Daily Reflections · November 15
Vital Sustenance
A saying about prayer that Bill W. quoted twice without naming who said it, the soul’s three needs beside the body’s, and a question he gave members to ask themselves in 1960.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 15 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 97, about a page into Bill W.’s essay 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
-
Not an extra
Today’s passage speaks in the voice of people who pray every day, and it puts prayer and meditation among the things a person lives on. The paragraphs before it admit that members often treat them as optional.
- When you go a few days without prayer or quiet time, what shows it first: your mood, your temper, your judgment, your sleep?
- Where in your day could it have a set place, the way meals do?
-
Saved for emergencies
The paragraphs just before the passage, in Bill W.’s essay, own up to the ways members put prayer off: busy with other things, keeping it for an emergency, leaving it to clergymen, or arguing against it until they finally gave it a try.
- Do you pray mostly when something has gone wrong? What happens to the habit when things are going well?
- If you doubt that prayer does anything, what would a fair trial look like, and how long would you give it?
-
Found in people
For the member who wrote today’s reflection, the Step needn’t be a big undertaking. Their way into it is the people they meet in an ordinary day, and the small ways they treat them.
- Who will you deal with today, at home, at work or in line at the store, and how could the way you treat one of them be part of your prayer?
- Who do you find it hard to see any good in? What could you look for in them today?
-
Just enough?
Read beside today’s title, a question Bill W. gave members to ask themselves in 1960 suggests a test: whether you’re taking in enough to grow on, or just enough to stay sober.
- Are you getting enough to grow on these days, or just enough to get by?
- What would one more helping look like this week: five more minutes of quiet, a page of reading, a call to someone further along?
Behind the words
Tried it enough
Today’s passage comes about a page into Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. The essay begins by admitting that members often slight the Step. Busy with their new lives and with helping the next alcoholic, they may treat prayer as something for an occasional emergency, or as “a somewhat mysterious skill of clergymen.” To some newcomers, and to one-time agnostics who still lean on the group as their higher power, the claims made for prayer may sound “unconvincing or quite objectionable,” and the writers remember feeling the same, with logic of their own against any God at all, or at least one who cared. They had held off, the essay says, the way a scientist might put off a test that could upset his theory, until at last they tried it.
Just before the passage, Bill set down a saying: “almost the only scoffers at prayer are those who never tried it enough.” He said it had been well said, but not by whom. Five years later he used it again. In “Take Step Eleven,” in the Grapevine for June 1958 (the article November 2’s reading comes from), he gave it to “a great theologian,” and in other words: “The chief critics of prayer are those who have never really tried it enough.” He named no one that time either. It was good advice, he wrote, and he was trying to take it more seriously himself.
The passage stops partway through its paragraph. The rest carries the comparison from the body to the soul, which can also “fail its purpose” without nourishment, and names three things the soul needs, set beside the body’s in One for each. Then it offers AA’s own experience as the proof, which bears this out, it says, “to an amazing extent.” In 1958 Bill spelled out the experiment for the doubter: try prayer “just as an experiment,” even toward a power he wasn’t sure was there, stay with it, and see what changed. He listed what a doubter who kept at it would likely find, starting with a calmer mind and fewer fears.
Seven years after the Twelve and Twelve, Bill came back to the word nourishment. In “AA Tomorrow,” written for AA Today, the Grapevine’s book for AA’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1960, he wrote that most members fell well short in spiritual growth, and called himself “a notable example.” He offered questions for members to put to themselves, in the first person. Am I content with “just enough spiritual nourishment to keep me sober”? Another asked members whether they thought well of their spiritual progress because things were good at home, they’d had a big raise and their lodge had made them vice-president.
More on the doubter Bill kept writing for: Good for God, in Suggestions Only. On where he wrote the Twelve and Twelve: Wit’s End, in the same piece.
One for each
Two sentences after today’s passage, the essay names three things the soul needs, in this order. The words in quotation marks are the Twelve and Twelve’s. Beside each is the bodily need it echoes from the passage; the pairing is this page’s. The passage itself is marked and not quoted.
Threads
Each one opens the calendar with its days lit up.
Sources
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Step Eleven (the reading cites page 97).
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “Take Step Eleven,” June 1958; and “AA Tomorrow,” July 1960, from the Grapevine’s book AA Today.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 15 · 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.