Daily Reflections · November 29
Active Guardians
Today’s four sentences close Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Eleven, written while he was handing AA’s keeping from its founders to its members.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 29 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 183: the last four sentences of the essay on Tradition Eleven.
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Themes and asks
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Past the newspapers
The essay around the passage is mostly about publicity and the press. Its last lines turn from the press to the members, and to the ambitions each one brings in.
- What did you want to be, back when you drank? Which of those wants came into AA with you?
- Is there a role in your group, a commitment or a title, that you want a little too much?
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Just a member
The member who wrote the reflection finds something freeing in anonymity. Read beside the essay, that suggests a room where nobody has to be more than a member.
- What did you stop having to prove once you were just another member?
- Whose last name, job or past do you know at your group? Does it change how you listen to them?
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One among many
For the member, belonging is part of staying sober, and humility is what lets them belong. Read beside the essay, that makes humility less a private virtue than the way one member fits among the rest.
- Where do you feel most like one among many? Where do you still want to stand apart?
- What has belonging to a group given you that standing out never did?
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In your keeping
Read beside Behind the words: in 1950 Bill W. told the members the founders couldn’t watch over AA forever, and the Conference that took over can’t make a member or a group do anything. Put together, the keeping comes down to the members.
- Who first showed you how anonymity works in AA, and who have you shown?
- If someone used AA’s name to sell something, or to sell themselves, what would be yours to do, and what wouldn’t?
Behind the words
Perishable
Today’s four sentences close the essay on Tradition Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve (1953), Bill W.’s book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. Just before them, the essay tells how the Alcoholic Foundation, AA’s trustees, wrote to news outlets across the continent about anonymity, and how, since then, editors had again and again taken members’ names and pictures out of AA stories. Then it turns from the press to the members.
Bill had used the word guardian three years earlier, about himself and Dr. Bob S. In the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, for November 1950, he told the members that for twelve years the two of them, with help from friends, had held AA’s office, its book, its magazine, its public relations and its money in trust for them. “Its founders are perishable,” he went on, and he asked the members to take these things into their own keeping through a General Service Conference, delegates who would meet each year with the trustees. Dr. Bob died that month, on November 16.
Then the word moved. In January 1955, in the Grapevine, Bill gave it to anonymity itself, kept before the public. That July, at the convention in St. Louis marking AA’s twentieth year, the members voted to give it to the Conference, as the founders’ successor. In his talk before the vote, Bill said what he, Dr. Bob and their old-time friends had been from the start: “self-appointed guardians and custodians”. The Conference couldn’t make anyone keep a Tradition, though. Its Charter, as AA Comes of Age prints it, calls it “a service body only; never a government”.
When Bill retold the history of the Traditions in AA Comes of Age (1957), the essay on Tradition Eleven came back largely unchanged, with one more story added. Its closing lines were reworded, and the last one changed its meaning. Where the Twelve and Twelve makes guardians of every member, the 1957 version says the Tradition implies that each member should become one, in AA’s dealings with the general public. The Twelve and Twelve has kept the 1953 words, and they’re the ones Daily Reflections quotes.
More on the vote at St. Louis: Legacy, in Rule 62. How the Conference was first put together: Panel Two, in Trusted Servants. On the members who put their names in the papers, and the letters to editors: The short form, in Rule 62.
Who keeps it
Six times Bill W., or the members at St. Louis, named a guardian for AA between 1950 and 1958, in order, with today’s passage marked. The lines are this page’s, apart from the quotations.
- 1950
The founders · the Grapevine, November
“We cannot be your guardians always.”
Bill, for himself and Dr. Bob, asking the members to take over AA’s office, book, magazine and funds.
- 1953
Every member · Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions Today’s passage
The last lines of the essay on Tradition Eleven.
- 1955
Anonymity · the Grapevine, January
“the guardian of all our Traditions”
Anonymity before the general public, that is: in the press, on the radio, in films and on television.
- 1955
The Conference · St. Louis, July
“the guardian of the Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous”
The resolution the convention carried, making the Conference the founders’ successor.
- 1957
Each member, before the public · AA Comes of Age
“each member ought to become” one, “in its relation with the general public”
The 1953 essay retold, its closing lines reworded.
- 1958
The Conference · the Grapevine, April
Bill’s article on the Conference, under the title “Guardian of AA.”
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 Tradition Eleven (the reading cites page 183).
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “AA Is Not Big Business,” November 1950; “Why Alcoholics Anonymous Is Anonymous,” January 1955; and “Guardian of AA: Our General Service Conference,” April 1958.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Unity: The Second Legacy” (Tradition Eleven, retold), “Four o’clock Sunday Afternoon” (Bill’s talk and the resolution at St. Louis, July 1955) and Appendix C, “The Conference Charter.”
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter XXIX, “The last year” (Dr. Bob’s death, November 16, 1950).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 29 · aa.org
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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.