One Drunk to Another A Daily Reprieve
Watch The Kitchen Table
Illustration · A root cellar on a spring morning: the door open at the foot of stone steps that climb to the yard in the sun, and a crate of potatoes sending pale sprouts toward the light. Not drawn from a photograph.

Daily Reflections · November 9

Stepping Into the Sunlight

Light before growth, in Bill W.’s essay on prayer and meditation, and the other times AA’s writers reached for the sun.

Today’s reading

The reading for November 9 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from As Bill Sees It, page 10, which takes it from Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. October 21’s reading comes from the same paragraph.

This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.

Read it at aa.org

Themes and asks

  1. Light first

    Of everything growth needs, the passage puts light ahead of the rest, and it makes meditation the way to get it.

    • What in you has been growing lately, and where has it been getting its light?
    • Which stretch of your day goes by with no quiet in it at all?

  2. Room for it

    The member who wrote the reflection won’t accept being too busy as a reason not to pray, and the drinking years are their proof.

    • How much of a day did drinking take, once? How much of today does your recovery get?
    • What would you move to make ten quiet minutes tomorrow?

  3. Small, and set

    The member describes a practice built to start small and grow, with the Lord’s Prayer and a count of blessings to fall back on when no words of their own will come.

    • What practice is small enough that you’d keep it every single day?
    • When your own words won’t come, what do you lean on?

  4. A moment, then a practice

    Read beside Behind the words, the sun changes its job over the years. In Bill’s story of 1939 it arrives all at once, at a kitchen table; by 1953 it’s somewhere to go on purpose, day after day.

    • Did your own start come all at once, or a little at a time?
    • What do you do each day, on purpose, to get back into the light?

Behind the words

Out of the shadow

Today’s passage comes near the end of the same paragraph as October 21’s, early in Bill W.’s essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions. October 21’s took the paragraph’s first sentence, about the good in us growing. Today’s says what that growth needs before anything else. By 1953 the sun was an old image in AA’s writing.

The Big Book used the word sunlight twice in 1939. Its pages on taking inventory, already in the loan copy sent out for comment that winter, warned that by holding on to a resentment “we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit.” Bill’s own story got the sun later, in the book as printed that April. There his old friend Ebby T. puts it to him: “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” Those words, Bill wrote, melted “the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years.” Then: “I stood in the sunlight at last.” Those three lines aren’t in the loan copy. They went in before the book went to press.

Members reached for it too. In December 1945 the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, printed a letter from a sergeant in the Army Air Forces, writing from Abilene, Texas, who signed himself E. B. He had come to his first meeting in Newark, New Jersey, in April 1941. Drafted, he went to meetings in Miami, Denver and Atlanta, but for the nearly two years before he wrote he had been stationed where he couldn’t keep in touch with other members. What AA did for him at first, he wrote, was like coming out of “a dark and hellish tunnel into full sunlight.” In May 1948 a member in Columbus, Georgia, signing the letter F.G., wrote to the same magazine about the lilies of the field. A lily kept from the sun is held back, the letter said, and so is a person’s spiritual life when “overshadowed by self.”

In the Twelve and Twelve, Bill tied the light to a practice rather than a moment, and the next pages walk a beginner through meditating on a prayer. By March 1960, with AA’s twenty-fifth anniversary coming, the sun in his writing was AA itself. Looking ahead to the anniversary gatherings, he wrote warmly of the families and friends who had helped members make the passage “from the darkness of alcoholism into the bright sunlight of AA.”

More on how Ebby’s line got into the Big Book: How It Works, in Keep Coming Back. On the Grapevine and the members it reached in uniform: Ink-stained wretches, in Jittery and Alone.

Where the sun comes up

Six of the times the sun turns up in AA’s writing, in the order each was written. The words are the writers’ own; what the sun stands for in each is this page’s reading. The small sun rises a row at a time, only to mark the order.

  1. 1939The Big Book, in the draft

    “the sunlight of the Spirit”

    What a resentment shuts out.

  2. 1939Bill W.’s story, added for print

    “I stood in the sunlight at last.”

    Belief, the moment it began.

  3. 1945E. B., a sergeant, in the Grapevine

    “into full sunlight”

    A life starting over.

  4. 1948F.G., in the Grapevine

    “overshadowed by self”

    What growth needs, and what self keeps off.

  5. 1953Bill W., the Twelve and TwelveToday’s passage

    Where meditation leads.

  6. 1960Bill W., in the Grapevine

    “the bright sunlight of AA”

    AA itself.

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.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939. “Bill’s Story” and “How It Works.”
  • The pre-publication manuscript of early 1939 (a loan copy), from a transcription. “Bill’s Story” and “How It Works.”
  • AA Grapevine, December 1945. E. B., “Like Full Sunlight,” in “Mail Call for All A.A.s at Home or Abroad,” page 9.
  • AA Grapevine, May 1948. F.G., “Advice to the Newcomer,” in “Mail Call for All A.A.s at Home or Abroad,” page 14.
  • The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “After Twenty-Five Years,” March 1960.
  • As Bill Sees It. AA World Services, 1967, first published as The A.A. Way of Life. Page 10, which the reading cites.
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. November 9 · 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.

Printed from One Drunk to Another, an independent AA history · onedrunktoanother.org/today/november-9/