You will escape disaster together

reprinted from Eastside Intergroup's Newsletter "Pass It On"

One of the members of my home group regularly opens her condo for meetings and AA fellowship – especially on holidays when the restaurant where we normally meet on weekend mornings needs the space and we’re looking for an alternate venue.

Phyllis has been doing this for more years than many of us have been of legal drinking age, and she did it again this past Mother’s Day. A week or so before the holiday she passed out flyers with directions to her home and at the end, she included her phone number with this admonition: “If all else fails…Fly blind and we’ll talk you in.”

I’ve saved that flyer ever since because it strikes me as a great metaphor for the way our whole program works. “Fly blind, and we’ll talk you in.”

That’s certainly the way I found sobriety through AA. All else had failed, and I was truly flying blind when I dialed AA’s Los Angeles central office from the payphone in the bar where I had spent much of that Tuesday afternoon. I knew almost nothing about AA except that it was about not drinking and it was “spiritual” – neither of which had until then seemed to me to be positive attributes. I finally called because I was miserable and had run out of other ideas.

When I got to my first meeting that same night, I began to meet the people who would “talk me in” to a new way of life. I had previously spoken with others about my behavior of course – to an angry wife, priests, therapists, policemen, drinking buddies, bosses, concerned friends and acquaintances. But they either signed onto my rationalizations (the drinking buddies and some of the therapists and acquaintances) or they were confrontational and/or “preachy.” I had a big problem with people talking “down” to me!

It was immediately clear that these AA people were different. I was obviously drunk when I showed up at that first meeting, but if anything, that only seemed to make everybody more anxious to be welcoming! I don’t remember a lot about the meeting except that at the end, these people urged me to come back again the next night and to try and avoid saloons inbetween.

I managed to do that, and I’ve been coming back ever since. And through it all, these wonderful alcoholics have been “talking me in” to a joyous existence unlike any I could have imagined back in that Los Angeles bar.

When you get right down to it, isn’t this what really sets AA apart? The authors of our Big Book readily admit that they borrowed freely from the fields of religion, philosophy and psychology in their work. Most of the principles embodied in our 12 steps are hardly original. What seems to me so powerful about them is that we rely not on teachers or leaders, but on ourselves -- fellow alcoholics -- to carry their message to the next sufferer. We tell our own stories and share what we’ve found works for us along the way. We listen to our fellow AA members and learn what we can from their experience. And in doing so, we slowly break through that “bondage of self” at the core of our illness.

We talk each other in. And in the process, we get not only our sobriety, but an incredible bonus that perhaps only those who have suffered the acute loneliness of addiction can fully appreciate.

As promised in “A Vision for You”, chapter 11 in the Big Book: “High and low, rich and poor, these are future fellows of Alcoholics Anonymous. Among them you will make lifelong friends. You will be bound to them with new and wonderful ties, for you will escape disaster together and you will commence shoulder to shoulder your common journey. Then you will know what it means to give of yourself that others may survive and rediscover life.

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