In All Our Affairs

Today’s passage is the second half of Step Twelve, as the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, sets the Step at the head of Bill W.’s essay on it. The essay takes the Step a part at a time. First comes the awakening, then carrying the message, where Bill says members find their deepest joy in “a Twelfth Step job well done” and counts seeing to the coffee after a meeting as the same work. Then he comes to the words of today’s title, which he calls “the biggest question yet.” Could members be as patient in their “sometimes deranged family lives” as they were with their group? Could they take the program to work, into the wider world and into their own faith? From there until its closing paragraph, the essay is about those affairs, and they take two-thirds of its words.

The idea is older than the Steps. Bill wrote “Bill’s Story” in 1938, and copies were run off that summer for a money-raising campaign, months before there were Twelve Steps. In it, he wrote that his friend Ebby T. had stressed that he must show the principles at work “in all my affairs,” and above all work with others, as Ebby had worked with him. In the program the early members passed on by word of mouth, as Bill set it down in 1957, helping other alcoholics was the fifth step, and the sixth was a prayer to whatever God they thought there was for “power to practice these precepts.” In the Twelve Steps, written in December 1938, the work with other alcoholics and the practice of the principles end up side by side, in the last Step. The rest of that Step was reworded before the book went to press, and its first half again in later printings, but the words of today’s title read the same in the loan copy of early 1939 as they do today.

Others took the words home. At AA’s International Convention at St. Louis in 1955, its twentieth anniversary, the Al-Anon Family Groups held meetings of their own, and many AA members got their first look at them. As Bill set down what their speakers said, they had once thought the Steps were fine for the alcoholics and not really for them. The change, they said, was mostly in themselves, and it came once they took up the Steps “in daily living, in all our affairs,” alongside others who understood their troubles better than any alcoholic partner could.

Bill kept coming back to the phrase. Looking ahead in the Grapevine in February 1961, he wrote that AA’s truths needn’t change; what could improve was how members lived by them, each on their own, together as AA, and out in the world. They could “constantly step up” their practice, he wrote, everywhere in their lives.

More on the six steps, and the formula Ebby brought to Bill’s kitchen table: Ten cents, in My Sponsor, Ebby. On how Step Twelve read in the loan copy, and the wording that changed in 1941: Having had a spiritual experience, in The Educational Variety. On how the family groups found one another: The Clearing House, in Captain of My Soul.