Traditions aside

Here's a post I wrote some time ago but never published.

Last Thursday I attended our local Intergroup meeting. It was a good reminder of how "a loving God may express Himself ion our group conscience." I wrote a little article for the newsletter on the subject, but since it is on my mind I would like to stray briefly from our walk through the Big Book to discuss an interesting way of looking at the first several Traditions.

The expression of God in our group conscience is anything but nebulous. If there were no tangible way for a Higher Power to guide the fellowship then all this talk about seeking and doing God's will would be pointless. When I was a newcomer, this idea that we could receive direct guidance from God seemed to be silly at best and a delusion otherwise. But I saw that AA had somehow survived all these years governed from below by a pack of fractious drunks. If I could understand how God managed that minor miracle, then maybe there was an answer to this question of guidance.

I grew up in a musical atmosphere. My home was filled with it constantly and my mother saw to it that her children knew the classics, understood jazz, could play an instrument and sing. Christmas was an especially musical time. We broke out all the Christmas albums and sang along with all the carols. Why am I telling you all this? Because I noticed something very odd. We had different groups, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, a couple of others I can't name, and they sang some of the same songs and they ALL SOUNDED ALIKE! How was that possible? How could groups of totally different people sound so similar?

I eventually found the answer in the physics of sound and human perception of it. (Stay with me here.) What was happening was very simple. Every individual voice was different, but when they sang together the individual differences cancelled out and what you heard was the distilled essence of human voices. And so it is in the AA group. In any group of people seeking to do God's will as they understand it, there will be differences, sometime great ones between people but if you listen carefully to what is common in the voice of the group you hear what I believe is the purified essence of the voice of God. That's why we can't trust our own direct guidance. It has to filtered through our experience in the group.

So this business of divine guidance starts to make sense in the context of the group and the Traditions actually provide a very clear model for how this functions in the real world. I want to examine the first several to show how this plays out.

Tradition One

Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon A.A. unity.

If God is to speak through the group, there first has to BE a group, a group of people who put unity ahead of their own personal agendas. The cornerstone of all the Traditions is this inviolable necessity of unity.

Tradition Two

For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience.

There it is in black and white. There is only one authority. And that authority finds its expression ONLY in the group conscience.

Tradition Three

The only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.

The unity of the First Tradition arises organically from our need for a common solution. If God is to express Himself in the group, then the members of that group must be clearly defined. We can't be all things to all people, but we must be one thing to ourselves.

Tradition Four

Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A. as a whole.

If the group is to express the voice of God, it MUST be free from coercion. And the converse is true as well. No group can interfere with another group's expression. Autonomy seems like a troubling proposition. How can an organization composed of stubborn drunks possibly survive if all its authority is decentralized? Yet that's precisely why we have survived. Within the minimal confines of the Tradition, groups can express God's will. And if we are all growing toward God according to the light we have been shown, then we are growing closer together as well.

Tradition Five

Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

The group carries "its" unique message. The group should certainly strive to carry the AA message, but it does so in its own voice. That is its primary purpose. And we should never criticize another group's message, no matter how wrong it may seem to us. Unity is the inviolable principle here. Trust God to carry His message, even if it is filtered through human weakness. That is as true for the groups I agree with as it is for those whom I don't.

As I have heard, the Steps keep us from killing ourselves and the Traditions keep us from killing each other.