Daily Reflections · October 27
Global Sharing
What alcoholics hand on to each other, and how far it had traveled when Bill W. wrote about it, a little further into his essay on Tradition Five.
Today’s reading
The reading for October 27 in Daily Reflections, AA’s book of short readings by members. Its passage comes from Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 152.
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
-
Both halves
The passage doesn’t leave the suffering out. What one alcoholic gives the next, it says, is the hard years along with the recovery. Read beside today’s title, the drinking is part of what there is to share, not only what came after it.
- When has the worst of your drinking been exactly what someone needed to hear?
- Which years do you still count as wasted?
-
A cure in hand
Just before the passage, the essay imagines doctors who have found a cure for cancer, one that works only if they all work at it together. Each has a specialty of his own, but he would put it second. AA’s members, the essay goes on, are bound the same way.
- If you had found a cure, who would you go looking for first?
- What do you let come ahead of passing it on?
-
Kept alive
The member who wrote today’s reflection doesn’t leave the wish to help other drunks to chance, and looks to a Higher Power to keep it alive.
- What wears down your wish to help another alcoholic, and what brings it back?
- When did you last feel it strongly, and what had you been doing that day?
-
The world over
Every member and every group, anywhere, who wants to tell another drinker what it was like and what got them out: that, for the same writer, is where AA’s strength comes from.
- Who has helped you stay sober without ever knowing your name?
- What would you want a drunk on the other side of the world to hear from you?
Behind the words
Chain style
The passage comes a little further into Bill W.’s essay on Tradition Five in the Twelve and Twelve, the essay whose opening was October 23’s reading. Right after it comes what Bill calls AA’s great paradox: that sobriety can seldom be kept “unless we give it away.”
The idea of handing it on was older than the book. Bill had his spiritual experience at Towns Hospital in December 1934. Writing to Dr. Carl Jung in 1961, he said a vision followed it: alcoholics who saw themselves in one another, each handing what he’d been through down the line, “chain style.” In Akron the next spring, remembering Dr. William D. Silkworth’s advice, he went easy on religion and talked about his own drinking, until Dr. Bob began to say, as Bill remembered it, “Yes, that’s me, I’m like that.”
By the time Bill wrote the essay, the chain had crossed the oceans. In 1951 the American Public Health Association gave AA a Lasker Award. Its citation counted 4,000 groups in 38 countries, and named the “novel principle” AA works on: that “a recovered alcoholic can reach and treat a fellow sufferer as no one else can.”
For AA’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1960, Bill put its spread across the world down to one word, communication, and to what he called “the language of the heart”: the way drunks who have suffered alike can reach each other. In Norway in 1950, he wrote, he and Lois W. felt at home at once without understanding a word of Norwegian, and they came back knowing “AA could circle the globe.”
In 1988 the Grapevine gathered Bill’s articles in a book with the same name. In 2022 AA’s office counted AA in some 180 countries, in a pamphlet it calls A.A. Around the Globe.
More on how AA crossed the oceans: Overseas, in The Only Requirement. On Bill’s 1961 letter to Jung: Mr. Anonymous, in Number One Man.
Each said they were different
From Bill’s article for the Grapevine’s yearly international issue, October 1959: who doubted AA was for them, and who got through to them.
- High-bottom drinkers“We were never jailed,” they said, or locked in a mental hospital. For years the old-timers couldn’t reach them.The old-timers at first, slowly, by going back to their own early drinking. Then other high-bottoms: once a town had a few sober, one could talk to another “as nobody else ever could.”
- WomenThey said they were different too. It was four years before AA kept a single woman sober.Mostly the women themselves. By 1959 Bill guessed there were some thirty thousand around the world.
- Everyone afterPrisoners and socialites, skid row and the professions, believers and agnostics, rich, poor and veterans: each in turn said the same.The same way, as Bill saw it: one drinker finding himself in another, and passing it on. By 1959, he wrote, they all talked about how alike alcoholics are at bottom.
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 Five.
- The Language of the Heart. AA Grapevine, 1988. Bill W., “AA Communication Can Cross All Barriers,” October 1959; “The Language of the Heart,” July 1960, from the Grapevine’s book AA Today; and his letter to Dr. Carl Jung of January 23, 1961, in “The Bill W. - Carl Jung Letters,” January 1963.
- Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. “Landmarks in A.A. History”; “Recovery: The First Legacy”; and Appendix D, the text of the Lasker Award.
- A.A. Around the Globe (SMF-165). AA World Services, 2022 · aa.org
- Daily Reflections. AA World Services, 1990. October 27 · 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.