One Drunk to Another A Daily Reprieve
Watch The Kitchen Table
Illustration · A boarding-house writing table at a window in the English Lakes: six sealed envelopes in a row, a dip pen and an inkwell on a green blotter, and the lake and fells beyond. Not drawn from a photograph.

Daily Reflections · January 6

The Victory of Surrender

The word in today’s title came to AA from the Oxford Group, whose founder dated his own surrender to one afternoon in the English Lake District in 1908.

Today’s reading

The reading for January 6 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 21, near the start of Bill W.’s essay on Step One: two sentences about what admitting defeat turns into.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. Where it starts

    The passage turns the worst admission a drinker can make into a starting point.

    • What did admitting defeat cost you, and what did it give you?
    • Where are you still fighting something you’ve already lost to?

  2. More than the bottle

    The member who wrote the reflection describes giving up a fight with people and circumstances, not only with alcohol.

    • Who or what are you fighting today besides the drinking?
    • What would it look like to stop, just for today?

  3. Writing first

    Read beside the history below: Frank Buchman saw that being wronged hadn’t made him right. This page’s thought is that surrender sometimes looks like an apology.

    • Whom are you waiting for an apology from?
    • What would you write to them, if you wrote first?

Behind the words

An afternoon in Keswick

The word in today’s title isn’t in the Twelve Steps. It came to AA from the Oxford Group, whose members, as AA’s history of Akron puts it, sought a new life by “making a surrender to God.” The Group’s founder dated his own surrender to one afternoon.

In July 1908 Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania, was traveling in Europe and nursing a grudge against six men on the board of the hospice he had run in Philadelphia. At Keswick, in the English Lake District, he wandered one Sunday into a small stone chapel where a woman, the evangelist Jessie Penn-Lewis, was preaching to a congregation of seventeen. As his biographer Garth Lean tells it, her sermon on the Cross reached him as no other ever had.

He saw that he had been wrong to hold on to his ill will, whatever the six had done, and that he was “the seventh wrong man.” He remembered a wave of feeling “following the will to surrender.” Back at the house where he was staying he wrote to each member of the board to ask their forgiveness. One of the letters, dated July 27, 1908, survives in the archives at Mount Airy.

Nearly thirty years later in Akron, the Group’s word was still in use among the first alcoholics: a new man made his surrender, on his knees, before he could go to his first meeting. December 18 tells how that was put to a newcomer. By 1953, when the Twelve and Twelve came out, the practice was long gone, and the idea was the First Step.

More on Buchman’s afternoon: Keswick, in What Not to Do. On how the Group worked on a newcomer: Soul surgery, in What Not to Do.

The afternoon, in order

Frank Buchman’s Sunday at Keswick, July 1908, in the order his biographer Garth Lean gives it. The wording is this page’s.

  1. On a whimAt the Keswick Convention, the speaker he came to hear isn’t there.
  2. The chapelSmall and stone-built, seventeen people, a woman leading the service.
  3. The sermonThe Cross, a subject he had preached on himself, reaches him for the first time.
  4. Six menHe thinks of the board in Philadelphia, and sees himself as one more man in the wrong.
  5. LettersAt his lodging he writes to each of them, asking forgiveness, with the same verse of a hymn at the end.
  6. TeaHe tells the story, and a Cambridge student asks to talk. They walk round the lake.

Threads

Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.

Sources
  • Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. Step One. Page 21, which the reading cites.
  • Garth Lean, Frank Buchman: A Life. Constable, 1985. Chapter 4, “Afternoon in Keswick.” Free to read at frankbuchman.info.
  • Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter V (the Oxford Group) and chapter VIII (the surrender in Akron).
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. January 6 · 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.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/january-6/