What do the Three
Legacies of AA represent?
Answer
The three legacies of AA -
recovery, unity and service - in a sense
represent three impossibilities, impossibilities
that we know became possible, and possibilities
that have now borne this unbelievable fruit. Old
Fitzmayo, one of the early AA's and I visited
the Surgeon General of the United States in the
third year of this society and told him of our
beginnings. He was a gentle man, Dr. Lawrence
Kolb, and has since become a great friend of AA.
He said, "I wish you well. Even the sobriety of
a few is almost a miracle. The government knows
that this is one of the greatest health problems
but we have considered the recovery of
alcoholics so impossible that we have given up
and have instead concluded that rehabilitation
of narcotic addicts would be the easier job to
tackle."
Such was the devastating
impossibility of our situation. Now, what has
been brought to bear upon this impossibility
that it has become possible? First, the grace of
Him who presides over all of us. Next, the cruel
lash of John Barleycorn who said. "this you must
do, or die." Next, the intervention of God
through friends, at first a few and now legion!
who opened to us, who in the early days were
uncommitted, the whole field of human ideas.
morality and religion, from which we could
choose.
These have been the wellsprings
of the forces and ideas and emotions and spirit
which were first fused into our Twelve Steps for
recovery. Some of us act well, but no sooner had
a few got sober than the old forces began to
come into play in us rather frail people. They
were fearsome, the old forces, the drive for
money, acclaim, prestige.
Would these forces tear us apart?
Besides, we came from every walk of life. Early,
we had begun to be a cross-section of all men
and women, all differently conditioned, all so
different and yet happily so alike in our
kinship of suffering. Could we hold in unity? To
those few who remain who lived in those earlier
times when the Traditions were being forged in
the school of hard experience on its thousands
of anvils, we had our very, very dark moments.
It was sure recovery was in
sight, but how could there be recovery for many?
Or how could recovery endure if we were to fall
into controversy and so into dissolution and
decay?
Well, the spirit of the Twelve
Steps which have brought us release from one of
the grimmest obsessions known -- obviously, this
spirit and these principles of retaining grace
had to be the fundamentals of our unity. But in
order to become fundamental to our unity, these
principles had to be spelled out as they applied
to the most prominent and the most grievous of
our problems.
So, out of experience came the
need to apply the spirit of our steps to our
lives of working and living together. These were
the forces that generated the Traditions of
Alcoholics Anonymous.
But, we had to have more than
cohesion. Even for survival, we had to carry the
message and we had to function. In fact, that
had become evident in the Twelve Steps
themselves for the last one enjoins us to carry
the message. But just how would we carry this
message? How would we communicate, we few, with
those myriad's who still don't know? And how
would this communication be handled? How could
we do these things. How could we authorize these
things in such a way that in this new, hot focus
of effort and ego that we would not again be
shattered by the forces that had once ruined our
lives?
This was the problem of the Third
Legacy. From the vital Twelfth Step call right
up through our society to its culmination today.
And, again, many of us said: "This can't be
done. It's all very well for Bill and Bob and a
few friends to set up a Board of Trustees and to
provide us with some literature, and look after
our public relations and do all of those chores
for us that we can't do for ourselves. This is
fine, but we can't go any further than that.
This is a job for our elders, for our parents.
In this direction only, can there be simplicity
and security.
And then came the day when it was
seen that the parents were both fallible and
perishable and Dr. Bob's hour struck and we
suddenly realized that this ganglion, this vital
nerve center of World Service, would lose its
sensation the day the communication between an
increasingly unknown Board of Trustees and you
was broken. Fresh links would have to be forged.
And at that time many of us said: This is
impossible, this is too hard. Even in
transacting the simplest business, providing the
simplest of services, raising the minimum
amounts of money, these excitements to us, in
this society so bent on survival have been
almost too much locally. Look at our club
brawls. My God, if we have elections countrywide
and Delegates come down here and look at the
complexity - thousands of group representatives,
hundreds of committeemen, scores of Delegates -
my God, when these descend on our parents, the
Trustees, what is going to happen then? It won't
be simplicity: it can't be. Our experience has
spelled it out.
But there was the imperative, the
must, and why was there an imperative? Because
we had better have some confusion, some
politicking, than to have utter collapse of this
center.
That was the alternative and that
was the uncertain and tenuous ground on which
the General Service Conference was called into
being.
I venture, in the minds of many
and sometimes in mine that the Conference could
be symbolized by a great prayer and a faint
hope. This was the state of affairs in 1945 to
1950. Then came the day when some of us went up
to Boston to watch an assembly elect by
two-thirds vote or lot a Delegate. Prior to
assembly, I consulted all the local politicos
and those very wise Irishmen in Boston said,
"We're going to make your prediction Bill, you
know us temperamentally, but we're going to say
that this thing is going to work." That was the
biggest piece of news and one of the mightiest
assurances that I had up to this time that there
could be any survival for these services.
Well, work it has and we have
survived another impossibility. Not only have we
survived the impossibility, we have so far
transcended it that there can be no return in
future years to the old uncertainties, come what
perils there may.
Now, as we have seen in this
quick review, the spirit of the Twelve Steps was
applied in specific terms to our problems of
living and working together. This developed the
Twelve Traditions. In turn, the Twelve
Traditions were applied to this problem of
functioning at world levels in harmony and
unity. (10th GSC, April, 1960)
