Gifts We Can Give

Experience has convinced many of us that there is a moral law which operates with as great precision and inevitability as any of the equations of physics, mathematics, chemistry or electronics. A hint of this fact is contained in those old sayings that “virtue is its own reward,” “honesty is the best policy” and “every sin brings its punishment with it.”

Maybe these ideas have become trite, but their validity should be familiar to every member of Alcoholics Anonymous. We are thinking of the demonstration, all too frequent, where some faltering member is ridiculed, scoffed at, condemned (behind his back, of course) by another member who thinks his foothold secure.

Time after time when the holier-than-thou member finds fault he sooner or later succumbs to the same fault which he criticizes.

“Oh, that guy! He’s a dope. He never got this program. He’s hopeless. Once a drunk always a drunk.”

Such a line of comment instead of understanding, charity and a helping hand often leads to the downfall of the critic. Maybe in voicing such negative sentiments the critic is only expressing his now inward weakness.

But he has violated a moral law – the moral law of charity, more correctly translated as love. Or to put it in AA phraseology, understanding.

The stupidity of a belittling attitude should be immediately apparent.

All of us agree that alcoholism is a disease. If a member has a relapse (slip to some) is that any reason for indicting him? Suppose he suffered from influenza, recovered, and then fell victim again? Would you call him names, belittle his moral qualities and hold him up as an object of scorn to others?

Christmas is a good occasion, when good will is supposed to be abroad in the hearts of men, to think of this tendency – think of rooting it out forever.

Here is a gift that all of us can give, not only to the erring member, but to ourselves. It is the gift of observing the moral law that “as a man thinketh, so is he.”

If we think with charity and good will, if we entertain genuine love for our fellow men, specifically for those who suffer from the same disease with which we are all afflicted, we will be giving expression to the symbolic gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh which the Wise Men carried to a manger in Bethlehem many years ago.

Gold, tradition has it, was for the king, frankincense for the high priest, and myrrh for the great physician. All these things He, whose natal day it was, became.

To us we can view these gifts as gold for the Higher Power which has made us whole again, frankincense for the sobriety that we achieved and myrrh for the healing hand of understanding, good will and love toward all, even, or especially! to the struggling. There are no greater gifts and in giving them we reward ourselves, too.

Central Bulletin December 1957