Daily Reflections · December 14
Reaching Out
Bill W. once set out to convert a doctor he took for an agnostic, and three years later learned what kind of man he had lectured.
Today’s reading
The reading for December 14 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 95, in “Working with Others,” the chapter for the member carrying the message: two sentences from its advice on a first visit with a newcomer.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
Read it at aa.orgYour screen will stay on while Chairing is showing.
Themes and asks
-
No high ground
The passage is about where the helper stands, and about who decides what’s worth taking. As this page reads it, the newcomer does.
- When you talk with someone new, how much of it is what you did, and how much is what they ought to do?
- What could you be standing on without knowing it: your years, your service, your beliefs?
-
A hard look
The member who wrote the reflection doesn’t take their own attitude for granted. They turn the passage into questions about how they see newcomers, and treat each new face as a reason to ask them again.
- Which newcomer did you last decide wouldn’t make it, and on what grounds?
- Has time sober made you easier to talk to, or harder?
-
Someone met you
The member who wrote the reflection ties the duty to reach out to their own first days in AA, when someone befriended them.
- Who first sat down with you in AA, and what did they do that brought you back?
- Who is new at your meeting that no one has really talked with yet?
-
Who teaches whom
The history below tells of a doctor Bill W. took for an unbeliever and tried to convert, and who, Bill learned later, had lived a life he doubted he could ever match. Read beside today’s passage, it suggests that the person you’re tempted to instruct may have something to show you.
- Who have you tried to set straight, about God or about AA, who might have had something to teach you?
- When did someone’s example do more for you than their advice?
Behind the words
Do as I do
Today’s passage is on page 95 of the Big Book, in “Working with Others,” the chapter the book gives to Step Twelve. It comes near the end of the chapter’s advice on a first visit: don’t stay too long, let the newcomer steer the talk, don’t hurry him. (October 31 reads the same lines beside Tradition Ten, and tells of the six months Bill W. spent preaching to drunks who didn’t stay sober.)
Bill kept finding the high ground in himself. In April 1961, writing in the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, he told a story against himself from not long after his own spiritual experience. Visiting a friend in a Midwestern city, he met a doctor and the doctor’s wife, Mary, and talked of nothing but his fellowship of alcoholics. One of the doctor’s questions made Bill suspect he was an agnostic, perhaps an atheist, and Bill set out to convert him then and there, boasting of what had happened to him.
The doctor stayed courteous, and asked mildly whether the experience might have been something other than Bill thought. Stung, Bill was rude, though the doctor had given him no cause, and convinced him of nothing. Three years later, back in the same city, he heard from Mary that her husband had died the week before. She told him of a Harvard man from a well-known Boston family who had stayed on as a company doctor in a troubled industrial town because, he said, the people at the company needed him, and who had hidden a heart condition from nearly everyone for years so that no one would worry about him. “This was the man I had chided and patronized,” Bill wrote.
Hearing it, he wrote, he saw that he had boasted of his faith and forgotten his ideals, and so had had little to give the alcoholics he was trying to help. Many had gone away, some for good. The same article reckoned that some three hundred thousand had recovered in AA’s twenty-five years, and that perhaps half a million more had come in and walked out again. A great many of them, Bill thought, may not have had the sponsorship they needed, and AA had failed them. He set down one recent first meeting as a warning.
More on Bill’s first months of preaching to drunks, and Dr. William D. Silkworth’s advice: Stop preaching, in The Little Doctor. On the evening in Akron when he told his own story instead: The gate lodge, in I Just Work Here. On the 1961 article and AA’s long argument over God: Good for God, in Suggestions Only.
Three speakers
The meeting as Bill W. told it in April 1961, speaker by speaker. He called it recent, and didn’t say where it was. The tags and short lines are this page’s.
First speakerTold his story
His own drinking, and how it went.
The newcomerSeemed impressed.
Second speakerLectured
God as he understood him.
BillThe subject could have done good, he wrote. It didn’t, because of the way the two of them told it.
Third speakerLectured
The same, then went far overboard on his own beliefs about God.
Bill“They did ooze arrogance.” The two of them, he wrote, were doing just what he had done years before.
Afterward The newcomer, a tough-minded man at his first AA meeting, said he’d had it. His sponsor insisted that this wasn’t what AA was, but it was too late. The man now had a ready excuse for another binge, and when Bill last heard of him he didn’t seem likely to live long.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “Working with Others” (the reading cites page 95).
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “God As We Understand Him: The Dilemma of No Faith,” April 1961.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 14 · aa.org
Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know
Daily Reflections is AA’s book of readings for every day of the year, each written by a member about a favorite passage from AA’s literature. A Daily Reprieve gives each day questions to sit with and the story behind its words.