At Peace with Life

Today’s two sentences come from page 85 of the Big Book, in “Into Action,” near the end of its pages on Step Ten. The sentence before them is November 16’s, the one A Daily Reprieve is named for, and today’s lines say what that reprieve asks of each day. The paragraph then ends on the will. Members can use all the willpower they wish along this line, it says, and: “It is the proper use of the will.” The book leaves no day out, and the reading falls on December 25. AA’s books tell how that day went in a few of its years.

In 1930 it went badly. Bill W. and Lois W. had come back from Montreal with no money to her parents’ house in Brooklyn, where her mother was ill with cancer. “Mother died on Christmas Day, 1930,” Lois wrote. “Bill was drunk then and for days before and after.” Pass It On, AA’s biography of Bill, tells it the same way, as a sign of how far out of control his drinking had gone. Four years later Bill left Towns Hospital in New York on December 18, 1934, after the stay his sobriety dates from. Christmas came a week later.

In 1949 the day shows up in two places. In Akron, Dr. Bob S. had lost his wife, Anne, that June, and Sister Ignatia, who had admitted alcoholics with him at St. Thomas Hospital for ten years, had written to him. He answered on Christmas Eve: “for my rare privilege of knowing you, I feel most humbly grateful.” His last visit to the ward came about then, Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers says, perhaps on Christmas Day, when she played the organ for him and showed him the hospital’s new chimes. He died the next November. In New York, Bill dated a letter to Dr. William D. Silkworth December 25, 1949, fifteen years after the doctor had told him at Towns that he wasn’t hallucinating. He called it “a letter of appreciation from Lois and me.”

At AA’s office in New York, Christmas had a custom. Nell Wing, who came to work there in March 1947 and was later Bill’s secretary, remembered the parties of her first years: carols, gifts with Bill as Santa, and records for dancing. The high point came when Bill leaned back in his chair in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets, and the staff sat on the floor to hear him tell how AA began, which he called his “bedtime story.”

Bill also sent the fellowship a short greeting in the Grapevine at Christmas. The one for December 1970 was his last piece in the magazine, the editors of The Language of the Heart note; he died on January 24, 1971. It runs to four sentences. It opens on gratitude and counts “our blessings of life, of service, of love.” Its third has the word in today’s title: in troubled times, he wrote, AA’s members had been able to find “an always increasing measure of peace within ourselves.”

More on Christmas 1930 and the years Lois waited: Everlastingly trying, in Captain of My Soul. On Dr. Bob, Sister Ignatia and their last Christmas on the ward: The flower room, in I Just Work Here. On the night Bill’s letter thanked Dr. Silkworth for: The bedside, in The Little Doctor.