In our belief, any scheme of combating alcoholism which proposes wholly to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure.. If the alcoholic tries to shield himself he may succeed for a time, but he usually winds up with a bigger explosion than ever. We have tried these methods. These attempts to do the impossible have always failed. Release from alcohol, and not flight from it, is our answer.
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[2]I find it somewhat curious to hear folks affectionately refer to the person who helped them get to AA as their “Eskimo”. The only reference in the Big Book to the term is found in the preceding paragraph in which the idea of isolating the alcoholic from any association with alcohol is smashed saying that an alcoholic who needs to do so: “…still has an alcoholic mind; there is something the matter with his spiritual status. His only chance for sobriety would be some place like the Greenland Ice Cap, and even there an Eskimo might turn up with a bottle of scotch and ruin everything!”
An Eskimo is someone who comes along and brings the hammer down on all hope. This, in most cases, is what is needed to hit the kind of bottom that makes sobriety through spiritual renewal possible. The spiritual path we need to take for sobriety is not the; churchy, easy-chair with smoking jacket, spirituality of sophistication and refined taste. It is a hard-core confrontation of the darkest spiritual influences. Or, if you will, the Tent-maker wrote to the Ephesians: “We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world….” The battle, therefore, is within where no sponsor, no fellowship, no religious zeal can better the direct and honest surrender to the source of Light; a Power greater than all the darkness of addiction and alcoholism.
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