We Are Not Saints
One man’s opinion?
Believe it or not, it may be that the oldtimers, perhaps even the founders, were the first to sugarcoat recovery because of FEAR!
Once again, from Gresham’s Law;
“This audacious blueprint for life change was drawn up in 1939 by a former dead-end drunk serving as spokesman for an unknown, unproven society of 100 reformed problem drinkers, many of whom were still in the relatively early stages of recovery from alcohol addiction.
Yet for all their boldness of scope, the Steps are so plainly worded, and so well-explained in chapters five and following of ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ the AA ‘Big Book,’ that they can be done by anyone. And, therein lies their greatest genius. There is no prior requirement of purity of life or advancement of learning. Just a willingness to admit personal defeat and a sincere desire to change.
The Twelve Steps sharply contradict the secular psychological axiom that where the level of performance is low you must set a low level of aspiration in order to gain a positive result in life. By this view, the proper approach for the early AAs would have been to put together a program aimed certainly no higher than alcohol abstinence and a return to life as it had been in the pre-alcoholic days, life as ordinary men and women of the world. But these newly-sobered-up drunks set out to become totally committed men and women of God.
The authors of the Big Book knew that this radical recovery plan was apt to jar many of the newcomers they were trying to reach with their message and they made two moves to sugarcoat their pill. First, they put the following disclaimer immediately after listing the Twelve Steps in chapter five: ‘Many of us exclaimed, I can’t go through with it. Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.’
That short paragraph was a stroke of inspiration, especially the phrase, ‘We are not saints.’ It has eased thousands of new, half-convinced AA members (myself included) [the author of this piece] past the fact that we were headed, under the guidance of the Steps, in the completely unfamiliar direction of spiritual perfection.”
I’ve spent some time inside my own head this morning and another “saying” I haven’t heard for forever is “If you don’t do a thorough and fearless fourth Step you are doomed to drink again!”
No, what I hear today is a little pat on the back to a slipper along with something like “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. Let’s have a first Step meeting.”
Our way got us drunk - it will succeed at that again if we don’t stop trying to re-write the program of recovery for the sake of our own egos!
Tags: aa, alcoholics_anonymous, Recovery, twelve_stepsRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Did You Know, Experience, Strength and Hope, Reality
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