Dianne’s Missives May 16

Thought to Consider…

A.A. is not something you join, it’s a way of life.

I have been to too many premature funerals due to our good friend alcohol.”

We are prisoners of our own resentments. Forgiveness unlocks the door and sets us free.

The road to recovery is always under construction.

“In A.A. we have found that the actual good results of prayer are beyond question. They are matters of knowledge and experience. All those who have persisted have found strength not ordinarily their own. They have found wisdom beyond their usual capability. And they have increasingly found a peace of mind which can stand in the face of difficult circumstances.”

All of A.A.’s Twelve Steps ask us to go contrary to our natural desires . . . they all deflate our egos. When it comes to ego deflation, few Steps are harder to take than Five. But scarcely any Step is more necessary to longtime sobriety and peace of mind than this one.

The Way of Strength

“We need not apologize to anyone for depending upon the Creator. We have good reason to disbelieve those who think spirituality is the way of weakness. For us, it is the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that men of faith seldom lack courage. They trust their God. So, we never apologize for our belief in Him. Instead, we try to let Him demonstrate, through us, what He can do.”

THE PAST IS OVER

A.A. experience has taught us we cannot live alone with our pressing problems and the character defects which cause or aggravate them. If . . . Step Four . . . has revealed in stark relief those experiences we’d rather not remember . . . then the need to quit living by ourselves with those tormenting ghosts of yesterday gets more urgent than ever. We have to talk to somebody about them.

Disease

“Some strongly object to the A.A. position that alcoholism is an illness. This concept, they feel, removes moral responsibility from alcoholics. As any A.A. knows, this is far from true. We do not use the concept of sickness to absolve our members from responsibility. On the contrary, we use the fact of fatal illness to clamp the heaviest kind of moral obligation onto the sufferer, the obligation to use A.A.’s Twelve Steps to get well.”

“If you are as seriously alcoholic as we were, we believe there is no middle-of-the-road solution. We were in a position where life was becoming impossible, and if we had passed into the region from which there is no return through human aid, we had but two alternatives: One was to go on to the bitter end, blotting out the consciousness of our intolerable situation as best we could; and the other, to accept spiritual help. This we did because we honestly wanted to, and were willing to make the effort.”

Awakening

“Alcoholism is a grievous and often fatal malady of the mind and body. We have found that these awful conditions invariably bring on the third phase of our malady. This is the sickness of the spirit; a sickness for which there must necessarily be a spiritual remedy. We A.A.’s recognize this in the first five words of Step Twelve. Those words are: ‘Having had a spiritual awakening . . .’ Here we name the remedy for our threefold sickness of body, mind, and soul.”

Dianne