Focusing and Listening

The passage comes near the start of 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 just before it, on Step Ten, ends at bedtime, with a review of the day and thanks to God. Today’s paragraph brings that self-searching together with prayer and meditation, which the rest of the essay takes up. The three hadn’t always been kept apart.

In the summer of 1935 Bill lived with Dr. Bob and Anne S. at their house in Akron. Each morning, as he remembered it twenty years later, Anne read from the Bible by the fireplace, and then they all sat still together, “awaiting inspiration and guidance.” It was the Oxford Group’s quiet time, often kept with a notebook open for jotting down any thoughts that came. In February 1938, when Frank Amos looked into the Akron group for John D. Rockefeller Jr., a morning quiet time, with prayer and reading, was among the seven points he set down as its program, and one of the five he put as things a member must do. None of these accounts of the Akron mornings mentions looking back at oneself.

The Big Book’s draft, the loan copy sent out for comment early in 1939, brought a look back into that morning sitting. Its pages on Step Eleven told the reader to wake and “look back over the day before,” ask forgiveness, then plan the day, ask for direction and close with a prayer. In the book printed that April, the look back had moved to the evening: “When we retire at night, we constructively review our day.” Before the book went to the printer, Bill wrote, the Catholic Committee on Publications of New York’s archdiocese read its pages on prayer and meditation and sent suggestions, which were taken up at once. He didn’t say what they were, so whether moving the review was one of them isn’t known.

In the Twelve and Twelve the evening review sits in Bill’s essay on Step Ten, not Step Eleven. As for the morning hour, Bill said later he’d long had a sense that “something was lost from A.A. when we stopped emphasizing the morning meditation.” Back in the early 1940s, Duke P., one of Toledo’s first members, had asked members who’d slipped about their mornings; none of them, he said, was still keeping a quiet time. Bill and Lois W. kept theirs, coffee in bed, a prayer and a few quiet minutes, until he died in 1971.

More on Anne’s mornings: Quiet time, in Call Me Anne. On how the Oxford Group listened and checked what it heard: Team guidance, in What Not to Do. On the draft sent out for comment: Loan copy, in By the Carload.