My AA convictions did not spell the necessary spiritual experience.
I came across this realization again in “We Agnostics.” “If a mere code of morals or better philosophy were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered a long time ago.” I had been treating AA as that very thing—a better philosophy for life. The result was that I had began to suffer from untreated alcoholism. See, I had thought AA was this magic formula. Go to meetings, get involved, read the book and help others. While all those things are vital to access a spiritual experience, those things are not the spiritual experience. Lack of power is my dilemma. AA is a path to power, not the power.
I took an infinite God and restricted him to an A+B=C formula. In essence, I'd made God finite and I got finite results. What a lonely feeling.
I faced the same proposition at nearly five years of sobriety that I did at six months of sobriety. “God either is or he isn't. What was my choice to be?”
Today here I sit at a new beginning. I am on a new journey with a new God of my understanding. The opportunities, I believe, are truly infinite. I will do my best to not turn AA into something it is not—a religion. I can get wrapped up in the principles and rituals of AA and forget the only thing that truly keeps me sober and sane: God. My life depends on a constant contact with him and an infinitely growing relationship.
Jason E.
Greendale, Wisconsin
SECTION TWO
Where Two or More
Are Gathered
In the July 1953 Grapevine, Bill W. reports that when Dr. Bob was preparing his story for the book Alcoholics Anonymous, in 1939, he put one paragraph of the story in italics to emphasize its importance. Speaking of his co-founder, Dr. Bob said, “Of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience.”
That is as clear a definition of an AA meeting as anything could be. Our entire history-making, life-saving program is modeled on that one event: two alcoholics sharing their experience, strength, hope ... and their gift of desperation.
Every day, in every corner of the globe, thousands of similar meetings are held. They may involve many more alcoholics; they may be held under trees or in trailers, church basements, in the rectories of cathedrals or even—as in Las Vegas—in the back rooms of bars. But they are our touchstones, our simple hope. They are the keys to the kingdom of sobriety.
The account that begins this section may very well be one of the most poignant we've ever read, taking the word "meeting" to a sacred new level.
Equally moving is the answer to one member's question: “How do deaf meeting-goers connect at the end of a meeting, when they need their hands to sign the prayer?” “Will you go to any lengths?” demanded the message in all caps on a desperate drinker's computer screen, just in the nick of time. Here's how it feels to stand in your driveway with tears streaming down your cheeks after a hospital stay as cars full of sober people arrive to bring you a surprise meeting. And then we read, “I could not believe that any human being would pick up a stranger and head for a church in a part of the county where neither of them had ever been before. But it happened.”
Here is an impromptu meeting at Ground Zero, and an account of one chairman's “perfect” meeting, ruined, he thought, by an old homeless bum whose message of dignity was powerful enough to change at least one nervous meeting chairman's life.
“Yes.” Dr. Bob might be nodding right about now. “That's exactly what I meant.”
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