aa Spoken Here Community Group
Fellowship Where you can share your thoughts, feelings, stories and get support to gain and continue sobriety.
âDuring the past 12 months we have had quite a number who felt that the fellowship, the helpful attitude toward others, the warming of the heart at social gatherings, was going to be sufficient to overcome the alcoholics obsession. Taking stock at years end, we find that this school of thought has few survivors, for the bottled heat treatment has persuaded them that we must find some sort of spiritual basis for living, else we die. A few, who have worked ardently with other alcoholics on the philosophical, rather than the spiritual plane, now say of themselves âWe believed that Faith without works was dead, but we have now conclusively proved that works without Faith is dead also.â
Bill W.
1940 Letter to Clarence Sâs wife in Cleveland.
Bill W.
1940 Letter to Clarence Sâs wife in Cleveland.
Because before the sequence of events that culminated in Bill Wilson coming into to contact with Dr, Bob Smith, no one had quite stumbled upon the combination of deflation, conversion, and service that basically makes up our program.
You noticed I said "had quite stumbled" upon the combination. In the mid 1800's an Irish drunk named Jerry MacCauley sobered up in Sing Sing Prison via a conversion experience. He drank again upon his release which convinced him that he could never safely drink again and that he had to redouble his spiritual efforts. He founded the Water Street Mission which had great success in sobering up drunks. I believe one of them was named Harry Hadley, whose experience is mentioned in "Varieties Of Religious Experience." His son ran Sam Shoemaker's Calvary Mission, where Ebby was staying when he called on Bill Wilson.
The Salvation Army had some measure of success with alcoholics. They had an actual program and still have one of the more effective not-for-profit long-term residential treatment programs available. There is a book that is still in print called "Twice Born Men," by Harold Begbie. The Big Book was modeled after this book, as it contains The Army's program in the front of the book and testimonies from recovered alcoholics in the back of the book. Then there was The Emanuel Movement, based in Boston. They had some success with alkies as well. And they used a similar combination of medicine and religion to AA. A man named Richard Peabody recovered in The Emanuel Movement and wrote a book called "The Common Sense Of Drinking," which Bill Wilson plagiarized to a great extent in the writing of the Big Book.Peabody helped a man named Courtenay Baylor get sober. Baylor worked with many alcoholics, among them Rowland Hazard in his early sobriety.
Then there is Rowland. He got sober in 1931 or 1932 and became active in The Oxford Groups. He never became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He didn't see the need to because he was already sober.
As far as Alcoholics Anonymous goes, the difference between the "meeting makers make it" philosophy of the New York AA's and the Akron/Cleveland AA's is spelled out in the letter from Bill Wilson to Clarence Snyder's wife wife in January 1940 that comprised the OP that started this thread. The Mid westerners considered meetings important but not vital. More important was the morning quiet time and devotion.
If you polled all the people in AA with 10, or 20 years sober I wonder how many lifetime meetings they'd average? My bet is thousands.
Just a thought..
Ever hear of Matt Talbot? He stayed sober for better than forty years, well before AA ever materialized by practicing his Catholic faith. Good thing he didn't depend on meetings.
I'm not saying don't go to meetings. I've been to thousands of them myself. What I am saying is that where we've gotten off the track is making meetings the answer. A couple of weeks ago A friend & I went to a meeting on a Friday night. There was a guy there who had drank after four years of going to meetings and was mystified as to how that could have happened. The sad thing was that about all they could offer him was "Meetings, meetings, meetings." Offering him the same answer that got him drunk. I sat in hundreds off meetings before I got sober, waiting for something to rub off on me, waiting for the "miracle" to happen. I am so grateful that men I encountered did not offer me sobriety. They did not offer me a meeting. They offered me a way of life.
Speaking of something rubbing off, a few pages ago, someone said something about something rubbing off by attending meetings. It brought to mind one of the better pamphlets put out by G.S.O., "A Member's Eye View Of Alcoholics Anonymous." I'll quote a piece of it here:
There is a widely held belief in A.A. that if a newcomer will simply continue to attend meetings "Something will finally rub off on you." And the implication, of course, is that the something which rubs off will be the so-called miracle of A.A. Now there is no doubt in my mind that many people in A.A. accept this quite literally. I have observed them over the years. They faithfully attend meetings, faithfully waiting for "something to rub off." The fumy thing about it that "something" is rubbing off on them. Death. They sit there week after month after year while spiritual, mental, and physical rigor mortis slowly sets in.
I don't get to many meetings these days although I am an active sponsor and 12 stepper. My home group is a beginners meeting so I have plenty of work to do with newcomers and those people returning from a relapse.
Those who 'make it' do so because in some way they find a way to a spiritual life not because they sit on their butts in meetings believing that is all that's required.
Sitting in meetings does not make you anymore sober than sitting in a garage makes you a car.
Like I said, AA meetings did not get me sober nor did they keep me sober.
If your sobriety depends on going to meetings, I guess you'd best keep going to meetings.
As for me, I recovered by the steps I took not by the meetings I made, to quote Cliff B.
I love that line.
Fellowship is great, but it's not going to keep me sober. Meetings are a great way to hear/share the message, that is one element (sharing the message). IMO if I don't work all 3 sides of the triangle I may be moving in the wrong direction, or at best stagnant, and that opens me up, at some point to a drink. At best, in that scenario I am unsettled.
PEACE
BINGO, BANGO, BONGO.
My favourite is the one when some person who is prevaricating in relation to Step 4 grins inanely and says 'Well, as the Big Book says - 'sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly' and all the sheep baa, because they know no better.
When that 'meeting makers make it' thing gets dragged out in a meeting, it usually means just one thing - the newcomer now believes that meetings are the answer to alcoholism and the person who says it leaves believing they have just carried a message.
I do believe that if tomorrow all the AA meetings closed, I would not get drunk and could stay sober indefinitely because my continued sobriety depends on my spiritual condition, not on AA meetings. There would be plenty of drunks to work with and you know how I would work with them?? Take them through the 12 steps!!