Daily Reflections · November 13
Looking Outward
The Big Book’s guide to what to ask for in a morning prayer, and the hospital room where, in Bill W.’s own story, he took it up after a friend’s visit.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 13 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book, page 87, in the chapter “Into Action,” from its pages on Step Eleven.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
Read it at aa.orgYour screen will stay on while Chairing is showing.
Themes and asks
-
Who else it’s for
Today’s passage puts a test to the requests in a morning prayer, and the test looks past the one praying.
- Think of the last thing you asked for, in prayer or just in hope. Who besides you would it help?
- Is there something you keep asking for that would do no one else any good? What would change if it had to?
-
Whose names come up
The member who wrote today’s reflection measures the change since drinking by where their prayers point now: outward.
- When you pray, or lie awake worrying, whose names come up? How often is the name your own?
- Who could you put in your prayers today, even someone you’d rather leave out?
-
The same question at bedtime
A few paragraphs before the passage, among its questions for the review at night, the chapter asks: “Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time?”
- How would you answer that question about yesterday?
- What could you do for someone today that you’d be glad to remember tonight?
-
Their good, not your plan
Read beside today’s passage, Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve adds a caution: even a prayer for someone else can carry your own idea of what they need.
- Is there someone you’ve been praying would change in one particular way?
- What would it be like to wish them well without deciding what that means?
Behind the words
Of use to others
Today’s passage comes from “Into Action,” the sixth chapter of the Big Book, in its pages on Step Eleven. It falls at the end of a morning’s meditation, in the closing prayer, just after the prayer asks to be shown the next step and given what’s needed for it. The sentence right after the passage is an admission: “Many of us have wasted a lot of time doing that and it doesn’t work.” In the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939, the same sentence had kept its distance: “People waste a lot of time doing that, and it doesn’t work.”
The rule was older than the chapter. In his story at the front of the book, Bill W. tells of his last stay in a hospital, which Pass It On places at Towns Hospital in New York in December 1934. There, he writes, he offered himself to God. Then an old schoolmate came to see him: Ebby T., who had sat at his kitchen table that fall with the Oxford Group’s message. They made a list of the people Bill had hurt or resented, and Bill set down what he was to do from then on. “Never was I to pray for myself,” he wrote, except as what he asked “bore on my usefulness to others.” In his story it’s one man’s rule for himself. On page 87 it’s what members do, with “we” where he had written “I.”
Later editions put it to work on a grudge. In “Freedom From Bondage,” one of the stories in today’s Big Book, a woman who came to AA at thirty-three tells of a resentment against her mother that was twenty-five years old. One morning, knowing her “reprieve was running out,” she prayed to be shown how to let it go. That day she came on a magazine article by a clergyman with advice for just that: pray for whoever the grudge is against, and ask that they be given what you’d want for yourself, daily for two weeks, even with no heart in it. “It worked for me then,” she wrote, and it kept on working.
Bill found a catch in praying for others too. His essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, published in 1953, says members form ideas of what God wants for someone else, and pray for exactly that. Such prayers are “fundamentally good acts,” it says, but the one praying can bring to them “a certain amount of presumption and conceit.” AA’s experience, the essay goes on, is to pray that God’s will be done “for others as well as for ourselves.”
More on Ebby’s visits to Towns: Ten cents, in My Sponsor, Ebby. On the night at Towns: The Bedside, in The Little Doctor. On the draft sent out for comment: Loan copy, in By the Carload.
In so many words
The Big Book’s main text sets down five prayers word for word, not counting the blessings that close two chapters. Here they are in the order they come, each with a few of its words and whom it names besides the one praying. Today’s passage, near the end, is marked and not quoted. The words in quotation marks are the book’s.
Step Three“How It Works”
Step Four“How It Works,” on resentment
“How can I be helpful to him?”
NamesGod, and the person who gave offense.
Step Seven“Into Action”
Step Ten“Into Action”
NamesGod alone, and asks nothing for the one praying.
Step ElevenToday“Into Action,” the morning
Today’s passage. Not a prayer in words of its own, but a guide to what to ask for in one.
Step Eleven“Into Action,” through the day
NamesGod alone.
Each names someone besides the one praying: God in all five, and other people in three.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Alcoholics Anonymous (the Big Book). Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “Bill’s Story,” “How It Works,” “Into Action” and, from later editions, “Freedom From Bondage.” Quotations and page numbers follow the fourth edition (the reading cites page 87).
- The pre-publication manuscript of early 1939 (a loan copy), from a transcription. “Into Action.”
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Step Eleven.
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 5 and 6 (Bill’s last stay at Towns Hospital, and Ebby’s visits).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 13 · 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.