from others to achieve such a way of life. It’s rarely emphasized, other than we have to grow along spiritual lines and have a spiritual awakening. Yet it’s theme runs all through the BB and the rest of the literature of the program.
Prayer and meditation are emphasized as tools to this way of life. In fact, what is so subtle in the BB is more thoroughly defined, when Bill wrote the eleventh step in the 12&12.
Why was I thinking about this today? Because I couldn’t help but think that this is the core, the foundation of what has really kept me sober all this time. Without this I would have truly died an alcoholic death a long time ago. Yet, if you asked me what it was, I would be at a loss for words. I know it’s in the steps. I know it’s in the meetings. I know it’s in working with others. I know it’s in our conversations with others one on one. It is the program on a whole.
And I am grateful for what it is.