Daily Reflections · November 5
The Quality of Faith
A man full of faith who prays and still drinks puzzles clergy and doctors, the Step Two essay says, but not most AA members.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 5 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 32, near the end of Bill W.’s essay on Step Two, where it turns to the believer who keeps drinking.
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Themes and asks
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Plenty of faith
The passage answers the last case Bill W.’s essay on Step Two takes up: a man who believes, prays and goes on drinking. He has no shortage of faith, the essay makes clear. Today’s title names where the trouble lay.
- If you judged your faith by what it changes in you, rather than by how strongly you feel it, what would you find?
- Where do you keep up the outward forms of a practice with not much going on behind them?
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What the prayers were for
The passage finds part of the believer’s trouble in his prayers, and in what they were for. Just before it, the same essay remembers members who gave up on God when the things they had asked for didn’t come.
- Look back over what you’ve asked for lately, in prayer or just in hope. How much of it was a list?
- What did you once ask for that you’re glad now you never got?
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Weather, not shelter
For the member who wrote the reflection, faith is a way through hard times rather than a way around them.
- Do you still, somewhere, expect sobriety to keep bad news away from your door?
- What hard thing have you come through sober that you once thought would finish you?
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Asking on a condition
Read beside the same book’s essay on Step Eleven, asking for things isn’t ruled out. That essay suggests putting a condition on every particular request, and checking first what each one is really worth.
- Who besides you would the last thing you asked for help?
- What would change in what you ask for if every request carried that condition?
Behind the words
Two and a half years of prayer
Today’s passage comes near the end of Bill W.’s essay on Step Two in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. The essay takes the newcomers who balk at that Step one at a time: the one who won’t believe, the one who drifted from the faith he grew up in, the one too clever for it, the one disgusted with religion, and the one who defied God when his prayers went unanswered. Last comes the believer who prays and still drinks. To clergymen, doctors, friends and families, the essay says, he is “a heartbreaking riddle.”
AA’s own beginnings had a man in something like his place. Early in 1933 Anne S. talked her husband, Dr. Bob, into trying the Oxford Group, the Christian movement whose Akron meetings AA would grow up in. For two and a half years he went to meetings every week, joined a church and studied the Bible. “They also said I should cultivate the habit of prayer, and I did that—at least, to a considerable extent for me,” he said later. “But I got tight every night.”
Paul S., one of the Akron pioneers, who first met him in January 1936, said that in all that time Dr. Bob felt “God had not heard his prayers,” and didn’t blame Him for it; he felt he didn’t deserve to be heard. What changed things, Paul said, was a discovery: that spirituality “couldn’t be absorbed by someone emulating a sponge,” but might be found in helping others. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, AA’s history of Akron, ties that to what Dr. Bob said Bill brought him in 1935: the Oxford Group’s idea of service. Faith, Dr. Bob said in his sober years, “has to be cultivated.”
AA’s books went on to say what to pray for. The Big Book of 1939, laying out Step Eleven, said to ask for freedom from self-will and never to pray for “our own selfish ends.” Many had wasted a lot of time that way, it said, and it didn’t work. In 1953 the Twelve and Twelve’s own essay on Step Eleven made room for specific requests, with a warning: asking for particular solutions, or to help others in ways already decided on, is asking God “to do it our way.” So add to each request, it suggested, “if it be Thy will.”
More on Dr. Bob’s two and a half years in the Oxford Group: Secret drinker, in I Just Work Here. On how the Oxford Group came to Akron in 1933: Ten days in Akron, in What Not to Do.
Two lists
What members who once defied God remember asking Him for, in the Step Two essay, and what AA’s books told members to ask for, in the order the books said it.
Asked for, and not givenToday’s essay
Members remembering, in the Step Two essay, 1953. The drinking came last.
- That the girl they wanted to marry would change her mind
- Healthy children
- A promotion at work
- That God would stop the drinking. “But nothing happened.”
Then the essay comes to the believer who keeps drinking, who begs for help against it and gets none. Today’s passage is about him.
What the books said to ask for
- 1939Step Eleven itself, in the Big Book: “praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
- 1939The Big Book on Step Eleven: freedom from self-will, and nothing for yourself alone unless others will be helped too.
- 1953The Twelve and Twelve on Step Eleven: the best understanding of God’s will for that day, and the grace to carry it out. Anything more particular, with a condition.
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 essays on Step Two (the reading cites page 32) and Step Eleven.
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. “How It Works” and “Into Action.”
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapters V, VI and XXVI.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 5 · 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.