One Drunk to Another A Daily Reprieve
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Daily Reflections · October 26

One Ultimate Authority

Who has the last word in an AA group: the Second Tradition, and the night Bill W.’s friends told him no.

Today’s reading

The reading for October 26 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 132.

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. The last word

    The essay around today’s passage opens on a puzzle: if nobody in AA can be made to pay or to obey, who runs it? Its answer is the passage itself, and the rest of the essay makes the case, from a new group’s first election to the night Bill W.’s friends overruled him. The member who wrote today’s reflection turns that inward, and gives up the controls.

    • When your group decides something you’d have decided differently, what do you do with it?
    • Where are you still trying to have the last word, in the rooms or at home?

  2. Ears first

    Today’s reflection is less about who holds authority than about how to use a little of it well, and its writer starts with listening.

    • Whose voice in your group is hardest for you to hear out?
    • Before you take on a job for others, what do you ask for?

  3. Chores, not orders

    The essay follows a new group from its founder’s rule to its first election. After that the committee keeps things running and tells no one what to do, and finds it is made of “servants, not senators.” Today’s writer holds a group job in the same spirit.

    • Where does helping slide into running things, for you?
    • If you hold a service job now, who is it really for?

  4. After the election

    Further on, the essay sorts the old-timers who lose that election into two kinds. “Elder statesmen” take it well and wait on the sidelines, and the group comes to them when it’s in trouble. “Bleeding deacons” can’t let go, and a few, the essay says, drink over it. Bill thought few old-timers skip the stage entirely, and that most come through it well.

    • The last time you rotated out of something, which were you?
    • Whose quiet opinion does your group turn to when it’s stuck, and why theirs?

Behind the words

From one parlor to all of AA

Today’s passage comes from AA’s Second Tradition, the words at the head of Bill W.’s essay on it in the Twelve and Twelve. The essay ends with a story to show the principle at work: a night in the parlor at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, when the sober members told Bill not to take a paid job at Towns Hospital. The essay has AA “only three years old” at the time; in AA Comes of Age (1957), Bill dated it 1937.

Looking back, he said three lessons from that night “rang in my consciousness.” One was “God, speaking in the group conscience, is to be our final authority.” A fourth followed from the three, he wrote: the people a group puts in charge are its servants, not its rulers. Around 1943 or 1944, Dr. Jack Norris heard Bill spend most of a talk in a packed ballroom in Rochester on the idea. As Norris remembered it, Bill told of what he had wanted for himself when he and Lois W. were broke, a paid job and his name on the Big Book as its author among them. Then: “The groups were right, and I was wrong!”

The words themselves came in the spring of 1946, the second of twelve points Bill set out in the Grapevine. That July he set down how AA looked to its nonalcoholic friends: run by its members, ruled by God and unable to discipline anyone, all at once, with a second point that looked “just a little impractical to outsiders.” In January 1948 he wrote a Grapevine essay on the point. He likened a group to a single member working the program: both grow by learning from their mistakes. In time, he forecast, a group’s conscience would prove “a far more infallible guide for group affairs than the decision of any individual member.”

Bill didn’t always follow it himself. When the Big Book came out in 1939, Pass It On says, the group conscience would have given it away, but Bill got his way, and the book was sold. Years later he wrote that “the sometimes idealistic majority of that day was seriously mistaken.” But in 1955 he and the other old-timers stepped aside, and left the last word on AA’s world services to the General Service Conference, where the groups’ delegates sat with the trustees.

More on the night in the parlor: The voice on the subway, in Number One Man. On the day at St. Louis in 1955: Legacy, in Rule 62.

Widening

Who the group conscience spoke for, step by step, as Bill W. told it. The bars show the circle widening; they don’t measure it.

  1. 1937One meetingThe sober members in the Clinton Street parlor talk Bill out of the job at Towns. “Thus spoke the group conscience.”
  2. 1946Each groupThe second of the twelve points in the Grapevine gives it the last word in every group’s own affairs.
  3. 1951The groups’ delegatesAt the first General Service Conference, delegates from the United States and Canada advise the trustees. Sometimes they disagree with headquarters, and Bill sees they are “frequently right.”
  4. 1955All of AAAt St. Louis, the convention votes that the Conference become “the voice of the group conscience of our entire Fellowship.”

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 Tradition Two.
  • Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. Bill W.’s talks at St. Louis in 1955, as edited and enlarged for the book: “Unity: The Second Legacy” and “Service: The Third Legacy,” and the convention’s resolution in “Four o’clock Sunday Afternoon.”
  • The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. “Twelve Suggested Points for AA Tradition,” April 1946; “The Individual in Relation to AA as a Group,” July 1946; and “Tradition Two,” January 1948.
  • Pass It On. AA World Services, 1984. Chapters 15 and 19.
  • Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 26 · 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/october-26/