A Safety Net

Today’s passage comes near the end of Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, just before the closing paragraph that November 10’s and November 11’s readings come from. Rebellion comes up again and again in his essays on the Steps, often as a danger. On Step Six he warned, “Delay is dangerous, and rebellion may be fatal.” On Step Seven: “Rebellion dogs our every step at first.” Here, near the end of Step Eleven, it gets a gentler answer, even when what a member rebels against is prayer.

AA had its rebels from the start. Early in 1939, Dr. Harry Tiebout was the medical director of Blythewood, a sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. As Bill told it years later, Tiebout showed one of the Big Book’s loan copies to two of his patients. One was Marty M. All that talk of God made her so angry that she pitched the book out the window and went off drinking. When she came back, shaking, and asked what to do next, the doctor grinned: “You’d better read that book again!” Bill wrote that in the Grapevine in 1966, after Tiebout died. Her biographers, working from her own talks, tell it differently. Tiebout gave the manuscript to her, and for six weeks she argued with him over it, reading as little as she could. He didn’t argue back; he kept telling her to go and read some more. The line that stopped her came in the middle of a rage, with the book only half read. As she remembered it, the line said, “We cannot live with anger.”

Seven years after the Twelve and Twelve, Bill described a stage much like the one today’s passage speaks to, though he was writing about AA’s principles in general, not about prayer. In May 1960, writing in the Grapevine about freedom in AA, he set out three kinds of choice. The first is made because a member must, to survive. The second comes once AA’s principles begin to look good, while rebellion is still very much alive: members keep practicing them anyway, out of responsibility to themselves, their families and their groups, “because we feel we ought to obey.” It isn’t easy, he wrote, but they can see they are growing, and they have company. Only now and then does the third come, when doing right is simply what a member wants.

For himself, the remedy was often small. In March 1962, writing about acceptance, Bill said that under heavy pressure he lengthened his daily walks and said the Serenity Prayer slowly, “in rhythm to my steps and breathing,” sometimes for days. With it went short sayings he repeated as he walked, among them that this, too, would pass. Such “fragments of prayer,” he wrote, kept breaking up the thoughts that circled back on him, guilt and depression, pride and rebellion.

More on Marty M., the book she threw out the window and the line she remembered: The red manuscript, in People Like You. On Bill’s long depression and the walks that helped him through it: The quarter mile, in Number One Man.