Throwback Thursday AA history post - In honor of Women's History Month, a talk by Nell Wing, Bill W.'s secretary and witness to early AA events:
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Spiritual thoughts for the week: March 28 There are two things that we must have if we are going to change our way of life. One is faith, the confidence in things unseen, the fundamental goodness and purpose in the universe. The other is obedience: that is, living according to our faith, living each day as we believe that God wants us to live, with gratitude, humility, honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Faith and obedience, these two, will give us all the strength we need to overcome sin and temptation and to live a new and more abundant life. 24 Hours a Day March 29 I must live in the world and yet live apart with God. I can go forth from my secret times of communion with God to the work of the world. To get the spiritual strength I need, my inner life must be lived apart from the world. I must wear the world as a loose garment. Nothing in the world should seriously upset me, as long as my inner life is lived with God. All successful living arises from this inner life. 24 Hours...
Tuesday AA literature/history post - from William Schaberg's Writing The Big Book: Chapter 25 "Working With Others": Step Twelve Bill concludes the chapter ["Into Action" - Jim B.] by returning to one of his constant refrains throughout the discussion of the Steps. "But that is not all," he says. "There is action and more action. 'Faith without works is dead.' What works? We shall treat them in the next chapter which is entirely devoted to step twelve." [This is from an early draft - Jim B.] In fulfillment of this promise, Wilson then took the already-written chapter, "Working With Others," and positioned it directly after "Into Action." He did this despite the fact that what he had written earlier focused almost exclusively on the middle part of the Twelfth Step ("we tried to carry this message to alcoholics") while completely ignoring the opening and closing requirements of the step ("havin...
Spiritual thoughts for the week: March 21 All is fundamentally well. That does not mean that all is well on the surface of things. But it does mean that God's in His heaven and that He has a purpose for the world, which will eventually work out when enough human beings are willing to follow His way. "Wearing the world as a loose garment" means not being upset by the surface wrongness of things, but feeling deeply secure in the fundamental goodness and purpose in the universe. 24 Hours a Day March 23 THE POOR IN SPIRIT Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3) To be poor in spirit means to have emptied yourself of all desire to exercise personal self-will, and, what is just as important, to have renounced all preconceived opinions in the wholehearted search for God. It means to be willing to set aside your present habits of thought, your present views and prejudices, your present way of life if necessary; to jettison, in fact, an...
From our online AA literature study guide at AA Book Club.org , a Big Book topic for meditation or discussion. For background, follow this link: AA Book Club.org - Big Book Topics Whistling in the Dark Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks--drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic chan...
Spiritual thoughts for the week: March 12 Simplicity is the keynote of a good life. Life can become complicated if you let it be so. You can be swamped by difficulties if you let them take up too much of your time. Every difficulty can be either solved or ignored and something better substituted for it. Love the humble things of life. Reverence the simple things. Your standard must never be the world's standard of wealth and power. 24 Hours a Day March 16 I must have singleness of purpose to do my part in God's work. I must not let material distractions interfere with my job of improving personal relationships. It is easy to become distracted by material affairs, so that I lose my singleness of purpose. I do not have time to be concerned about the multifarious concerns of the world. I must concentrate and specialize on what I can do best. 24 Hours a Day March 16 LETTER OR SPIRIT Jesus made a special point of discouraging the laying of emphasis upon outer observances; ...
Spiritual thoughts for the week: March 5 Fear is the curse of the world. Many are our fears. Fear is everywhere. I must fight fear as I would a plague. I must turn it out of my life. There is no room for fear in the heart in which God dwells. Fear cannot exist where true love is or where faith abides. So I must have no fear. Fear destroys hope and hope is necessary for all of humanity. 24 Hours a Day March 6 OPEN YOUR MIND Have you an open mind? Is the window of your soul open for fresh air and the sunshine of Truth to come in, or is it closed and shuttered by mental laziness or the emotional congestion that we call prejudice? None of us knows how many fine things we have missed through being self-satisfied and cocksure. No one can be considered really intelligent who does not have a readiness to examine new ideas with an open mind. Around the Year with Emmet Fox (Excerpt) March 8 The joy of true fellowship shall be mine in full measure. I will revel in the joy of real fell...
Two years of AA Book Club Blog!! Throwback Thursday AA History/Literature post - From William Schaberg's Writing The Big Book, how the Big Book became more suggestive and less dogmatic: Chapter 29 Promoting and Editing the Multilith Copy Significant Contributions from Dr. Howard By far the most comprehensive changes to the book were suggested by a man who is identified only as "Dr. Howard," a New Jersey psychiatrist who was given a Multilith Copy to review. After reading it, the doctor was "greatly interested and enthusiastic," but he had a number of significant criticisms to offer. Most especially, he insisted that the tone of the book was far too dogmatic and directive. "His idea," Bill says, "was to remove all forms of coercion, to put our fellowship on a 'we ought' basis instead of a 'you must' basis." Doing so would mean the entire front half of the book would have to be reedited, page-by-page, taking out all ...