The Options Are: AA Recovery or Die

“The AA Program has borrowed from medicine, psychiatry, and religion. AA has combined them into a program best suited to the alcoholics mind and which will best help the alcoholics to recover. We do not try to improve on the AA program as it has everything we alcoholics need to arrest our illness. The plan of action puts us in union with the Divine Principle directing the universe.

There is no greater purpose for an alcoholic than to achieve sobriety and create a union of their soul with God. Priceless beyond all rewards, promises and gifts is this union, being in harmony with God puts us in harmony with all others who are trying to do His will.

If we want to raise our consciousness and get closer to God we must prepare ourselves by prayer to become willing and disciplined to work the Twelve Steps. We have to become a high priest spiritually and we must allow the process of the Steps to clear out of ourselves the sins, faults and wrongs we’ve done – otherwise we cannot raise our consciousness and get our close union with God.”

The Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book has been given to us so we can enter into the care of God by a complete surrender with total abandonment withholding back nothing from God or working the AA Program. By this AA way of living the Twelve Steps we are given by God’s grace all we need to be raised into a new life having made our confession and cleaned up our past and by making the needed amends as is possible.

By so doing we will be brought into a refreshing new relationship with God and be strengthened by the AA meetings and fellowship to keep up the sustained continuous efforts required with the spiritual principles.

In conceding to our innermost selves we are alcoholics and asking God to help us make use of Alcoholics Anonymous, we allow God to discipline, prepare and train us for even greater works to be done in and through us (John 14:12-14). Our Heavenly Father is always close beside us-indeed God’s grace and Spirit reside in us.

God works with us to create a wonder filled victorious over alcohol, drugs, poor behaviors and resolving every kind of problem spiritual life. As we pray and ask God for the help we need, we come to rely heavily upon following His inspiration and guidance to help us solve our difficulties and to let the good orderly direction of AA help us to live without self-destructive habits.

It is up to every one of us each day to make up our mind that it’s time to go to any lengths for sobriety by living the AA Program as well as we can. God helps us to be His living success stories through our cooperating with Him (the spiritual life is not a theory – pg.83) and making the living of a spiritual life our personal reality – no one else can work the Twelve Steps for us.

Bill Wilson put the AA Program together for us by borrowing from psychiatry, religion and the medical community to create a recovery plan that works well in healing alcoholics. Bill learned three separate things that he put together:

• He got an accurate description of his problem from Dr. Silkworth (medical).
• He learned the solution to his problem from Ebby Thacher (one alcoholic talking to another).
• He got a practical program of action from the Oxford Group (religious).

Bill later put the connection together with the Swiss psychologist Dr. Carl Jung (psychiatry) who told Rolland Hazard who was an America patient of his, that he was beyond human aid and his only chance of recovery from alcoholism was if he could receive a religious experience that would solve his drink problem. Rolland being a churchman sought out help which he received in the Oxford Group. Ebby Thacher joined the “O.G.” as did Bill Wilson and from these things coming together the Alcoholics Anonymous Program was developed.

The AA Program does not need to change for each individual that enters as each individual can interpret the plan of actions and information in the Big Book as they understand it and as it makes sense to them under God as they understand God’s guidance. The main thing is to follow the path of recovery as it had been laid out in the Big Book. At the very least each person can start with their Higher Power being the good orderly direction they get from the group of drunks in the AA meetings.

These can help strengthen and encourage members to keep progressing and enlarging their spiritual life by giving the Twelve Steps their full efforts. If any of us are not following the plan laid out in the Big Book closely or thoroughly enough and we skimp out on parts we will cause our own failure into relapse and possibly death-suicide by booze.

The fact is that alcoholism, drug addictions and poor addictive behaviors will either make us ready to drop all rebelliousness, hard-heartedness and stubbornness and make us use the AA Program and Twelve Steps with full and sustained efforts or we will keep chasing the illusion of being able to one day control our addictions until insanity locks us up or we allow these to kill us with illness or suicide. We get locked up-buried up-or sobered up.

The options are Alcoholics Anonymous recovery with a full on effort that results in a life of victory or keep going our own way being irritable, restless and discontented, keeping on drinking living miserably and dying from active alcoholism or suicide, stay in a self-imposed prison, a real prison of bars or psych ward institution.

“Then we shall remember, too, how the pains of our illness literally drove us to what was the first responsible act of years – that of joining AA. Alcoholism had literally lashed us to such a point of collapse that we became willing to do whatever was necessary to get well; it was a matter of life and death (Bill Wilson July 1965).”

Walk the AA Way of Recovery from Alcoholism Prayer

“Thank You dear God for bringing to Bill Wilson all that was required for many generations to recover from alcoholism through the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. May Your blessings and grace, be upon Alcoholics Anonymous, the recovery meetings and the fellowship, and may You give victory and success to all who do the work of the Twelve Steps walking in the way of AA recovery.

O God, Creator of all things, grant that the work of the Twelve Steps may bring enlightenment and progression in our spiritual life and that we may hasten to carry the AA message to those who are still suffering so many may be saved from dying due to alcoholism.

Thank You God, for the spiritual nourishment we receive in the Alcoholics Anonymous Program meetings and Big Book that renews and sustains us and that never fails when the whole suggested program is thoroughly followed. We pray for all those who are just now walking through the doors of the recovery meetings that they may give the AA Program their best all out efforts, we pray that even more happiness, joy and freedom than we have received will be given them and an abundance of opportunities will come their way as they continue to walk the path of the AA way.” Amen

“Remain humble, honest, open-minded and willing, keep the AA Program simple, the more we do so, the more good works and service we will do and we will stay sober.”

“The opposite of humility is pride, the root of all sin, it shows itself … in arrogance, in claiming power, and trying to make a good impression on others. Pride seeks to please oneself, and likes being accepted and praised by others.”

“We are either following cloven hoofs or humble sandals.”

By Jerome D.