Yuku free message boards

Listen, if you will, to these three statements. First, Alcoholics Anonymous does not demand that you believe anything. All of its Twelve Steps are but suggestions. Second, to get sober and to stay sober, you don't have to swallow all of Step Two right now. Looking back, I find that I took it piecemeal myself. Third, all you really need is a truly open mind. Just resign from the debating society and quit bothering yourself with such deep questions as whether it was the hen or the egg that came first. Again I say, all you need is the open mind."

The sponsor continues, "Take, for example, my own case. I had a scientific schooling. Naturally I respected, venerated, even worshipped science. As a matter of fact, I still do--all except the worship part. Time after time, my instructors held up to me the basic principle of all scientific progress: search and research, again and again, always with the open mind. When I first looked at A.A, my reaction was just like yours. This A.A, business, I thought, is totally unscientific. This I can't swallow. I simply won't consider such nonsense.

"Then I woke up. I had to admit that A.A, showed results, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding these had been anything but scientific. It wasn't A.A, that had the closed mind, it was me. The minute I stopped arguing, I could begin to see and feel. Right there, Step Two gently and very gradually began to infiltrate my life. I can't say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe in a Power greater than myself, but I certainly have that belief now. To acquire it, I had only to stop fighting and practice the rest of A.A.'s program as enthusiastically as I could.

This program is suggested. If you want to stay clean and sober, then it is suggested that you do certain things: Don't pick up, go to meetings, listen to learn and learn to listen, get a sponsor (someone you can identify and connect with or a person who has something you want), work the Steps, learn to apply them to your life, and get active in service within your group. I found these to be 'darn well betters' or you will go back out and use. I am grateful to a friend who did my research for me. I didn't have to go back out, he showed me it wasn't any better out there. He use to say, "Sit in the front row, you can hear better." I said, "When if you hear you don't seem to listen, I'll sit farther back and listen harder." It took me a long time to move away from the back row.

The whole picture is very overwhelming. I didn't get this way overnight, I couldn't expect myself to heal overnight. It wasn't a quick fix program, it took time, and all I had to do was take it one day at a time. I just had to deal with one day feelings, one days thoughts, one days actions, and when something from the past came into today, I dealt with it or left it there until such a times as I felt up to handling it. I tried to live in the day and not project into tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes, when it gets here, it is today!

I had to have an open mind. My best thinking got me to the doors of recovery. I had to learn to be open to other people's ideas and concepts. They said, "Take what you need and leave the rest on the shelf." As a friend of mine use to say, "If you can't use it, perhaps you can pass it on to someone who can."

My sponsor told me to quit analizing everythng. I want to know the whys and wherefores of everything. She said, "You can't intellectualize this program, just know it is and that it works."

My experience had been a religious background. It hadn't stopped me from becoming an addict or an alcoholic. I found that I had to find what worked for me. I saw AA working for other people, and had to have faith that it would work for me. There were so many ideas of who God was I was confused and didn't know what I believed. I had to make God personal. Slowly things changed in my life and I could see the results of the program working. AA itself became my Higher Power until such a time as I could find out who God was to me. It was my understanding of God, not someone else's that I had to discover. I ended up taking some of my old ways of thinking and beliefs and bringing in the new ideas and concepts which made my God bigger than anything that I had to face on this recovery journey.

They talk of God in Steps Two and Three and yet it wasn't until I finished the other Steps that I had true knowledge of what and who God was to me.

To be continued...

Consider next the plight of those who once had faith, but have lost it. There will be those who have drifted into indifference, those filled with
self-sufficiency who have cut themselves off, those who have become prejudiced against religion, and those who are downright defiant because God has failed to fulfill their demands. Can A.A, experience tell all these they may still find a faith that works?

Sometimes A.A, comes harder to those who have lost or rejected faith than to those who never had any faith at all, for they think they have tried faith and found it wanting. They have tried the way of faith and the way of no faith.

Since both ways have proved bitterly disappointing, they have concluded there is no place whatever for them to go. The roadblocks of indifference, fancied self-sufficiency, prejudice, and defiance often prove more solid and formidable for these people than any erected by the unconvinced agnostic or even the militant atheist. Religion says the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can't be proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God. Obviously, the dilemma of the wanderer from faith is that of profound confusion. He thinks himself lost to the comfort of any conviction at all. He cannot attain in even a small degree the assurance of the believer, the agnostic, or the atheist. He is the bewildered one.

Another crowd of A.A.'s says: "We were plumb disgusted with religion and all its works. The Bible, we said, was full of nonsense; we could cite it chapter and verse, and we couldn't see the Beatitudes for the `begets.' In spots its morality was impossibly good; in others it seemed impossibly bad. But it was the morality of the religionists themselves that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy, bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so many `believers' even in their Sunday best.

How we loved to shout the damaging fact that millions of the `good men of religion' were still killing one another off in the name of God. This all meant, of course, that we had substituted negative for positive thinking. After we came to A.A,, we had to recognize that this trait had been an ego feeding proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious people, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings. Self-righteousness, the very
thing that we had contemptuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil. This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to A.A,, we learned better.

Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps and 12 Traditions


Like everything else in my life, I compared instead of identifying. I was brought up in a very strict religion and yet it teachings were simple. There were no pews, just wooden chairs. No stain glassed windows, just opaque glass, a pot bellied stove that stood near the back of the church, wainscoting around the bottom of the walls, very simple and very plain and there was no minister, just lay ministers, people who felt the spirit of God who got up and shared. I don't know how the person was chosen to share on Sunday. It was seldom that it was the same man twice in a row unless he was doing what I called a mini series. There was a group of elders who made decisions for the church and the whole structure was a lot like the rooms of recovery.

The main difference with that church was filled with thou shall not and this is what you should believe and do. In AA things were suggested but there were some darn well betters or you would go back out and drink again.

When I went to other churches, I had a problems with the rituals, the decor, the 'read' prayers and as much as some of them were very nice and quite touching, they didn't come from the heart of the person sharing them. It was like a meeting I went to once and a woman and written out her story and shared more from the paper than from the spirit of the moment.

So many things are repetitive and we get annoyed and think, I have heard this before and often tend to shut it off and yet, how easily we forget. It amazes me when I go to a meeting and people have to look at the page to quote the 12 Steps. Yet the words mean nothing if you don't know them and apply them to your life. The spiritual principles are there for application not for my education. It is easy to talk the walk, but much easier said than done.

I had trouble with the robes and the fancy churches feeling that they were trimmings and money ill spent that could be given helping the people and the glory of God not the glory of the Church. It didn't attract me and didn't promote religion to me. Especially when I saw people going on Sunday to church and then leaving their principles at the door on the way out. Doing penance for something you did only to go out and do it again didn't sit well with me and yet how many times did I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. This time it will be different. Yeah! Sure! I would have remorse and guilt but seldom did I ask for forgiveness, certainly not for myself.

I am not sure that resented the people so much as the teachings of the church. Who died and made them God. A sponsee would phone me and say she was going to mass. She would ask, "Would you like to say a prayer for you." I would respond, "You don't need to bother, I have a direct line." There came a time, I would ask for prayers and figured I need all the help I could get. I figured an extra word now and then could only help the cause instead of hinder it. I heard a speaker who became a priest in recovery say, "It is a wonder God doesn't lean over the edge of heaven and shout, "Will you all just shut up!" We tend to keep asking for help and not having the faith that the first one will work and we send up a deluge of words and many forms asking for the same thing over and over again instead of being quiet and listening for the answers.

It is amazing how we can surround ourselves with that self-righteous cloak and think that we are so much better than others. I will never forget hearing many people say, "But that is a street meeting, I can't relate to them...." I did it one night at a group called "The Thunderbird Group." Then I looked around the room and said, "Oh good to see he has come back. I wonder how she is doing, good to see her here. That person is new I wonder if it is his first meeting. Then I heard myself and realized the insanity of my thinking. We are all alcoholics, what makes me different. Do I forget where I come from. A woman, who had 16 years in recover wouldn't come to share for a one year anniversary because she had come to my group to hear me share my story for a three year anniversary and had made the comment about it being a street meeting. We may have not gone all the way to the bottom like some people and yet if we had continued on our path, there is a good chance we might have ended up there. I know I was only one step away. It may not be a physical thing but a mental, emotional and spiritual thing.

Just because I go to church doesn't make me spiritual. Being brought up in the church for 22 years didn't stop me from becoming an alcoholic and an addict. For me, spirituality is a personal thing. Church can't give it to me. It is a God given gift.

To be continued...