Spiritual Awakenings

Description

From Grapevine, the international journal of Alcoholics Anonymous, personal and heartfelt stories from AA members

“The greatest gift that can come to anybody is a spiritual awakening.” —Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous

In this collection of more than 80 stirring letters, essays and stories, discover the unique journeys of the spirit that AAs have taken on their paths from alcoholism to recovery— and the practical ways they put their spiritual values into operation in their everyday lives while maintaining or attaining sobriety.

Spiritual Awakenings includes stories from the pages of Grapevine magazine contributed by AA members who’ve found comfort and strength in so many ways: by returning to the abandoned faith of their youth, discovering an entirely new Higher Power, integrating personal philosophies with the principles of the Steps and Traditions or simply by listening and observing the world around them.

Starting with the voices of Bill W. and Dr. Bob, co-founders of AA, and including stories from newcomers and old-timers, the eager and the cautious, Spiritual Awakening: Journeys of the Spirit highlights the many different aspects of getting in touch with your own version of faith.

Spiritual presence, transformation, anonymity, humility, simplicity, sacrifice—what better foundation upon which to build a new life?

Sujets

• Twelve-Step Programs
• Espiritual
• Spiritual formation
• Higher Power
• Body (disambiguation)
• Healing
• Spiritual
• Prayer
• Alcohol

Informations

• Publié par: AA Grapevine
• Date de parution: 10 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781938413063
• Langue: English

Extrait

Spiritual Awakenings
JOURNEYS OF THE SPIRIT FROM THE PAGES OF AA GRAPEVINE
Other books published by AA Grapevine, Inc.
The Language of the Heart (& eBook)
The Best of Bill (& eBook)
Spiritual Awakenings (& eBook)
I Am Responsible: The Hand of AA
The Home Group: Heartbeat of AA
Emotional Sobriety: The Next Frontier (& eBook)
Spiritual Awakenings II (& eBook)
In Our Own Words: Stories of Young AAs in Recovery
Beginners' Book
Voices of Long-Term Sobriety
A Rabbit Walks into a Bar
Step by Step: Real AAs, Real Recovery (& eBook)
Emotional Sobriety II: The Next Frontier (& eBook)
Young & Sober (& eBook)
Into Action (& eBook)
Happy, Joyous & Free (& eBook)
In Spanish
El Lenguaje del Corazón
Lo Mejor de Bill (& eBook)
Lo Mejor de La Viña
El Grupo Base: Corazón de AA
In French
Les meilleurs articles de Bill
Le Langage du cœur
Le Groupe d'attache : Le battement du cœur des AA
Spiritual Awakenings
JOURNEYS OF THE SPIRIT FROM THE PAGES OF AA GRAPEVINE

AAGRAPEVINE, Inc.
New York, New York
www.aagrapevine.org
Copyright © 2003 by AA Grapevine, Inc.
475 Riverside Drive, New York, New York 10115
All rights reserved
May not be reprinted in full or in part, except in short passages for purposes of review or comment, without written permission from the publisher.
AA and Alcoholics Anonymous are registered trademarks of AA World Services, Inc.
Twelve Steps copyright © AA World Services, Inc.; reprinted with permission.
ISBN: 978-0-933685-45-1, Mobi: 978-1-938413-07-0, ePub: 978-1-938413-06-3
“The greatest gift that can come to anybody is a spiritual awakening.”
— Bill W. AA Grapevine, December 1957
AA Preamble
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes.
Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
©AA Grapevine, Inc.
Contents
AA Preamble
Beginnings
Those Marvelous Twelve Steps
When the Big “I” Becomes Nobody
The Fundamentals in Retrospect
Part One: Seeking
The Bill W. - Carl Jung Letters
So That’s a Spiritual Experience!
You’re Welcome Here
A Rush of Gratitude
The Human Hands That Help Us
The Sense of Sobriety
Where the Words Come From
Eye of the Hurricane
The Spiritual Kind of Thirst
When Other People Came Alive
Working Incognito
A Crack in the Wall of Disbelief
Small Wonders
A Candle of Hope
Okay, God …
Journey of the Spirit
No Secondhand Gods
Is There Room Enough in AA?
Honest Disbelievers
It’s Always Dark at the Beginning
God, the Verb
The Lonely Emergencies
AA’s Steps Lead to—Spiritual Awakening
What a Spiritual Awakening Means to Me
Mesmerized by Sanity
The Lord of Song
Search for Cloud Nine
Part Two: Finding
Bill W. on the Second Tradition
Two Messengers
Rambling Rose
Spiritual Spectrum
A Gift That Surpasses Understanding
Grandma’s Twelfth Step Work
What We Cannot Do for Ourselves
The Result Was Nil
That God Could and Would …
AA and the Religion Turnoff
Cold Sober
Gateway to Sanity
Sober for Thirty Years
A God Personal to Me
An Agnostic’s Spiritual Awakening
What We Could Never Do
A Not-So-New Newcomer
Making Amends
The Perfect Parent
Let Go and Let God
The Biggest Word in the English Language
Building an Arch
Sunlight and Air
A Moment of Silence
The Circle of Peace
A Powerful Reason for Faith
Practical Enlightenment
Part Three: Practicing
Take Step Eleven
Divine Hot Line
Letting the Spirit Join In
Prayer
Stepping into the Sunlight
Mysterious Alchemy
The Power of Good
Through Another Alcoholic
Our Spiritual Gift
Practice But Don’t Preach
The Kingdom Within
The Person I Am
Listening for the Reality
Faith Is Action
The Power To Carry That Out
Paradox of Power
Awareness
Gratitude Tree
Why God Says No
More Than I Can Handle
These Twenty-five Words …
Be Still and Listen
Tuning In to the Spirit
The Butt Guy
Sweating It Out
Amends in Paradise
Toward Reality
The Power of the Program

The Twelve Steps
The Twelve Traditions
About AA and AA Grapevine
WELCOME
What a blessing, these stories from our companions in AA! For when we came to Alcoholics Anonymous, that is exactly what we heard—tales of the journeys those who were here before us had taken from the darkness of alcoholism into the fullness of new light.
Listening to such stories, freely given, how could anyone not be stirred? We wanted what we could see, however dimly, what these storytellers had. Some among us plunged right into a new life; others moved more slowly. But for all of us, the more we listened, really listened, the more a change came on.
We tried to live the Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the change became more focused—a coming to life, an arousal, if you will, of some part of ourselves lying dormant all these years, perhaps an entire lifetime. So our search began.
For help we turned to our friends, to our sponsors, to readings inside and outside AA. And as we persisted, we began to find something, hard to pin down, at first—a sense that all our seeking now brought with it the dawning of arrival.
We found ourselves going about our many daily tasks with a different slant on things. Indeed, for some of us the world may have begun to seem entirely new. Oh, our old habits often banged into the new, but even so we found that life without alcohol, without some constantly beckoning spree, could be lived fully, joyfully, whatever came our way.
These, then, are our stories, our spiritual awakenings.
The Editors
Beginnings
We start with the voices of our cofounders, plus two early friends of AA. One friend, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, one-time minister of the Riverside Church in New York City, talks about the “essential truths” of our Twelve Steps. “Just as around our bodies there is a physical universe from which replenishing power comes into us,” he observes, “so around our souls there is a spiritual Presence in whose fellowship our lives can be sustained and our characters transformed.”
A spiritual presence in which characters are transformed. According to psychiatrist Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, another early friend of AA, central to this transformation is our AA principle of anonymity “The great religions are conscious of the need for nothingness if one is to attain grace,” he writes, later adding, “the maintenance of a feeling of anonymity—of a feeling ‘I am nothing special’—is a basic insurance of humility and so a basic safeguard against further trouble with alcohol.”
Dr. Bob takes up the topic of humility when he speaks of the kitchen table, “that modest piece of furniture” around which so much of AA’s early history was played out. “Experience has taught us,” he says, “that simplicity is basic.” Although, in Dr. Bob’s words, “the ego of the alcoholic dies a hard death,” in the transformation of sobriety we can find some measure of humility.
And finally, stirred by the simplicity of the gravesite where Dr. Bob and his wife, Anne, lie buried, Bill W. is led to comment that the real monument to his life is “one word only, which we AAs have written. That word is Sacrifice.”
Spiritual presence, transformation, anonymity, humility, simplicity, sacrifice. What better foundation upon which to build new lives?
THOSE MARVELOUS TWELVE STEPS
June 1960
An interpretation of the Steps by an eminent scholar who was not one of us—but was always one with us
It was no theologian, spinning theories about God, who wrote AA’s Twelve Steps. They were hammered out of the hard rock of experience by men in desperate need. But, speaking as a clergyman who never was an alcoholic, I read those Twelve Steps with profound intellectual admiration. They state with amazing clarity and conciseness the essential truths, both psychological and theological, which underlie the possibility of transformed character.
It is not the alcoholic alone who comes to the place where he has to admit that he is powerless to manage his life. A nervous breakdown brought me there. Completely knocked out, in a sanitarium, my will power so far gone that the harder I tried the worse off I was, I had to admit that my life had become unmanageable. It was then, when I was powerless to save myself, that I desperately welcomed a Power from beyond myself. When I read Step Two— Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity —that hit my target in dead center.
The Twelve Steps of AA are not true for alcoholics only; they are basic and universal truths. So it was when Robert Louis Stevenson was transformed from aimless, feckless, irresponsible living into a vigorous, purposeful life, and ascribed the change to “that unknown steersman whom we call God.”
There are two techniques indispensable for a sane and healthy life. The first is will power—putting our backs into it and trying hard. The second is intake—hospitality to power from beyond ourselves, what Paul called being “strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man.” The first is like a tree’s fruit; the second is like a tree’s roots. After many years of personal counseling, I am sure that, soon or late, every life runs into some experience where the first technique peters out and the second technique becomes critically necessary.
Here again, the Twelve Steps state a universal truth. Of course, we must try hard, but even physical output is not the whole story; intake—air, food, sunlight—is essential. My basic religious faith is that, just as around our bodies there is a p