A group of fellows came upon an amazing way to recover from the hopelessness that is alcoholism, and once tried and tested by thorough experience, the good and the bad ones, they decided to share this in a generous volume. (Our beloved Big Book.) They even thought to share the varied stories with this volume to show the reader just how wide the Broad Highway is, how just about anyone suffering from spiritual sickness can get recover.
(It was so successful that countless other fellowships and programs embraced this same set of divine directions.)
It worked. And the number of successes validated this.
It was a simple recipe of 6 steps expanded to 12 to prevent any wiggle room, to secure the trap doors that they discovered, again by their varied experiences.
Though some might say the directions aren’t clear in the Big Book indeed they are. Their clarity is equal to the fellow’s willingness to let go absolutely. This comes with a rub.
Alcoholics, spiritually sick people for that matter, aren’t fond of letting go absolutely. In other words they’re always looking for the easier, softer way.
It is this peculiar set of people who will always seek to change the recipe the founders and pioneers came upon. It is why the success rates are not the equivalent of what they were in the early days.
The persistence in trying to change the recipe has been happening since day one I’m imagining. While many treatment facilities welcome AA in their places and welcome our fellows in to put on meetings their program does not run congruent to the actual program and narrative in the Big Book. They simply wish to add or take away from the original recipe in the hope they’ll find the next best thing I suppose.
Tragically many die as a result. I’ve been to enough of these funerals over time. Even more tragic are the ones who wander listlessly without hope while remaining spiritually sick.
Stop adding and taking away from the recipe in the book while keeping an open mind to the fact that there are indeed different interpretations to the Broad Highway and that God is indeed there to facilitate it all. A “Plain Language Big Book?” Absolutely laughable.
When someone tries to add and subtract and justify this with the line “we realize we know only a little” it’s as dangerous as the sick bastard who justifies their defects of character by exclaiming “progress not perfection.”
Perhaps what they knew little of when they wrote that was relevant to their faith and the Power of God, perhaps it had absolutely nothing to do with the recipe. Hell, we know their recipe was spot on. And far more successful than those who insist on human aid.
The effort to push a “Plain Language Big Book” diminishes the text Alcoholics Anonymous thereby dismissing it. Why? Ask why?
And referring to the new title as the plain language Big Book is an insult in itself. It’s indicative of the lack of imagination by the non-alcoholic writer pressed to translate something he knows absolutely nothing about, the problem and the solution, and by those who in “service” who are blatantly trying to play God because the idea and mention of God doesn’t fit in with their self-reliance and inability to trust and rely on Him, their inability to let go absolutely.