Daily Reflections · October 24
By Faith and By Works
The close of Bill W.’s essay on Tradition One, the forge he liked to picture the Traditions coming from, and the old pairing in the reading’s title.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 24 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 131.
This page doesn’t reprint it. Read it free at aa.org, then come back for the asks.
Read it at aa.orgYour screen will stay on while Chairing is showing.
Themes and asks
-
Learned, not planned
The passage points to the Traditions as the place AA keeps what it learned, and says those lessons came from experience rather than from a plan.
- What does your group do that only makes sense once you know the trouble behind it?
- What has your own experience taught you that you’d never have taken as advice?
-
Believing and doing
Today’s title pairs faith with works, an old pairing with a history in AA. The passage puts what AA built down to both: trusting, and getting on with the job.
- Which comes easier to you right now, trusting or doing?
- What could you do today that would back up something you say you believe?
-
Room to get it wrong
The member who wrote today’s reflection looks to following God’s will to keep AA as the writer knows it, and counts even the writer’s own mistakes, which God allowed, as part of how the Fellowship got here.
- What mistake taught you something no one could have told you?
- Can you let someone in your group be wrong today without stepping in?
-
A small part
Earlier in the essay, Bill W. answers people who fear the group swallows the person. Nobody in AA can be made to do anything, he says. Yet each member finds that staying well depends on the group staying whole, and that sometimes means setting their own wants aside.
- When did you last put what your group needed ahead of what you wanted?
- Where might you be rocking the boat in your group right now?
Behind the words
Bill’s anvil
The passage closes Bill W.’s essay on Tradition One in the Twelve and Twelve, the Tradition that begins “Our common welfare should come first.” Its first sentence ends one paragraph, and the rest is the essay’s last paragraph, whole. The reading joins them and leaves out the paragraph between: the story of Eddie Rickenbacker and the men who drifted on rafts in the Pacific for more than three weeks in 1942, which the passage compares AA to. October 25 tells it.
The Traditions were Bill’s words, first printed in the Grapevine in 1946 as twelve points and adopted at AA’s first International Convention, in Cleveland in July 1950. He didn’t count them as his. In 1955 he wrote that he had only mirrored principles already “hammered out on thousands of anvils of AA group experience.” It wasn’t the only time he reached for the forge.
The title’s pairing of faith and works is older than AA. The Letter of James, in the New Testament, says more than once that faith without works is dead. In Akron in the summer of 1935, Anne S. read from the Bible each morning with Bill and Dr. Bob, and, as Bill remembered it, “she would softly conclude, ‘Faith without works is dead.’” Some early members thought so much of James that they suggested “The James Club” as a name for the Fellowship. The Big Book has the line three times, first in Bill’s own story, as something Ebby T. told him.
More on the convention that adopted the Traditions: A standing vote, in Rule 62. On Anne’s mornings and the Book of James: Quiet time, in Call Me Anne.
The anvil, again
- 1953The essay on Tradition OneToday’s passage, at the close of the essay.
- 1955The Grapevine, JuneFive years after Cleveland, on who really wrote the Traditions: not Bill, he said, but the groups’ experience, brought into focus by AA’s headquarters, its trustees and its staff.
- 1955The talk at St. LouisOn a night in 1937 when the New York members talked him out of a paid job (October 26 tells it): “Three blows, well and truly struck, had fallen on the anvil of group experience.” The words are as AA Comes of Age printed the talk in 1957.
- 1957The Grapevine, NovemberOn how the two Traditions about money were made: “the hammers of the promoters beat on the stubborn anvils of the conservatives.”
Sources
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Tradition One.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. “Twelve Suggested Points for AA Tradition,” April 1946; “How AA’s World Services Grew, Part II,” June 1955; and “Respecting Money,” November 1957.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. Bill W.’s 1955 talk on the Traditions, “Unity: The Second Legacy,” and the book’s chronology.
- Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapter 7.
- Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers. AA World Services, 1980. Chapter 6.
- Alcoholics Anonymous. Works Publishing, 1939; fourth edition, AA World Services, 2001. “Bill’s Story” and “Into Action.”
- The Holy Bible, King James Version. The Letter of James, chapter 2.
- Thomas Fleming, “Lost at Sea for 24 Days.” American Heritage, Fall 2008 · americanheritage.com
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 24 · 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.