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)
