My Small Group, Anonymous

A year ago I joined a small group of men and women that meets in the early morning every day. The group is affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous.

I started attending not because I have a problem with alcohol. I don’t. But I do have friends who are recovering alcoholics and who often speak of their AA experiences in the most intriguing ways. So I decided to see for myself what they were talking about.

Going online I discovered dozens of nearby gatherings to pick from, available around the clock: noon, dinner time, midnight, or—like the one I chose—6:30 A.M. Each meeting is held in rented or borrowed facilities (AA owns no property), is convened by volunteers (AA pays no one), and is never advertised (AA attracts, never promotes).

When I confided my intention to go to an AA meeting, a few friends had concerns. “What if you meet someone you know?” one asked. “What if you’re seen coming out of the meeting? What will people think? Aren’t you worried about rumors that Gordon must be drinking?”

Frankly, I decided not to worry about what some people might think. Jesus apparently didn’t when he showed up at a few drinking events. Is it possible, I asked, if he’d be fascinated by AA, too? Wouldn’t he be sympathetic toward any group focusing on human redemption?

The meeting I chose happened in the basement of a so-called liberal church. There was a circle of 17 steel folding chairs. On each chair was a copy of The Big Book, the “Bible” of the 12 Step movement. I was no sooner seated than the people on either side of me introduced themselves (first names only) and expressed gladness that I was there. In fact, before the hour ended, four men, one after the other, handed me cards and said, “I’m John (or Brian or Alex), and here’s my cell number. Call me anytime, and I’ll come and meet you if you need a friend.”

Change does not come easily in most of the stories in AA. But it does come.

Their assumption? I was going to need their help at some point.

Promptly at 6:30 the group quieted. All 17 of us sat reflectively holding our 16-ounce cups of coffee or Coca-Cola. There was no music or video or offering; just a greeting from the designated facilitator (a different man or woman every day) who welcomed us with a reminder that no one could smoke and that confidentiality was a supreme value.

“My name is Jeff, and I’m an alcoholic,” he said. In turn everyone else followed with their name: “My name is Roberta, and I’m an alcoholic … my name is Todd, alcoholic.” With each introduction came a response from the group, “Hi, Roberta” … “Hi Todd.” I soon learned that many of these men and women had been introducing themselves similarly for months, in some cases years. But saying their names each morning seemed important so that newcomers like me weren’t embarrassed.

When my turn came I froze. Should I fib? Should I try to fit in by saying, “My name is Gordon and I’m an alcoholic.” But since I wasn’t, I decided that would be a dumb idea.

“My name is Gordon … first time here.” The group responded: “Hi, Gordon … keep on coming; keep on coming,” which I soon learned was sort of an AA cliché like the “praise-the-Lord” line we say in church when nothing else comes to mind.

A silly piece of me—not made of God—wanted to add to my introduction, I write books and articles; I speak at leadership conferences. But I knew that none of this would impress anyone.

The fact is that the group only wanted to know one thing: Was my life broken, and how could they help?

Introductions over, we said the serenity prayer (traditionally attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr): “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

My first impression? This is a good prayer. It’s not a bunch of words cobbled together on the spot that promises everything and delivers nothing. This prayer acknowledges that there are things in one’s shattered life that may never change (so accept them!) and things that can be changed (so be courageous and change them!). Beyond, the prayer said, there is need of insight to know which is which.

Then the facilitator indicated a page number in The Big Book: Alcoholics Anonymous, 7th edition. We would read several pages, each of us reading a paragraph out loud.

The Big Book contains a sizable collection of stories about men and women who have succumbed to alcoholism and then entered recovery (a word not unlike salvation in a Christian group). Long time AA’ers know the stories well. But they never tire of reading them again.

Every Big Book story—and I’ve now read scores of them—seems to follow the same pattern. A successful life goes off the rails. Alcohol becomes the drug-of-choice to dull the spiritual pain, and it soon dominates everything in one’s life. Thinking becomes skewed, behavior becomes destructive, relationships and jobs implode.

Then the story changes—a kind of conversion—when the alcoholic faces up to his condition (called “reaching bottom”) and seeks help. Enter, AA and its program.

Change does not come easily in most of these stories. But it does come. And each of the narratives in The Big Book ends with a description of a transformed life, which is not just peaceable and whole but productive. The drunk becomes a contributor to his or her world, bringing other alcoholics into the program. I grew to love these stories we read each morning.

On that first morning, when we finished the story, we took turns talking about what we learned. Each person had his or her few minutes to talk. A few comments were off the wall, daffy, not cogent. But others? Powerful, moving, convicting. I wished that my church friends could have heard them.

“I began drinking in Vietnam,” one man said. “It was the only way I knew to deal with all the killing I was into. Our unit would come out of the bush after several days of torching homes, shooting up villages, killing possible informers. The only way to forget what I’d just done was to get as drunk as I could.

“When I left Nam, I kept drinking because I found readjusting to normal life almost impossible. That was 35 years ago. I drank almost every day for 28 years. My wife and kids left me. I couldn’t keep a job. I went from shelter to shelter, rehab to rehab.

“Then I joined the program. The first thing I heard was that I’d have to do a 90/90 (90 meetings in 90 days) if I was to have any hope of recovery. So I did it. Along the way, I got a sponsor and started through the steps (the 12 Steps). There’ve been slips (returns to drinking) along the way, but now I’ve been sober for 16 years, and next week I get my 17-year chip.” (At this everyone, including me, applauded). Getting a chip is a big thing for a recovering alcoholic.

In meetings that followed, I heard many stories similar to this one. Not every one was a success story. There were lots of slips. Lots of dropouts. And lots of sadness.

Kelley: “I was eight years sober. Eight years! And then last August a friend offered me a drink. I thought, ‘[expletive deleted] … I’ll just take two sips to see if the stuff still tastes the way I remember.”

Kelley paused. And then said, “Two [expletive] sips! The next thing I remember was last week—four months later. Think of it: I was smashed for four months. And now I’m sober for nine days.” (The AA clock of sobriety starts all over again when there’s been a slip.) For Kelley it was as if the eight years of sobriety never existed.

Back on that first visit when the circle of conversation reached me, I said, “I don’t know if I should be here or not. But the meeting is listed as an open one, and I figured you wouldn’t mind a non-drinker sitting with you. I love your stories. And I love the spirit in which you tell them. If you don’t mind, I’ll come back.”

“Keep coming … keep coming,” the group said again. And that was when the business cards were given to me. I suspect some thought I was in denial and would one day acknowledge that I too was an alcoholic.

In an AA meeting, there are no homeless men and there are no prostitutes. We’re just a bunch of drunks helping each other stay sober for one more day.

When the hour ended, the group stood, joined hands, and said the serenity prayer a second time. Lots of people hugged—some even hugged me. We put the chairs back where they belonged and headed for our places of work.

From that day forward for many months I went to the AA meetings as often as I could. I began to understand why some said, “I woke up at four this morning and couldn’t wait until it was time to get here. I need you people so much. I’m a much stronger person after the meeting is over. I can go without a drink for another 24 hours.” I imagined church-people saying this about Sunday worship.

Me? The non-drinker? I often left AA meetings deeply moved, sometimes in tears. I left feeling I’d been with people who were dealing with soul-level issues. For them this hour was about life and death. Something in my soul resonated with the honesty of the group. There was not an ounce of judgment in the circle. Just openness. Everything was on the table.

In all the months I attended AA, I never learned a last name, or what anyone did for a living, or even what anyone’s economic position was. These things made no difference. The primary issue was recovery, nothing else.

The word “program” is big to alcoholics. “I love the program,” an alcoholic may say. Or “I owe everything to the program.”

The program is simple: do meetings regularly, get a sponsor who holds you accountable, embrace the 12 Steps one by one. And when you finish the twelfth, go back to the first step and start again. No preaching, no great visions, no super buildings in these meetings: just small groups of men and women present to each other, persuading each other to stay sober.

Some know the story of the AA movement. It began in the mid 1930s when two alcoholics, Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson, met. Something mysterious happened to the two of them one Sunday afternoon as they talked in private in Akron, Ohio. Promising to hold each other accountable, Wilson and Smith launched a fellowship for alcoholics. Soon the program took shape. There came the 12 Steps, a series of principles of life that—step by step—took an alcoholic through a process that came to be called Recovery.

Samples? Step 1: We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol. Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. Step 12: We tried to carry this message to (other) alcoholics.

Some will react when I say that the 12 Steps sound very biblical to me. They parallel what the biblical writers set forth as a way of overcoming the captivity of sin. They clarified for me what the Christian gospel is supposed to accomplish in the life of a man or woman.

I asked one alcoholic, “What’s it like to come to a meeting where the man on your right has been sleeping in a cardboard box and the women to your left is a prostitute? How do you do this?”

“You don’t get it,” he responded. “In an AA meeting, there are no homeless men and there are no prostitutes. We’re just a bunch of drunks helping each other stay sober for one more day. Where we sleep or how we make our living has little to do with our addictions.”

Recovering alcoholics often rise early in the morning. They pray and meditate with the help of spiritual literature. They attend meetings several times a week. Some may go to two meetings a day if their struggle is acute. The alcoholic keeps in close—often daily—contact with his sponsor, a fellow-alcoholic who is also in recovery but experienced enough to ask tough questions, offer stern rebukes, and spot the lies that alcoholics tell themselves and others.

Failures in the program? Indeed. Some say the fallout rate can be as high as 70 percent. It is shocking to see a man or woman who has been sober seven years, thinking he’s no longer vulnerable, take one drink—just one beer—and start the captivity all over.

Looking back over this past year, I think I learned several important things:

· Alcoholism is as illustrative of what the Bible calls sin as anything I know. It is a spiritual disease that warps the brain, destroys common sense, generates selfishness, and twists the truth. A classic alcoholic is a habitual liar, sure he’s never wrong, convinced that everyone else is to blame for his problems.

Such delusions can only be dealt with when the alcoholic reaches some kind of bottom where life has become intolerable.

Then like the Psalmist he finally calls out and begins the slow, often painful, rise from the bottom of the pit. The rise begins when he calls upon God, and admittedly many call upon a “God” that would not meet the theologian’s standard. But one has to start somewhere.

· Transparency. The alcoholic’s price of admission to an AA meeting is acknowledged brokenness. Better to stay away from an AA meeting if you’re not ready to be truthful. Recovering alcoholics spot hypocrisy instantly. And they will not tolerate it. In AA the beginning assumption is that everyone is broken, unable to help themselves.

My church tradition speaks of spiritual brokenness (or sinfulness), but often acts surprised whenever that brokenness becomes evident. We can speak all we want of the virtue of repentance, but genuine repentance can only happen where people—like the Prodigal’s father—know how to respond graciously to the repentant one. I’d say that some form of repentance happens in almost every AA meeting.

A woman in our group says, “Yesterday at the market I found myself in the wine aisle. Now how did I get there? I couldn’t stop looking at all the beautiful bottles and imagining their new flavors. I even held a few bottles in my hands. I looked at those wines like some of you guys look at pornography. I wanted to open a bottle so badly. And think of it, I’ve been sober for 22 years … that d___ desire never goes away.”

· Acceptance. You have to really be obnoxious to get rejected from an AA meeting. I’ve seen people stoned on drugs, smelling badly, almost irrational. All welcomed! Every person is greeted as a potential 12-stepper.

One morning Kathy—I guessed her age at 35—joined us for the first time. One look at her face caused me to conclude that she must have been Hollywood-beautiful at 21. Now her face was swollen, her eyes red, her teeth rotting. Her hair looked unwashed, uncombed for who knows how long.

“I’ve been in five states in the past month,” she said. “I’ve slept under bridges on several nights. Been arrested. Raped. Robbed (now weeping). I don’t know what to do. I … don’t … want … to … be … homeless … any more. But (sob) I can’t stop drinking (sob). I can’t stop (sob). I can’t …”

Next to Kathy was a rather large woman, Marilyn, sober for more than a dozen years. She reached with both arms toward Kathy and pulled her close, so close that Kathy’s face was pressed to Marilyn’s ample breast. I was close enough to hear Marilyn speak quietly into Kathy’s ear, “Honey, you’re going to be OK. You’re with us now. We can deal with this together. All you have to do is keep coming. Hear me? Keep on coming.” And then Marilyn kissed the top of Kathy’s head.

I was awestruck. The simple words, the affection, the tenderness. How Jesus-like.

I couldn’t avoid a troubling question that morning. Could this have happened in the places where I have worshiped? Would there have been a space in the program for Kathy to tell her story? Would there have been a Marilyn to respond in this way?

I have been around enough to have heard the criticisms hurled at Alcoholics Anonymous by some Christians. Yes, the movement prefers the term Higher Power to God. The name and the saving power of Jesus are rarely mentioned. AA does seem to scorn the church. But may I be blunt. This may be because so many AA people were once church people and found little that spoke into their captivity. Then they came into the AA orbit, and something good, something redemptive happened.

No, I can’t respond to many anti-AA allegations. But I do know that the steps readily parallel the ideas I see in the Scriptures. And the concluding product? A recovering, transformed human being who cares for others—seems quite similar to what Jesus seemed to be seeking. The woman Jesus met at Sychar fits this description.

Let the bullets fly. I’m not sure that God worries a lot about being called by alternative names any more than I was bothered when my infant children called me other names than Daddy. (I cared only whether they loved me.) Alcoholics in the program know—no equivocation—that recovery begins when one admits that they are in a pit and can’t get out on their own. The pathway to salvation has a similar starting point.

· Community. I have spent my entire life as part of the Christian church. I am enthusiastically surrendered to the idea of the church as a place where love (the love of Christ) is supreme and the transforming gospel is proclaimed. But only rarely have I seen the depth of caring, openness, and servanthood that I have seen in AA groups.

What startled me in the AA world was the number of people I met who are members of churches and yearn for their congregation to offer what they experience at AA meetings. Not infrequently, when I have spoken publicly about my AA experience, people have approached me afterward to say, “Thank you for telling the AA story. I’m a friend of Bill’s” (an admission of one’s AA involvement).

I have to ask: What if church leaders sought out some AA folk and sat down and asked some questions? “What are you guys doing that we need to know about? What have you discovered that—if we adopted it—could make our ministry to broken people more effective? What is God doing among you that we need to allow him to do among us?” I think it would be a profitable conversation.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership Journal and chancellor of Denver Seminary.