I've had to revisit many of the things that my sponsor told me when I was new.

This is NOT any kind of disparagement of my sponsor - Scotty had about five years when he started sponsoring me. He had those five years in a small group, in a transient Army town - the "oldtimer" for Delta Group had eight years, I believe. Scotty taught me what he knew, the best he knew, and I'm forever grateful.

However, I suspect that, wherever Scotty is now (he was from Minnesota) then I'm sure he's probably learned a few things since then; I'd be willing to bet that he's learned that some of the things that he used to think of as "good AA practices" maybe aren't any such thing, at all.

But maybe not. Maybe he's fallen for the trap of thinking "hey, my sponsor told me <blank>, and so it must be true!" and believes that to revisit those things that his sponsor told him would somehow be disloyal. We drunks are like that, you know - we'll make a mistake, and then stick by that mistake out of what we will believe to be "loyalty" but is actually (more often than not) simple stubbornness - or unwillingness to admit a mistake.

It's actually a terrible trap, and I'm beginning to believe that it may be causing the Fellowship a lot of harm. You can point to a sentence in the Big Book, and the guy that you're talking to is incapable of seeing that sentence, because it doesn't say what his sponsor said - and may, in fact, say something completely contradictory.

This allows us to treat our sponsor's opinions as sacrosanct FACTS - and give them precedence over the Big Book.

That, by itself, is bad enough - but there are two corollaries that go along with this silliness:

1. Since we drunks have such bad memories - no, forget that little bit of pretense. Since we're so steenkin' DISHONEST, we probably don't remember exactly what our sponsors told us, which means that we are really setting up our distorted memories of what our sponsors told us as untouchable AA "truth".
2. Since we, ourselves, become sponsors, this silly practice allows us to CREATE OUR OWN DISTORTED NEW NOTIONS, and then our pigeons turn the things that we say (or, even, their distorted memories of what we say) into new AA "truths".
   

My sponsor has a term for all of this stuff - he calls is "AA folklore". Quite often, it's simple stuff indeed - stuff that maybe sounds like it might be pretty good stuff; but the peril is that it diverts us from what we, as AAs, have decided we really DO believe and practice, and that we want to pass on to the newcomer.

Here's one of my favorites, and it's the first entry in this new category of blog posts that's titled "Ain't In My Big Book" - are you ready? Here it is:

"Just ask God every day to keep you sober/abstinent".

Yep, that's it - the old "Ask God to keep you sober" business. There are other bits of AA folklore that are very similar, or perhaps the same thing in different wrappers, such as "Ask God to remove the obsession/compulsion" or even (very subtly different) "Ask God to help you stay sober".

(N.B. - if you're already down at the "comments" section, ready to fire off something about how your sponsor told YOU this, and by jingo it's true, and blankety-blank*&^%$#@! - here's the question. What are you so mad about? :)

These sound perfectly reasonable, to somebody who's never studied the Big Book - or, to whom the Big Book is not, actually, the authority on how to work the AA program (N.B. - that's one assumption that's being made in these posts; that, as Chapter Two says, "we have a way out upon which we can absolutely agree". If that's not the case for you, then please don't even bother commenting on this post - just move along, move along. Plenty of recovery sites full of bogus, newcomer-killing claptrap looser interpretations for you to hang out where you'll feel totally welcome :)

But anyone who has, indeed, read the Big Book - a book which is designed to give us a way to find a Power greater than ourselves which will solve our problem - and who has also heard the bit about "just ask God to keep you sober" might have noticed that this Book, which gives "clear cut directions" to tell us "precisely how [they] recovered" NEVER EVER MENTIONS ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT ASKING GOD TO KEEP US SOBER.

That seems to me to either be one heck of an omission on Bill W's part - I mean, if asking God to keep us sober was a part of the AA program, then wouldn't Bill have at least mentioned it in passing?

Come to think of it, if asking God to keep us sober worked, why would we ever bother with all of those silly Steps?

Come to think of thinking of it, if asking God to keep us sober worked, would any priests or ministers ever find their way to AA? Do you suppose Father Hillary got to his first AA meeting, and found out that all he was supposed to have done all this time was ask God to keep him sober - and then hit himself in the forehead and said "Gee! Why didn't I ever think of that?"

By the time I got a sponsor, I had already sorta started on the Step thing, and he gave me what seemed like pretty good advice at the time:

"When you get back to the barracks tonight, put your boots underneath your bunk - and, while you're down there on your knees, thank God for keeping you sober today. Tomorrow morning, when you get on your knees to get your boots out from under your bunk, ask Him to keep you sober for that day."

At the time, it made plenty of sense - there was an problem with implementing it exactly like this because I wasn't exactly living in the barracks at the time; I was living outside of the barracks, in a pup tent. But I was still able to put this suggestion to quick use.

And I worked the rest of the Steps, and started sponsoring folks, and told them the same exact same that my sponsor had told me (of course, if the new pigeons weren't in the Army, then I didn't say "bunk" and "boots"; I made appropriate substitutions :) I also repeated something that I heard during this period - "I've never met anybody who relapsed who had asked God to keep them sober that day".

And then - whups! - I did, indeed, meet somebody who had gotten drunk and has asked God to keep them sober that day. I believe that what I did was the same sort of thing that anybody does who relies on AA folklore; I assumed that the poor guy's memory was confused, and he hadn't really asked God that day - maybe the day before.

Then I met several folks who reported that they had asked God to keep them sober, and eventually had to look at what I was passing on. And that's about the time that I noticed that the Big Book never said anything about asking God to keep us sober, or remove the obsession, or the compulsion.

No, the Book was entirely clear on this point - it said that, if we do these things (the 12 Steps) then we WON'T drink - that we will seemingly be unable to drink, even if we want to do so, and that at Step 10, the problem will simply be REMOVED.

Then I remembered something else that I had heard in those early days, and that's the thing that I stuck with - I was told that the Steps keep us sober, and that nobody ever relapses while they are working a Step.

Now I sit in meetings and I will hear most of the older people telling a group of newcomers, repeating the phrase over and over again, "...I just know that I always ask God to keep me sober in the morning, and I thank Him at night, and that works for me" and I wonder - how did this get started? And why do we carry it on?

I don't for a minute believe that it's because the newcomers are NEWCOMERS, and thus can't work the Steps -
most of the the newcomers that I see these days are completely capable of driving to the meeting. They can certainly get going on the Steps. Early on, in some locations, new members were taken through the first three Steps before they were allowed to attend their first meeting - I'm not advocating that practice, but it sort of plays havoc with the notion that newcomers can't start on the program of recovery.

If the idea is that we don't want them to know what is going to be required of them - if we're soft-pedaling the Steps, hoping that by the time the newcomers have been around a while, then they might be willing to take on more - then we've really missed the boat. Once we've told them that all they have to do is ask God to keep 'em sober, why would they do anything else?

(N.B. - I think that what I thought early on was that I was supposed to ask God to keep me sober - however, if I didn't work the Steps, then my life wouldn't get better, and then I would just say "the heck with it" and stop asking. No, wait - that 's not what I think that I thought. I now remember - that's what some folks TOLD me.)

No, I think that the reason that we - as a Fellowship - tell the newcomers these things is because we heard them when we got here, and so we're just passing on what we heard.

Funny, though - we also heard "...thoroughly followed our path" and "At some of these we balked. We thought we could find an easier, softer way" - why aren't we stressing THAT at newcomer's meetings?

It comes back to that same old question - do I owe the newcomer the best that I have? Or do I owe him what I heard - with my bad hearing and bad memory and poor understanding - when I got here?