must awake or we die.”
“So we do awake, and we are sober. Then what? Is sobriety all that we are to expect of a spiritual awakening? Again, the voice of AA speaks up. No, sobriety is only a bare beginning, it is only the first gift of the first awakening ... a new life of endless possibilities can be lived if we are willing to continue our awakening.”
It is commonly acknowledged that we drank in a futile search for spirit, so it’s no surprise that alcohol also goes by the name of “spirits,” with some package stores even named “spirit shops.” But alcohol took away our spirits, and it’s only when we find the real thing through the liberating program of Alcoholics Anonymous that we realize we have come home.
Let one of the writers in this book describe what that feels like:
“You, too, can live—really live. There will be love and laughter and a delicious sense of well-being down deep inside if you will abandon yourself to the business of recovery—not just recovery from the disease of active alcoholism, but deeper than that, recovery from a former self. Such thorough recovery can be realized, I believe, only through the fearless application of spiritual principles to our daily lives.”
Written by men and women made new in spirit, these are stories that will light our way home.
SECTION ONE
A Daily Reprieve
Alcoholics may be granted, as we are told in our literature, not a cure, but a temporary reprieve, contingent on our spiritual condition.
Funny about that word “reprieve.” Official definitions range from an offhand “to give relief for a time” to the more chilling “a temporary suspension of the execution of a sentence, esp. of death.”
A death sentence. This is always a shock to read, yet all of us who have suffered, who have seen others die at the hands of our rapacious creditor, know how dangerous it is to shrink from that reality—our reality. We are spared daily, however, given twenty-four hours worth of grace, most often by doing a few significant things and joining others at our simple gatherings.
These are stories of power only gained by acknowledging our powerlessness. “I felt myself move with a new power, courage, and faith that, by the grace of God, I have acquired as a result of working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous,” says one alcoholic, as she finds the courage to make financial amends to the government. Here’s a man on the run, twelfth-stepped by a cab driver, another who found his wife in AA on Thanksgiving, another who only started drinking when he lost his wife, and a woman who drank to celebrate her decision to go with “AA all the way!”
Here’s an inmate who woke up from drinking shaving lotion to cry, “Lord God, if you are there, take this life of mine and run it.” Here’s a woman who, after twelve years of sobriety, is still looking outside of herself for a reward. “Meditation has become a daily gift of self-love,” a former inmate reports. And more than one of us has found great cyber-fellowship: “The greetings and cheerfulness on the screen made me feel safe,” one young girl says.
Enjoy these stories of spiritual reprieve, as varied, colorful—and powerful—as what takes place in our precious “rooms of AA.”
Life and Taxes
June 2005
Last November, I began working the Steps in order to take responsibility for my past—and especially to make amends to the Internal Revenue Service for twenty-three years of failing to file income tax returns. Yesterday, I signed, sealed, and mailed the final four years of my taxes. I went to my accountant, with a conscious contact of my Higher Power, ready to take whatever was coming to me. I felt myself move with a new power, courage, and faith that, by the grace of God, I have acquired as a result of working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
The attorneys tell me that I am open to possible criminal charges. The accountants tell me that the government may say I owe up to thirty thousand dollars more in back taxes. And yet, at this moment, I am at ease. There are no fears or anxieties, no doubts or insecurities, and no trepidation about what might happen in the future.
Furthermore, I'm not judging myself for being irresponsible. I am simply doing this with an attitude of self-compassion, kind of what I imagine a loving parent would feel toward a child who just wasn't able to do any better at the time. It's a big step for a fellow who had lost all faith in God and his life.
The malignant doubt that had poisoned my life for forty-two years (including ten years of sobriety) is gone, thanks to God and the AA program. I am incredibly happy and joyous, and free of the restless, irritable, and discontented life I used to know. I only want to do God's will to the best of my ability. And each day, my life just gets better and better.
J.B.
Connecticut
The Fugitives
May 2004
My wife and I stood before the federal judge and listened to her pronounce sentence on us. We were both going to do prison time. We'd been through a lot in the twenty years we'd been together. We'd drunk and drugged together, and now we were both going to prison on a drug-dealing charge. I like to say that we were “codependents and codefendants.”
How had I gotten here? I had certainly come a long way from the fifteen-year-old who'd hung out with the older guys because they could buy booze for me. I remember that I always drank more than my friends and could never seem to get enough. In college, I started drinking every night, and the only way I would wake up to get to class was by setting up a device with my stick that would knock over a huge pyramid of beer cans when my alarm clock went off. As the beer cans came crashing down, I would drag myself out of my stupor and head to class.
Some years later, I had a job working as an all-night country and western disc jockey. My shift would start at midnight and I would drink right up until 11:45 P.M. and then make a mad dash to the radio station. The guy I relieved would put on a long record for me, and I would fall into the chair trying to pull myself together. I would sober up by about 6:00 A.M. at the end of my shift. I can't imagine what I must have sounded like to the audience and was not very surprised when I got fired.
At another point, my wife and I were living on a fifty-seven-foot boat in New York City and would order our booze by the case from the neighborhood liquor store. Because we lived on a large boat, the liquor store thought we entertained a lot, but it was just the two of us drinking alone and drinking unbelievable quantities of booze. We had been dancing for a lot of years, and now we were going to have to pay the piper.
After sentencing us, the judge said that we were to be given a “voluntary surrender.” That meant we had three weeks to get our affairs in order before we had to report to our respective prisons. I hadn't been able to get my affairs in order for forty years, so I had no idea how I was going to do it now. But I was going to have to go whether my affairs were in order or not. Most of the three weeks were consumed with getting the alcohol and drugs we were convinced we needed to survive. The day came to go, but we didn't know how we could live without our alcohol and drugs. So we chose to pursue them instead of showing up at prison.
Now we were on the run; we were hunted fugitives. We found ourselves living in an abandoned apartment; I went out stealing all day so we could buy what we needed. I remember waking up in the morning and saying, “Not another day of this. I can't do this any more.” Then I'd get up and go out and start all over again. I had reached the jumping off place that the Big Book talks about. I could not live with alcohol or without it. I had no idea how to get off the hamster wheel I was on, so I just kept running.
In the next couple of weeks, several incidents took place that seemed unrelated and just fortunate coincidences. In retrospect, I know that God was giving me all the rope I needed. We were living in New York City, and we decided it would be safer if we got out of town. We ended up in a cheap motel in a small town in upstate New York, a few hours from the city. My wife was pretty drunk one night and decided at