Daily Reflections · November 7
Let Go and Let God
The second half of Step Eleven, under a slogan older than AA.
Today’s reading
The reading for November 7 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 96: the second half of Step Eleven, the part that says what to pray for, where it stands at the head of Bill W.’s essay on that Step.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
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Themes and asks
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Narrowed to one
The passage is the half of Step Eleven that November 6’s reading stopped short of. It says what to pray for, and it narrows the list with a single word: only.
- Of everything you asked for this week, out loud or just in hope, how much was for a particular result?
- If you could ask for only one thing about today, and it couldn’t be an outcome, what would it be?
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What lingers
For the member who wrote the reflection, the slogan matters most with what lingers: worries and memories that effort alone won’t shift, which the member leaves for God to lift. Whatever hurts in the moment, the member drops almost by reflex.
- What have you let go of lately without even noticing?
- What have you carried so long that you’ve stopped feeling its weight?
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Someone else’s life
In Behind the words, a wife in Akron in 1937 is told to let go of her husband and leave him to God. Near the end of the essay that today’s passage heads, Bill W. says something like it about prayer: in praying for other people, it suggests asking for God’s will for them, whatever it is, rather than deciding what it ought to be.
- Whose life are you trying to run right now, in prayer or out of it?
- What would you ask for that person if you didn’t already know what’s best for them?
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Not the same as giving up
The slogan can be heard as a reason to leave everything to God and do nothing. Today’s passage asks for more than knowing what to do; it asks to be able to do it. Read beside it, letting go looks less like sitting still.
- Is there something you’ve handed over to God that is really yours to do?
- Where has letting go turned into an excuse?
Behind the words
Older than AA
Today’s passage is the second half of Step Eleven, as the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, sets it at the head of Bill W.’s essay on that Step. Today’s title isn’t in the passage or the essay, and it isn’t in the Big Book of 1939 either. It’s one of AA’s slogans, and it was a saying before there was an AA.
In 1929 Sam Shoemaker, the New York rector whose parish was the Oxford Group’s home in America, published Twice-Born Ministers, accounts of clergymen the movement had changed. In one, a young man at a seminary tells of a house party after Christmas where he was afraid “of losing the direction of my own life.” He ran away from it, spent a wretched day back at the seminary and returned. Soon after he got back, he wrote, he had “let go and let God,” with a friend beside him. The words are set off in quotation marks of their own, as if they were already a saying.
By 1937 the saying had turned up in Akron, between two wives. That summer Annabelle G.’s husband, Wally, was admitted to the hospital under Dr. Bob. Dr. Bob phoned Maybelle L., whose husband, Tom, was one of Akron’s early members, and told her to take Annabelle in hand, or Wally would be drunk within two hours of getting out. Annabelle was in the middle of canning peaches, but she went. Upstairs, she remembered, Maybelle asked why she didn’t hand him over to God. “Let go and let God.” That night Annabelle couldn’t sleep, until she told God out loud that she could do nothing and He could take over. Then she slept. Afterward Anne S., Dr. Bob’s wife, telephoned her every day.
Bill used the slogan of the old-timers, himself among them. In April 1955, writing in the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, ahead of AA’s twentieth anniversary at St. Louis, he likened the old-timers to parents whose children have grown up. Every parent, he wrote, comes to a time when they have to “let go and let God.” He set the words in quotation marks too. That July, at St. Louis, he formally handed AA’s affairs over to its General Service Conference.
Henrietta Seiberling, the Oxford Group member in Akron at whose home Bill and Dr. Bob first met, in May 1935, died in New York in December 1979. The slogan is on her gravestone in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, according to Arthur S.’s timeline of AA history, which takes it from the historian Dick B.
More on Anne and the Akron wives: Every single morning, in Call Me Anne. On the evening at Henrietta Seiberling’s: The gate lodge, in I Just Work Here. On Sam Shoemaker’s parish: Calvary House, in What Not to Do.
Let go of what
Four times the idea turns up, in date order, with what was let go of. Only today’s essay says it without the slogan; setting it beside the others is this page’s own idea.
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1929A young man at a seminary
The direction of his own life
At one of the movement’s house parties, as Sam Shoemaker’s Twice-Born Ministers told it that year.
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1937Annabelle G., in Akron
Her husband, Wally
Told by Maybelle L., another member’s wife, to hand him over to God.
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1953The Twelve and TwelveToday’s essay
Deciding God’s will for someone else
Near the end of the essay, on praying for other people. The slogan isn’t in it.
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1955Bill W., in the Grapevine
AA itself
Like a parent with grown children, three months before he handed AA’s affairs to its General Service Conference.
And by Arthur S.’s account, the words are on the gravestone of Henrietta Seiberling, who died in 1979.
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 96).
- Samuel M. Shoemaker Jr., Twice-Born Ministers. 1929. Free at the Internet Archive.
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. Searched for the slogan, which it doesn’t have.
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapters 8 and 9.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “The Significance of St. Louis,” April 1955.
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 22.
- Arthur S., A Narrative Timeline of AA History, 2009 (1979, from Dick B., The Akron Genesis of Alcoholics Anonymous).
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 7 · 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.