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Made a Decision

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                                                  AA History 101

It's so easy for us to take AA for granted and forget that it's one of the most amazing societies ever established. 

There's a political axiom that states, "Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it," and without an understanding of what AA's founders did for us we could still so easily lose it.

What? 

AA is a worldwide organization. Everyone, even non-members, know that it works and works well. How could it ever come to an end? AA could end the same way our bodies, groups, religions, or democracies end - when people ignore the signs that dis-ease is setting in and do nothing to try and save it.

In my children's lifetime the women of Iran could go to the beach wearing the modern one-piece and two-piece bathing suits of that time. None on those carefree beach days could have imagined they would soon legally not be able to go anywhere unless covered from head to toe; that their secular country would become an extremist Islamic state.

How easily - and quickly - freedom can be lost!

When I don't vote in an election I disrespect all the women who suffered, even died, that I might be able to vote. And when I am not willing to give back what was so freely given to me by those who pioneered our fellowship, the same applies.

When enough of us let others do all group and 12-step work, or can't be bothered to accept any service positions, or don't take time to study our literature, or work the steps, or sponsor others ... we not only put our sobriety at risk, we threaten AA's very survival.

There are some terrific books out there about AA's history beyond what's in our Big Book, including "Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers;" "Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age;" "Not God: a History of Alcoholics Anonymous;" the "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions," and many more. 

Have a google. You're sure to find a title to interest you. You'll also get more than a few chuckles and lots of identification with our earliest members when you read any of them. 

You'll learn that our personal escape hatch from hell began in June, 1935, when two late-stage alcoholics first met and shared their drinking experiences with one another. One was the New York stockbroker we know as Bill W. The other, Dr. Bob, was a physician in Akron Ohio.

Six months before that fateful meeting, Bill W., sobering up from yet another near-fatal binge, had a sudden spiritual experience following a conversation with a one-time drinking buddy who had become sober after joining The Oxford Group. 

Many alcoholics before AA began had been helped in that Christian fellowship which offered a pattern for living similar to the 12-steps. Bill and his wife, Lois, soon became members, but broke with the group in 1937. (Or as Lois put it, they were "kicked out" for focusing too much on alcoholism and not enough on Christ.).

Bill was also helped by Dr. William D. Silkworth, a New York doctor who was able to convince Bill of the deadly nature of Bill's alcoholic obsession for drink, and then for urging him to rely on a spiritual force to help him. 

Silkworth wasn't part of the Oxford Group, but he was convinced they were right about a need for a moral inventory, confession of past wrongs, making amends to those harmed, service to others, and the need for a belief and reliance in God.

When just a few months sober Bill was stricken with a powerful urge to drink while on a business trip in Ohio. While struggling to not give into that craving he had the sudden thought that he needed another alcoholic to talk with - and that the other alcoholic also needed him! 

A series of rapid Godshots later found him talking with Dr. Bob, who had himself been trying desperately to stop drinking. Bill shared with him his experience, strength and hope seated at the doctor's kitchen table and AA was born. So AA actually began with sponsorship when Bill carried the message to Dr. Bob.

The doctor in turn sponsored countless other drunks in his effort to safeguard his own sobriety. He found his only relief from his obsessive drinking-thoughts (they lasted for several years after his putting "the plug in the jug") came when he was carrying the message of recovery to others.

Our two founders - fearful that what they had so wonderfully found might just as easily easily slip away, threw themselves day and night into building a fellowship of other drunks around them. 

They took detoxing boozers into their own homes to dry them out. They held meetings in their living rooms. They made calls on alcoholics in hospitals or locked in mental hospitals and jails. They non-stop walked the walk and talked the talk of apostles to anyone in need of AA's message. Their wives helped the partners and children of the alcoholics they helped, so the program of AlAnon grew right along with AA. 

Medical help was on their side, too. Dr. Bob had hospital access and a friendship there with a nurse who became another early influence in the growing AA program, the Catholic nun Sister Ignatia. Although neither of our founders were Roman Catholic, both were Christians with an ever-strengthening faith in God as they saw the many miracles daily happening around them. 

Sister Ignatia supported their efforts with her own practical faith. She also knew Dr. Bob shared her reliance on God, noting, "Some people who were on the program for a length of time would come up to him and say, 'I don't get the spiritual angle.' And I heard him say time and again, 'There is no spiritual angle. It's a spiritual program'."

But Bill W. and Dr. Bob also knew their audience. They knew the resistance many alcoholics had to believing there even was a God, much less a God who would help and not condemn them. Many of those early members were dead set against religion of any kind, although most were open (with reservations and suspicions) to the concept of spirituality.  

The "God idea" became a real struggle between AA earliest members during the writing of our Big Book. The problem, they said, was that even those with faith also had backgrounds in differing theologies, so how could everyone in AA possibly agree regarding religion?

Then Bill proposed to them the concept spoken by his old drinking-buddy-turned-sober during their own earlier life-changing conversation: "Why don't you choose your own conception of God?" Slowly, the heads around the table nodded.

That phrase became "God as you understand Him," and AA's key sales pitch for seeking a spiritual life to stop drinking was soon adopted. 

The word God (or words meaning God) is found 281 times in the first 164 pages of the Big Book. Our Founders gave God full credit for their own recovery. They were strongly influenced in this by the teachings of an Episcopal clergyman, Sam Shoemaker. 

It was Dr. Silkworth who gave AA important knowledge about alcoholism as an illness, but it was Shoemaker who offered our Founders knowledge of what could be done to recover from it. His teachings helped form AA's core program as embodied in our 12 steps.

Or, as it was expressed in the book Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (pgs 38 & 39) - One showed us the mysteries of the lock that held us in prison; the other passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated.

There were money struggles in the beginning, too. While some members dreamed big dreams of establishing AA treatment centers, hospitals and even AA communities. Others, suffering from regret over money they had once wasted on booze, fought to keep expenditures and ambitions to the minimum.

Many upheavals over money attended AA's early days until eventually our Traditions got hammered out and adopted. For those interested, just read the section about the Traditions in our 12 & 12, and then go on to some of the other books listed earlier.

During and right after World War II, Dr. Bob and Bill W. continued their virtually non-stop work to keep AA going and growing. They wrote many letters to one another during that time with messages like this one: 

We must think deeply of all those sick ones still to come to A.A. As they try to make their return to faith and to life, we want them to find everything in A.A. that we have found, and yet more, if that be possible. 

No care, no vigilance, no effort to preserve A.A.'s constant effectiveness and spiritual strength will ever be too great to hold us in full readiness for the day of their homecoming.

AA's founders finally started to relax a bit about AA's ability to survive in the 1950s. In a letter at that time one wrote: 

It seems proved that A.A. can stand on its own feet anywhere and under any conditions. It has outgrown any dependence it might once have had upon the personalities or efforts of a few of the older members like me. New, able, and vigorous people keep coming to the surface, turning up where they are needed. Besides, A.A. has reached enough spiritual maturity to know that its final dependence is upon God.

AA has since survived many challenges and changes like its influx of women and drug addicts in the 1970s and 1980s, people sentenced to attend meetings by the courts in the 1980s and 1990s, younger and younger members arriving in the early 2000 years, and the rapid leap from in-person to Zoom meetings during the recent (continuing) worldwide Covid pandemic. 

All these have rocked AA's boat, some quite violently, but our  adherence to our Traditions has kept us safe. Unity and service keep AA together. Without it we lose our focus and our ability to fulfill our primary purpose of helping those still suffering alcoholics. 

Or as Bill W. himself once said: 

 The Oxford group wanted to save the world and I only wanted to save drunks.

Long may Bill's goal continue. 

Do your part!