It’s usually pretty easy for me to be pleasant to the people in an A.A. setting. While I’m working to stay sober, I’m celebrating with my fellow A.A.s our common release from the hell of drinking. It’s often not so hard to spread glad tidings to my old and new friends in the program. He cannot picture life without alcohol. Some day he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end.

Provided we strenuously avoid turning these realistic surveys of the facts of life into unrealistic alibis for apathy or defeatism, they can be the sure foundation upon which increased emotional health and therefore spiritual progress can be built. At the time it, the Daily Reflections, seemed to me to have only one saving grace, if you will excuse the pun, that it was written by AA members. And, as one would expect from the heavily Christian membership of AA, this led to its being filled with writings from folks who think that God got them sober.There are probably a couple of dozen daily readings in there which one might call secular in the sense that they do not have any religious message in them (even if maybe a “spiritual” one), but the vast majority follow this script: Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Now granted by today’s standards that is not nearly enough, so we in secular AA who are involved in General Service work must continue to seek to widen the door with more appropriate literature. At last year’s conference we gained conference approval for the Grapevine to publish a collection of the some 45 stories that have been published since 1962 written by agnostics and atheists. That book when published will be hugely important to those who have other beliefs beside the majority of Christian believers and those of us with agnostic or no beliefs.

I think it’s naïve to think that AA will remove, or tone down, the God talk in any of the conference-approved books in the foreseeable future. Seeking change in Daily Reflections is the wrong place to make a stand, in my opinion. I’m too old to pin much hope on a notoriously inflexible organization being prodded into more than token gestures of flexibility. I live in the middle of the mid-American, red-stated heartland, aka Trumplandia, surrounded mostly by farmers and folks who supply farmers with what they need to grow corn and soybeans. Except for one secular AA meeting, I attend a couple of mainstream, Christian-oriented meetings, where the Daily Reflection is always read.While there are a few dozen good, and even some “very good” entries (for instance January 12), many of the reflections by agnostic standards do seem unusually naïve or even irrational for having been published so relatively late in the century. Jumping on the tale end of this thread a bit late from the foggy mountains of Pennsylvania where Jill and I are visiting one of our daughters. People who want to find the reflections do not have to look very far. They can find the original hard copy book: Why all this insistence that every A.A. must hit bottom first? The answer is that few people will sincerely try to practice the A.A. program unless they have hit bottom. For practicing A.A.’s remaining eleven Steps means the adoption of attitudes and actions that almost no alcoholic who is still drinking can dream of taking.

Recently I marked 30 years as a sober atheist member of AA. And locally our Freethinkers Meeting of AA will celebrate our first anniversary on the first Monday in February. Take May 19, “Giving Without Strings”. A bit naïve like much in this book is, but otherwise much in tune with the strong core aspects of the program – until they throw in “my life is full of a loving god of my understanding…” – a piece which could just as well have been left out, and the reflection would have said exactly the same with respect to its applicability to the real world. Thing is, I’m ok with the actual contributors – who knows, maybe their words came from an important recovery experience, one that really helped, and they wanted to express gratitude somehow, but at the time were under the influence of some hardcore types.While we have seen signs that the General Service Board is staffed by open-minded people, the General Service Conference which makes all the decisions for AA literature seems bent on exercising “tyranny of the majority” by keeping all of AA as Christian as possible. Some of our early literature has specifically Christian roots. What Bill wrote in 1938 with three years of sobriety is forgivable. The way Bill’s every word from those beginnings is canonized while his later writings are ignored is not. It is truly awful to admit that, glass in hand, we have warped our minds into such an obsession for destructive drinking that only an act of Providence can remove it from us. Finally, in 1990, the General Service Conference approved a daily reflections book… (and) the first printing of Daily Reflections was completed in September 1990. This volume had its beginning in an Advisory Action of the 1987 General Service Conference, and fulfills a long-felt need in the Fellowship for a collection of reflections that moves through the calendar year—one day at a time.