Daily Reflections · December 28
Suit Up and Show Up
From 1944 on, Bill W. kept reaching for one word for what a sober alcoholic gets back: citizen.
Today’s reading
The reading for December 28 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from As Bill Sees It, page 21, the 1967 book of short readings from Bill W.’s letters, talks and articles.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
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Themes and asks
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Dressed and there
The member who wrote the reflection has made the title’s old AA saying a rule of their own, and treats it as a choice that comes round again every morning.
- Which morning this month did you nearly stay home? What got you out the door?
- Where do you turn up in body while the rest of you stays away?
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What you said you’d do
The member ties showing up to two ordinary things: keeping your word to a group, and how you treat the person who is new.
- What have you told your group, or one person in it, that you would do? Is it done?
- Who took you at your word early on, before you had earned it?
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Past the meeting-room door
Bill W.’s passage treats work with other alcoholics as where a sober life starts, with a wider world beyond it to go back into. Read beside the history below, he had been saying so since 1944.
- Outside AA, who is counting on you to be somewhere this week: at work, at home, on your street?
- What part of ordinary life are you still putting off until you feel ready?
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Let back in
The passage has the turning away run in both directions, the drinker’s and everyone else’s. Read beside the history below, Bill told the St. Louis convention in 1955 that the second had been mended. This page reads that as something each member finds out one door at a time.
- Where were you no longer welcome when you were drinking? Which of those doors has opened since?
- Which door is still yours to knock on, and what would you wear to it?
Behind the words
Citizens again
Today’s passage turns on a word Bill W. had been using for years. In October 1944 the Grapevine, AA’s magazine, was in its fifth month, and Bill’s article in it was called “A Date with Destiny.” Doctors, clergy, employers and teachers, he wrote, had begun to hope that AA’s members would put what had happened to them to use well beyond AA. “Yes, we are again citizens,” he wrote. What they had come back to was no easy place: “It is a distraught world, very tired, very uncertain.”
He had someone in mind. E. M. Jellinek of Yale had come asking for AA members’ help in teaching the public about alcoholism, and Marty M. had just become executive director of the new National Committee for Education on Alcoholism. AA would stay her avocation, Bill wrote, and educating the public would be her vocation. She had asked her AA friends whether the job made her a professional. Not unless she sold AA itself to alcoholics at so much a customer, they told her.
By March 1947 he was drawing the line more carefully. In “Dangers in Linking AA to Other Projects” he wrote that no group, and not AA as a whole, should take up any other activity, or lend AA’s name to one. But for members to do nothing had become unthinkable to him. “AA must come first,” he wrote, but “we are also citizens” of something larger. Those who answered a call from another field were to go as individuals, keep their anonymity in the press, and leave AA out of any appeal for money.
In 1953 the word went into the Twelve and Twelve twice. Its essay on Step Twelve counts among the rewards of carrying the message the sight of “the alcoholic outcast received back into his community in full citizenship,” and its essay on Tradition Ten leaves each member free to act on the issues of the day while AA itself takes no side. On July 3, 1955, at the International Convention in St. Louis, Bill read the resolution that handed AA’s affairs over to its General Service Conference, and then gave his last talk of the weekend. As AA Comes of Age printed it in 1957, he warned AA against thinking itself a cure-all, and then turned the warning round: “Let our individual members heed the call to every field of human endeavor.” His reason was the old one. God had saved them from alcoholism, he said, and “the world has received us back into its citizenship.”
More on Marty M.’s committee, Yale’s backing and AA’s alarm at her name in the papers: Something useful, in People Like You. On Bill’s own years after the handover: Mr. Anonymous, in Number One Man.
The word, year by year
Six of the times Bill W. set the word down, in order, with the word highlighted and today’s book framed. The short lines are this page’s, apart from the quotations.
- 1944
- 1947
- 1948
- 1953
- 1955
- 1967
As Bill Sees It Today’s book
Page 21 has today’s passage, where the word turns up once more. It isn’t reprinted here; the button above opens it at aa.org.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- As Bill Sees It. AA World Services, 1967, first published as The A.A. Way of Life. Page 21, which the reading cites.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “A Date with Destiny,” October 1944 (Jellinek’s request, Marty M.’s new job and her friends’ answer); “Dangers in Linking AA to Other Projects,” March 1947 (what members could do as individuals, and on what terms); and “Tradition Seven,” June 1948.
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essays on Step Twelve and Tradition Ten.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Four o’clock Sunday Afternoon” (the handover and Bill’s last talk at St. Louis, July 3, 1955).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. December 28 · 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.