Latest / Sober Readings / A Rippling Effect
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Hey everyone, welcome back to Sober Readings, or welcome to Sober Readings if this is your first time listening. My name is Scott, and today is the twenty-ninth of June. It's Monday. Happy Monday, everyone. Let's begin today's episode with a serenity prayer. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference. Today's reading from Daily Reflections. A rippling effect. Having learned to live so happily, we'd show everyone else how. Yes, we of AA did dream those dreams. How natural that was, since most alcoholics are bankrupt idealists. So why shouldn't we share our way of life with everyone? That's on page one hundred fifty six from twelve steps and twelve traditions. The great discovery of sobriety led me to feel the need to spread the good news to the world around me. The grandiose thoughts of my drinking days returned. Later, I learned that concentrating on my own recovery was a full-time process. As I became a sober citizen in this world, I observed a rippling effect which, without any conscious effort on my part, reached any related facility or outside enterprise. without diverting me from my primary purpose of staying sober and helping other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. From the twenty-four hours book, June twenty-nint. AA Thought for the Day. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous involves a continuous striving for improvement. There can be no long resting period. We must try to work at it all the time. We must continually keep in mind that it is a program not to be measured in years. Because we never fully reach our goals, nor are we ever cured. Our alcoholism is only kept in abeyance by daily living of the program. It is a timeless program in every sense. We live it day by day, or more precisely, moment by moment now. Am I always striving for improvement? Today's meditation for the day. Life is all a preparation for something better to come. God has a plan for your life and it will work out if you try to do His will. God has things planned for you, far beyond what you can imagine now, but you must prepare yourself so that you will be ready for the better things to come. Now is the time for discipline and prayer. The time of expression will come later. Life can be flooded through and through with joy and gladness. So prepare yourself for those better things to come. And today's prayer for the day. I pray that I may prepare myself for better things that God has in store for me. I pray that I may trust God for the future. The Daily Meditation from Touchstone. A good indignation brings out all one's powers. That's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Anger is a human emotion that gets us in touch with our energy and our vitality. But like any good thing, it can also be used in hurtful ways. When we examine the role anger has played in our lives, some of us can see where we used it to intimidate and dominate others. Maybe we can recall being terrified by someone else's anger or even by our own. Some of us denied our anger and covered it with excessive helpfulness. Examining the place anger has had in our lives is one of the doorways we must pass through to regain our full masculine spirit. We learn to set aside the anger we use to cover up fear or hurt. We express it respectfully and honestly when we feel it in a relationship. Expressing anger does not have to be abusive or rejecting. It can mean we care enough to be fully involved, and we will not leave after we express it. We can learn to hear others in their anger rather than attempt to control or evade their message. In the process, we are invigorated and feel healthier because we are claiming a larger part of ourselves. Today, I will first be honest with myself about angry feelings, then I will find respectful ways to express them. And for today's final reading, we're going back to chapter two of AA Comes of Age. We're almost at the end of Bill W's speech that he gave. We have about two pages left, we'll do half of it tonight. And if you'll remember when we left off, Bill W. and doctor Bob were talking to Bill D, who was sitting on the edge of the bed. That's a famous ⁓ picture in Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Bob and Bill D and I went frantically to work with more of those alcoholic characters at the city hospital. We had a long string of failures. Notable among these had been Eddie. In fact, Dr. Bob and I had tackled him just before our first visit with Bill D. Every time Eddie got drunk, he wanted to jump off the Cleveland docks. Once, when angered, he had tried to emphasize a point by waving a knife at Anne and me. He finally did make the grade and recently wrote me that he has been sober for seven wonderful years. So Eddie, our first failure, so called, is today a success. Then from another quarter, we turned up with a surprise. I guess this was the beginning of AA's young people's department. This new one, Ernie, had been a terribly wild case, yet he caught on very quickly to become AA number four. As I remember it, We straightened up only two more during that whole summer in Akron. By September, my proxy fight backers had got tired again. I had to go home to New York. Right here, I want to set on record the timeless gratitude that AAs will always have for Henrietta Sieberling. She who first brought Dr. Bob and me together. Of the ten people to whom I had been directed by clergyman Walter Tunks. Henrietta was the only one who had understood enough and cared enough. And this had been only the beginning of her mission. During that first summer at Akron, she affectionately counseled many an alcoholic's family, just as Anne was doing. Despite the fact that she had no direct experience of alcoholism, Henrietta had a rare capacity for identification with us. Therefore, she was eagerly sought out for her great spiritual insight and the help she could give. What Alcoholics Anonymous owes to her will always be beyond anyone's reckoning, and doctor Bob's debt and mine are the greatest of all. By the time I got home I was endowed with a little more humility, a little more understanding, and considerably more experience. Very slowly a group began to take shape in New York. Lois, not content with nursing me all those years, thought it would be wonderful if we filled the old family house in Clinton Street with alcoholics. Her mother had passed away and her father, a doctor, had moved elsewhere. So why not? We thought we could feed our charges at low cost and pick up a lot of knowledge about alcoholism. As it turned out, we did not sober up a single one. But we did pick up a lot of knowledge. We used to have as many as five in the house at a time, and sometimes they would all be drunk at once. One day we came home to find a drunk swinging a piece of two by four on another down in the cellar. I don't remember what their resentment was. On another occasion, we had been away for a week, leaving only one problem drinker alone in the house, and we came back to find him dead, a suicide. We continued our work on alcoholics, some of them in Sam Shoemaker's Oxford group, some at Cavalry Mission, some at Charlie Towns Hospital, where good old doctor Silkworth risked his reputation by letting us see them. Lois and I continued to find, however, that if we permitted alcoholics to become too dependent on us, they were apt to stay drunk. In that fall of 1935, a weekly meeting took shape in our Brooklyn parlor. In spite of much failure, a really solid group finally developed. There was first Henry P and there was Fitz both out of town's hospital. Following them, Moore began to make real recoveries. Until the middle of 1937, we in New York had been working alongside the Oxford groups. But in the latter part of that year, we most reluctantly parted company with these great friends. Naturally enough, they did not think too highly of our objective, limited as it was to alcoholics. From our point of view, we felt very sure we couldn't do much about helping the Oxford groups to save the whole world. But we were becoming more certain every day that we might be able to sober up. Many alcoholics. The Oxford groupers had clearly shown us what to do. And just as importantly, we had also learned from them what not to do as far as alcoholics were concerned. We had found that certain of their ideas and attitudes simply could not be sold to alcoholics. For example, drinkers would not take pressure in any form, excepting from John Barleycorn himself. They always had to be led, not pushed. They would not stand for the rather aggressive evangelism of the Oxford groups, and they would not accept the principle of team guidance for their own personal lives. It was too authoritarian for them. In other respects too, we found we had to make haste slowly. When first contacted, most alcoholics just wanted to find sobriety, nothing else. They clung to their other defects, letting go only little by little. They simply did not want to get too good too soon. The Oxford Group's absolute cons concepts, absolute purity, absolute honesty, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love were frequently too much for the drunks. These ideas had to be fed with teaspoons rather than by buckets. Besides, the Oxford Group's absolutes were expressions peculiar to them. This was a terminology which might continue to identify us in the public mind with the Oxford groupers. even though we had completely withdrawn from their fellowship. There was yet another difficulty. Because of the stigma then attached to the condition, most alcoholics wanted to be anonymous. We were afraid also of developing erratic public characters who, through broken anonymity, might get drunk in public and so destroy confidence in us. The Oxford groups, on the contrary, depended very much upon the use of prominent names. Something that was doubtless all right for them, but mighty hazardous for us. Our debt to them, nevertheless, was and is immense, and so the final breakaway was very painful. And so I'll stop right there for today. We're almost at the end of the first section in chapter two. We've got about one more page left, and we'll finish that up the next time we read. And so I hope you'll come back to join me for that last reading. The next section of chapter two is titled Unity, the second legacy. And so that'll do it for today's episode of Sober Readings. Thank you so much for listening. Hey, if you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket for today's readings, just go to my website, soberreadings.com and click that donate button. And if you'd like to send me comments on today's reading, you can send me an email at sober readings with Scott at gmail dot com. So again, thanks for listening today. Stay sober, keep reading, and I'll catch you in the next episode. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other, and remember just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day, and as my friend Larry says, best day ever.