A Great Fact For Us

Wednesday, August 7, 2013:

Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us. Ask him in your morning meditation what you can do for the man who is still sick. The answers will come, if your own house is in order. But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got. See to it that your relationship with Him is right, and great events will come to pass for you and countless others. This is a Great Fact for us.

Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 164

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At the time the book this quote comes from was published, only a handful of people called themselves members of this obscure Fellowship. Yesterday, I sat in meditation with my Fellowship. Afterwards, one of us shared that she has no dogma except for the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of AA and even that dogma is her personal practice. I thought about what “dogma” meant and it occurred to me: The difference is that Dogma is a set of beliefs figuratively set in stone. A dogma is a belief commonly held by a group and it usually takes an act of faith to believe; i.e., life after death for the righteous, reincarnation, or the transfiguration of wine into the blood of Christ. We take it on faith that someone before us has experienced these “mysteries”. Another dogma is one that proclaims its Book, (the Koran; Sutras; Vedas; scriptures or Bible) is divinely inspired and that every word of it is sacred. Very few religious fanatics... true believers... would say that their Book is suggestive only. That is exactly why faith in our book isn't a dogma.

Bill Wilson rolls over in his grave, so to speak, when some of us speak of the Big Book as our Bible. It was considered by him, and the early Fellowship of Alcoholics, to be a text book, a manual, a blue-print instead. It is a guide, one of many, for recovery from alcoholic. We don’t have a monopoly on this truth in the same spirit that some Hindus or Buddhists believe that their Vedas and Sutras as road maps of the territory, a Great Fact, to be traveled for enlightenment. Once on the road, everything on that map… the territory it describes, is one that will be experienced by the traveler. The Great Fact for us is that our suggestions will lead us in the direction of recovery and nothing beyond that.

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