The Awakening

What Brought Us Into AA?

It was the realization that we had no power to help ourselves.

We had relied entirely upon ourselves because we liked the rules we made for ourselves better than those rules that generations upon generations of mankind had found necessary for living without personal disaster. We had considered ourselves above those who lived by the universal rules.

When trouble came, we sought to help self-imposed discipline, we usually succeeded, for a while. But again, we made our own rules, and as we got the upper hand over our troubles we compromised with evil. A little evil would be all right: it was too much evil that got us into trouble. The particular evil that we compromised with was luring because we wished to recognize no responsibilities and because that evil destroyed all reminders of responsibility.

Simple first grade arithmetic ought to have been enough to teach us. But we wouldn’t believe the simple addition because we wouldn’t believe that what was meat for moderate, disciplined men was poison for the undisciplined.

Many of us still have trouble in believing it, and in accepting the simplest facts of our experience. We still want to make our own rules. We still want to avoid responsibility. We still are unwilling to accept our lots in life.

Let us look back at our efforts to help ourselves. How did we reach the position in which we found ourselves when we grabbed desperately at the help that AA offered? Very few of us were on an unbroken downward descent. We stopped the slide “many times and tried to walk up hill. Then we compromised with evil and tried to ride up hill, with no power other than our own feeble wills. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves sliding backwards at breakneck speed.

Let us keep on looking back at our efforts to help ourselves. Each successive time that we tried to help ourselves, we were on a lower level than we had been before. Each effort to rise was less successful. Sometimes we thought we had gained a pinnacle, but we never looked back to see the towering mountain from which we had slid.

When we landed in a heap at the bottom of the slide, or banged up near the bottom, we realized at last that we had no power to help ourselves. We could not get up, we couldn’t walk, and we surely couldn’t climb. We seized the hand that was offered us. We took the nourishment that restored our ability to stand and then helped us to climb. We were restored outwardly and we found an inward strength.

The hand that was offered us was the hand of AA, the hand of another alcoholic. The strength that that hand found to pull us to our feet was not the hand’s own but it was the strength that the hand had found after it had learned that it had no power to help itself.

It had found a power greater than its own. It had found it in the realization that if the body is to be saved the Spirit must also be saved. It had found that since it is not able to defend itself it must seek the help of a higher power than itself.

This power is not a crutch that can be used for a while and then thrown away. Our whole experience should teach us that. And so should the experience of those who thought that the power was a mere crutch.

Our experience should teach us that when we try to make our own rules the temptation comes to embrace evil because a little evil seems pleasant; or we eagerly seize upon evil because we cannot stand to face a new adversity or we are not willing to accept the realization that our stature is less than we wish it to be.

No, the power is not a crutch: it is a backbone. It is a backbone whose living fluid is the Spirit, and that living fluid must be defended against assaults of evil and against the temptation to believe that we have the power to walk alone in any direction that we choose.

Those of us who are wise have learned that we have no power to help ourselves. Our help is in a power outside ourselves, a help that first comes to us through the hand of AA.

By Central Bulletin, March 1946