Daily Reflections · October 25
A.A.’s Heartbeat
Unity as a matter of life and death: the start of Bill W.’s essay on Tradition One, and the wartime raft he kept coming back to.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 25 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from As Bill Sees It, page 125.
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Themes and asks
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A matter of life
The passage treats unity as something AA lives or dies by, not a nicety. The sentences around it in Bill W.’s essay make the same point: if the Fellowship doesn’t hold together, it doesn’t last.
- Where would your sobriety be today if there were no group to go to?
- What do you do that keeps your group going, and not only you?
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Still yourself
In its next paragraph, the essay asks whether all this swallows up the individual member, and answers no. Nobody in AA can make another member do anything, punish anyone or throw anyone out, and the Traditions, it says, forbid nothing.
- Have you ever taken unity to mean everyone agreeing with you?
- Can you stay with your group after a vote goes the other way?
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Nobody hoards
Later in the essay, Bill likens AA’s early groups to men adrift after a plane went down at sea, none of whom could keep the water or the bread for himself. Behind the words tells their story.
- What are you keeping to yourself that your group could use: your time, your money, your story?
- Who around you could use a share of what you’ve been given?
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Your own stake
For the member who wrote today’s reflection, unity is personal, not only the group’s business, and the reflection traces it back to AA’s two founders and the way they worked together.
- Where in AA do you feel you belong, and where do you still feel like a guest?
- What part of AA beyond your home group could you take a share in?
Behind the words
The men on the raft
The reading cites As Bill Sees It, a book of short readings from Bill W.’s writings, but the line is older. Bill first wrote a version of it in April 1952, at the start of a Grapevine article on Tradition One, the first of a series on the Traditions. The series became the second half of the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, and the book’s wording is the one the reading uses. It comes in the first paragraph of the essay. The Tradition itself, in the short form members know today, reads: “Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.”
Farther on, the essay reaches for a story its first readers would have remembered. In October 1942, on an inspection tour of the Pacific, a B-17 carrying Eddie Rickenbacker went off course and came down in the sea. Rickenbacker had been a fighter ace in the First World War, and by then ran Eastern Air Lines. Eight men took to rafts with four oranges among them. On the eighth day a gull landed on Rickenbacker’s head; he caught it, and they divided it. One of the eight died and was buried at sea. The other seven were found after three weeks or more at sea, and Rickenbacker called his book about it Seven Came Through.
In the essay’s telling, AA’s groups had lived that story countless times: rescued, but not yet safe, and each bound to look out for the rest. Bill used the raft before and after, too. In his talk on unity at St. Louis in 1955, as AA Comes of Age printed it two years later, he went on to say what had rocked AA’s raft in its early years. First came slips: when anyone relapsed, members would look at each other and ask, “Who next?” Then romances that set whole groups taking sides. Worse were the drives for power, glory and money. “Pride and fear and anger,” the talk says, were what threatened the common welfare most.
More on how Tradition One went from 38 words to 12: The short form, in Rule 62. On a fellowship of drunks a century earlier that didn’t hold together: The Washingtonians, in the same piece.
The raft, three times
Bill told the story at least three times, years apart, and each telling puts something different first. In order.
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1946The Grapevine, July
“cling together with an intensity of purpose”
The group as a safe harbor with alcohol all around it. Like the men on the raft, members hold on to each other, and self-love gives way.
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1953The Twelve and TwelveToday’s essay
“None might become selfish of water or bread.”
Each man had to think of the others. They held together through fear and pain, and the death of one.
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1955The convention at St. Louis
“Nobody dared rock that raft, lest they all perish.”
Everyone got the same share. Then came the list of what had rocked AA’s own raft. The talk was printed, edited and enlarged, in AA Comes of Age in 1957.
Sources
- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. AA Grapevine and Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1953. The essay on Tradition One.
- AA Grapevine, “Tradition One,” April 1952 · Grapevine archive
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. “The Individual in Relation to AA as a Group,” July 1946, and the introduction, on the 1952–1953 series on the Traditions.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. Bill W.’s 1955 talk on the Traditions, “Unity: The Second Legacy.”
- Captain Edward V. Rickenbacker, Seven Came Through: Rickenbacker’s Full Story. Doubleday, Doran, 1943.
- National Air and Space Museum Archives, Edward V. “Eddie” Rickenbacker South Pacific Negatives, the biographical note · Smithsonian
- Pacific Wrecks, B-17D Flying Fortress serial number 40-3089, on the flight, the rafts and the rescue
- Dwight Jon Zimmerman, “Eddie Rickenbacker Adrift in the Pacific Ocean,” Defense Media Network, November 15, 2012
- As Bill Sees It. AA World Services, 1967, first published as The A.A. Way of Life. Page 125, which the reading cites.
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 25 · 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.