Daily Reflections · December 18
Honesty with Newcomers
In AA’s first years, members put the question of God to newcomers in very different ways, from a hospital bed in Akron to a new group in Philadelphia.
Today’s reading
The reading for December 18 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 93, in “Working with Others,” the chapter on Step Twelve: two short sentences from its advice on a first visit to a newcomer.
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Themes and asks
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Your own story
What the member who wrote the reflection offers a newcomer is the difference in their own life, there to be seen. Advice, as they see it, has never been what gets a drinker sober.
- When someone new asks you a question, do you answer with advice, or with what you did?
- Which changes in your life could someone new see without your pointing them out?
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The part that’s hard to say
The passage asks members to give the spiritual side its full weight with a newcomer, and the member treats that as part of being honest with them.
- Is there a part of your recovery you leave out when you talk to someone new? What makes you leave it out?
- Could you say in two or three sentences what you believe today, in your own words rather than anyone else’s?
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Where it comes from
For the member, an honest picture of sobriety includes where they believe it comes from: a Higher Power’s grace, which they also credit for their being able to help anyone else. Read beside today’s title, honesty might also mean leaving the hard stretches in.
- When someone new asks how you stay sober, what do you tell them it comes from?
- When you tell your story, do the hard stretches stay in, or only how it turned out?
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Their idea, not yours
In the Big Book, the sentences that follow the passage add a limit: a newcomer who doesn’t believe needn’t take on the member’s idea of God. Read beside today’s title, that suggests honesty runs both ways, about what you believe and about what you don’t ask of the other person.
- How do you talk about your Higher Power with someone who doesn’t believe in one?
- Can you tell someone what you believe and leave them free to believe something else?
Behind the words
The Fellow Upstairs
Today’s two sentences come from page 93 of the Big Book, in “Working with Others,” the chapter on Step Twelve. They fall about midway through its advice on a first visit, once the newcomer has heard about the illness from the member’s own experience and is curious to know how the member got well. The next sentences turn to a newcomer who is agnostic or atheist: he “does not have to agree with your conception of God.” Both of today’s sentences read the same in the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939. (December 14 tells of a doctor Bill W. took for an agnostic and tried to convert on the spot.)
In Akron, a newcomer was expected to make a surrender: down on his knees in prayer with older members, at his hospital bed or in an upstairs bedroom at T. Henry Williams’s house, before he could come to a meeting. Clarence S. came over from Cleveland early in 1938. As he remembered it, Dr. Bob sat on the edge of his hospital bed and asked, “Do you believe in God, young fella?” Clarence said he guessed he did. “Guess, nothing! Either you do or you don’t.” Then Dr. Bob had him out of bed and on his knees to pray.
Not everyone in Akron took to it. Bill V. H., a newcomer of 1937, wasn’t keen on the surrender, Akron’s history says: to him it threw the spiritual side straight at the new man, and asked too much of him. By 1939 the emphasis had shifted so far that one newcomer went to several meetings before he and his wife made theirs.
In New York, Jim B., an agnostic who came in in January 1938, sat through the weekly meetings at Bill’s house in Brooklyn while members took turns telling, as he put it, “how God had touched each of us personally on the shoulder.” For his first few months he argued against it at every chance. In February 1940 a good job took him to Philadelphia, and he was soon in a new group there, telling its newcomers about the spiritual side the way New York did. He found “they would not believe me unless I was practicing what I preached.” The more he lived it, the calmer he grew, and coaching newcomers to change, he found, was changing him too.
In Chicago, where members were organizing a group by September 1939, an early member wrote that they mostly fell back on stand-ins like “the Fellow Upstairs” so as not to scare off the agnostics coming in. He remembered Dr. Bob as “the first group leader I heard refer simply and without ostentation to God.”
More on why New York’s drunks wouldn’t take the Oxford Group’s pressure: Team guidance, in What Not to Do. On the fight over God in the book itself: How It Works, in Keep Coming Back. On Jim B.’s first year in New York: A mile long, in Rule 62.
At the bedside in Akron
How Akron put it to a newcomer in the hospital, as members remembered it in Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, in order, with today’s book ringed where it falls. Today’s passage isn’t quoted. The tags and short lines are this page’s.
February 1937Before a meeting
Bob E.
“You couldn’t go to a meeting until you did it.”
On the surrender, made on his knees by the hospital bed, or else upstairs at the Williamses’. He came in that month.
Early 1938Asked outright
Clarence S.
On the visit when Dr. Bob asked whether he believed in God, then had him kneel and pray.
1939Today’s passage
The Big Book
Today’s two sentences, written for every member’s first visit. The ones after them leave the newcomer free to choose his own idea of God.
January 1940The book first
John S.
“he wasn’t making you get out of bed to surrender on your knees”
On Dr. Bob at his bedside, who asked if he had any money, for the book, then came back once he had read it and quizzed him on it.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “Working with Others” (the reading cites page 93; the first visit, and the sentences after the passage) and “The Vicious Cycle,” Jim B.’s story, first printed in the second edition (1955) (New York in 1938, and Philadelphia in 1940).
- The pre-publication manuscript of early 1939 (a loan copy), from a transcription. “Working with Others.”
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter VIII, “The first group forms, in Akron” (Bob E. and the surrender), Chapter XI, “Early meetings and Big Book controversies” (Clarence S., Bill V. H., and the change by 1939), Chapter XIII, “The movement spreads in the Midwest” (Chicago’s group in 1939), Chapter XVII, “‘As Dr. Bob said …’” (the early Chicago member) and Chapter XXII, “Oldtimers’ impressions of Dr. Bob” (John S. in January 1940).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 18 · aa.org
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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.