Carrying the Message

daily gratitude list 3.28.23

I’m grateful for even more Lab weather. I’m grateful for opportunities to use my swanky umbrella. I’m grateful for seeing how things changed your course. I’m grateful for changes of course. I’m grateful for reminders about what matters. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I am thinking there are going to be a lot of May flowers and it’s not even April yet. Is April the cruelest month? Before I launch off on today’s tangent (I’m curious, too), I wanted to make sure I reminded you about the “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, tonight at 7pm.

This is an “open” meeting of AA, meaning that non-alcoholics are invited to “observe.'“ That’s the official AA line, between you and me, if you want to come to the meeting as a non-alcoholic and participate, I’m not going to turn you in to the AA police. Also, if you want to lean back on the back two legs of your chair, I’m not going to give you a hard time about that, either. Tonight, we will be reading about Bill’s fateful dinner with Ebby (question—what did they eat?). You know this is my favorite part of the Book, so I’m sure to be in rare form. Hopefully, you, too!

Since we’re talking about meetings, I’m going to switch into lecture mode a little bit. Your Sponsor (My Sponsor) issues trenchant warnings about the dangers posed by self-righteous anger to alcoholics. And he’s right, a dry, flinty Sauvignon Blanc pairs nicely with all of those angry, resentful, why-don’t-they-see-it-my-way thought clouds scuttling through my head.

Advice noted. Lecture sequence initiated.

I’m going to start by saying I love going to AA meetings. I’ve been to meetings on three continents and tons of cities all over. I’ve been to a clubhouse in Las Vegas with cast-off theater seats bolted to the floor—very comfortable and elegant. I’ve been to meetings in the cramped psychiatric hospital in Baltimore where the Fitzgeralds rehabbed. Me and the Sponsees have the tour de AA (this week’s stop, a meeting actually called “Cadillacs for Everyone.”). There is hope and wisdom and caring, and lots of sobriety, at every meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The Fifth Tradition says:

Each Alcoholics Anonymous Group ought to be a spiritual entity having but one primary purpose—that of carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the unfair and incorrect misperceptions about AA and I think it’s important to speak up about those things.

Because I’m an AA zealot who thinks there is but one true path to sobriety? Ummm, no. I tried basically everything I could before I gave into AA. I latched on to all of those criticisms of AA, the ones you can find everywhere on social media. The humble brag, "AA wasn't for me, I just quit," gave me hope I'd fall off that softer and much easier donkey, instead. The criticisms were like the flotsam and jetsam after the shipwreck and I clung to them to maintain AA-aloofness, to maintain my glorious drinking career.¹ Every time someone pointed out some reason why AA was stupid, I'd nod my head in silent agreement. Of course, that's why I'm not getting it, it's a shitty, old-fashioned program. That also meant I didn't really need to try. The result was already foreordained. Like this time was going to work?

One of the keys to my sobriety was finally seeing how pervasively I tried to control my life, how I thought I could control outcomes, get what I wanted (insert lie here: “What I want is actually best for everyone, but no need to thank me”). That was how my disease expressed itself. It marshals a bunch of different brain assets to create this view of the world, these thinking patterns, wherein I not only could control the world around me, but should. That “should” part was particularly toxic and is what creates a lot of those nasty, sticky resentments.

Bill accurately diagnoses the problem:

Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way…What usually happens? The show doesn’t come off very well.

Big Book, pp. 60-61

Here’s the nugget that perfectly described me and the way I lived when I was drinking:

Is he not a victim of the delusion that he can wrest satisfaction and happiness out of the world if he only manages well?

Big Book, p. 62

That’s the nub of it, isn’t it? Willingness, the tool that makes sobriety possible, is simply conceding the illusion of self-control is, well, an illusion. Once I truthfully conceded that I was not capable of controlling what I thought I could (the entire universe) and when I saw the consequences of leaving the old management team in place, we began a search for a new center of life. For me, it wasn’t an old guy looking like George Burns, or maybe a slightly homeless Santa that came knocking on the door. Contrary to the nightly table prayer we uttered in Iowa City every night, “Lord Jesus” didn’t arrive to claim a dinner spot.² I just became willing to think there might be a different organizing force to the universe, one I didn't understand and probably never would. One that I didn't, couldn't and shouldn't control.

My journey to sobriety involved realizing I couldn’t control things, that there was some greater, as yet undefined power that was actually more instrumental in running the universe than me. It would seem kind of logical that I might also conclude that I shouldn’t be trying to control other people, including going to AA meetings and telling everyone how they should recover; that there was really only one way. That it was somehow my province as an AA members with a bit of sobriety to point out my disdain or scorn for how other people were trying to get sober or had gotten sober.

As to all of the people who criticize AA, I think we have to acknowledge they’re not making up the shitty experiences they describe. The lectures they received. The judgmental, passive aggressive, semi-dismissive shares, the attitudes, the personal views and opinions that get spouted as AA orthodoxy. Almost none of which survives even a not-so-careful read of the Big Book.

I think the fundamental problem is that people think the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is expressed in meetings. It is actually set forth in the pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even in the early years of the movement, Bill realized that a sprawling, decentralized operation like he was creating, required a foundation, a Rosetta Stone, to guide it. Hence, the Big Book came into being. Bill recognized the inherent power and desire of alcoholics to spin things to the satisfaction of their own egos. So he wrote it down.

It troubles me when I go to meetings and see how little of the discussion is guided by the principles set forth in the Book, or when people get it really wrong,³ or worst, people who see meetings as chances to dramatically declaim their own dark views of sobriety. The monologue I heard one night about “how much are you prepared to sacrifice for your sobriety,” was very eloquent, and I like dark stuff, but I wonder what a newcomer would think about that.

And I took a very long time to get here (literally, hahaha), but I think that’s the question that should be asked each and every time before the opening of a mouth at a meeting:

What would a newcomer think about that?

The magic of meetings flows not from descriptions of shitty exes, or cool stories about drinking escapades or lecturing people about the one true path. It’s from sharing our experience, strength and hope in a candid, honest, humble way. Not a self-aggrandizing, “look how much I’ve suffered for my sobriety,” come see the deepness of my soul way. No. Here’s how I did it. When I ran out of hope, here’s what I did. When things finally got too dark, here’s what happened. And look at how much better things are now. Attraction rather than promotion.

Meetings, any kind of emotional support or a helpful community, are very important to the process of recovery. Bill recognized the key to his own sobriety, and now the keystone of the Program he devised, was working with other alcoholics, trying to help them find how to apply the principles of the Big Book to their own lives; how to use the tools and the steps to fashion their own path out of the wilderness. That’s a lovely, beautiful thing.⁴ I’m telling you, it’s about the most meaningful thing you can do as an alcoholic. But it is not telling them what to do or insisting they follow my footsteps exactly.

We’re not tiptoeing out of a minefield; we’re blazing a trail to get the f**k out of here. And it’s not my trail—it’s theirs.

I love AA. I love the people in AA. I think we are at our best when we live the principles set out in the Big Book and share honestly and humbly about how we changed our lives, saved our lives. I think the 5th Tradition doesn’t only confer a primary purpose to “Groups” of alcoholics, I think the 5th tradition compels me, as an alcoholic, to recognize my primary purpose ought to be helping to carry “the message” to the still sick and suffering. Fortunately, I don’t have to spend a lot of time ginning up that message. They helpfully wrote it all down for me.

1. I’m thinking some kind of Admiral Nelson thing at Trafalgar, but there is an odd swirl to the water…

2. We invited him to join us every night, but I always wondered whose dessert he was going to get if he showed up.

3. The guy at a meeting who pointed to the interval between Bill’s diner with Ebby and getting sober at Towns Hospital as the necessary amount of time to work the steps? Ummm the Book and the Steps were published in 1939.

4. Also, it works.