this move from admission to acceptance know the enormous weight that rolls from our shoulders when we can stand up and say, “I don’t have to worry about being an alcoholic anymore. It’s just the way I am. Like the color of my eyes.” The alcoholic desperately needs to accept his own alcoholism.
Now there’s another act of acceptance that has to take place, I think, and AA helps with this. The alcoholic has to accept himself. As you think back on your own life, as you think of the alcoholics with whom you’ve talked, haven’t you discovered that all of us have a very naive conception of what it means to be a human being? At an AA meeting, I heard a guy say, “Before I came to AA, I used to be an idealist.” The implication is that once he got into AA he threw all his ideals away. Well, this is not what he meant at all. He meant, “Before I got into AA, I was a Utopian.” A Utopian is one who believes that human beings can be perfect. The speaker thought he could be perfect himself, so other people should be perfect. He found out they weren’t, and so he settled for being a junior-grade cynic.
I often think of this in terms of William Steig’s wonderful cartoon showing a dour old man sitting inside a box, with a caption saying, “People are no damn good.” This is the attitude of many drinking alcoholics: People are no damn good, because they’re not perfect.
AA teaches us the truth about people by letting us rub shoulders with it. For example, the newcomer soon finds out that his sponsor, perhaps idolized at first, puts his pants on one leg at a time—that he’s a human being. The newcomer finds that the finest members still do make mistakes. He reads Step Ten and sees that the AA program isn’t written for Utopians. It’s written for human beings who are going to make mistakes over and over again. We make mistakes; we admit them; we try to clean up the mess we made; and we go on.
Finally, the alcoholic comes to the point where he can accept himself as a human being, with all his strengths and weaknesses—that mixture which we are—and live with himself, and once he is tolerant of himself, he can be tolerant of other people. Now this, I say, is something that happens in AA. I’m convinced it’s a vital part of growing up in AA.
Another of the alcoholic’s needs is pointed out in the AA program strongly and emphatically: the need to accept God as each of us understands him. To somebody like me, born in a preacher’s house, brought up on the Bible and church, it isn’t very difficult to conceive what God is like. But for many alcoholics, it’s a tough row to hoe. When I talk about the Twelve Steps, I counsel newcomers not to be surprised if Steps Two and Three do not happen overnight. We have to work into them and through them. For many of us, God is a somewhat threatening figure. To turn life and will over to a figure like that takes either courage or desperation.
A friend of mine is now about as spiritual-minded a man as I know. I heard him tell an AA group about his first efforts. He said, “I heard these other guys talk about it. I had to stay sober, so I said I’d give it a whirl.’’ In the morning, he told us, he would get up and say, “Oh God, if you’re there, help me stay sober.” At night, when he got home, he’d say, “God, if you’re there, thank you.”
My own feeling is that this is the kind of approach God understands perfectly, and which he welcomes. But that isn’t the end of the story. Hank went on with his prayers until one night, when he said, “Thank you,” he swears he heard the answer, “You’re welcome.” He can’t prove this. But you’ll never make Hank believe it didn’t happen.
Fortunately, AA never discusses theology, never talks about creeds, and never formulates any concept of the nature of the Deity to be forced upon anybody. But, whether we realize it or not, we in AA are practical theologians—we learn by doing. The first inkling comes when we try to understand what AA is talking about in the sign that hangs in countless meeting rooms all over the country—“But for the Grace of God.” New members come to feel that it isn’t just the empty repetition of ritual. When a member stands before a group and says, “I’m here tonight thanks to the grace of God and AA,’’ the first part of that phrase means something. What is it?
He begins to think back. When he first came up that flight of stairs, he didn’t know any of these guys. They didn’t owe him anything. And yet he was welcomed. They did what they could for him; they nurtured him, sustained him, criticized him, told him where he was wrong, told him where he was right. Why? Some people have waited three months for someone in AA to send them a bill. This is natural. The motto of America is “Nothing for nothing. You pay for what you get.” And yet we have been given life, the most precious thing of all, which all the money in the world cannot buy—nor all the intelligence, all the education, all the position.
Why did these AAs do it? I think we all find an unavoidable association between what AA does and the grace of God. AA reflects, in an limited, human sense, the way God works with us. AA people love us when we’re newcomers, not because of what we’ve done, but in spite of it, not because we’ve earned love, but because we need it. And so, I think, comes the final great acceptance of the AA member: the realization that I have been accepted by God—that, when I staggered up those stairs for the first time, God was there waiting for me.
J.L., Santa Fe, N.M.
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