Sometimes the history of AA, those early days, causes me to laugh. How rough and rudimentary those days were. And how blessed we are that all those old timers ironed out the program. We come in and all we have to do is to do what they did. Do what they did, after all the rough spots were taken care of.
Just go and read the story in the BB The Vicious Cycle. When the author describes those early days with Bill, I really had to stop and laugh at what he said. I can just imagine. They had no formal steps in those days. They had to leap ahead and just grab onto a God, not of their understanding, but that of Bill’s. Bill talks about this in The Language of the Heart. How he drove many candidates away with trying to get them to believe as he did.
In fact, you can tell in reading the author of this story that he was on the edge, because of his own prejudices. And Bill for his part makes amends to us all in his description of what he called “spiritual pride”. He said he always regretted doing that.
But as time went on, a very short time in reality, they began to formulate what worked and put it down in the BB we have today. What they had to leap to get, when they first got sober, we get to do gradually through the 12 Steps. They take us to the solution, if we will but work them. The spiritual solution. The awakening, brought about by what the Steps are designed to do for us. Bring us into contact with a higher power, or the God of our understanding.
The BB demonstrates how much Bill had changed in a very short time. When you read the chapter Working With Others, we’re cautioned not to proselytize, teaching others about our concepts, but to let them work their way through to whatever they will believe, as long as it makes sense to them.
AA not only offers us sobriety, through this spiritual solution, but it does it by offering us the freedom to decide for ourselves. If that’s not a solid basis for a spiritual life, I can’t imagine what is.
Anyway, I was thinking about AA’s beginnings and being grateful for all the men and women, who laid the groundwork for what we have today. I thought about what a rough time they had in their striving to stay sober and just what they gave us. Imagine, it was not a comfort zone back in the 1930s. Yet they did it and now we have it. You have to love those early members.
AA did what was necessary. Learning by hard experience. Learning by getting bumps and bruises in the process. Successes and failures. And here we are getting the results. It’s handed to us literally on a silver platter.