9th Step Promises

11946 views 16 aa

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be

amazed before we are half way through.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.
No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our
experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle
us.
We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do
for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled
among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always
materialize if we work for them.
3rd ed. Big Book pg. 83 & 84

The Origin Of Our Serenity

Prayer
3093 views 5 aa

The Origin Of Our Serenity Prayer

As published in August/September 1992 BOX-459

For many years, long after the Serenity Prayer became attached to the
very fabric of the Fellowship’s life and thought, its exact origin, its
actual author, have played a tantalizing game of hide and seek with
researchers, both in and out of A.A. The facts of how it came to be used
by A.A. a half century ago are much easier to pinpoint.
Early in 1942, writes Bill W., in A.A. Comes of Age, a New York member,
Jack, brought to everyone’s attention a caption in a routine New York
Herald Tribune obituary that read:
“God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot
change,
courage to change the things we can,
and wisdom to know the difference.”
Everyone in A.A.’s burgeoning office on Manhattan’s Vesey Street was
struck by the power and wisdom contained in the prayer’s thoughts.
“Never had we seen so much A.A. in so few words,” Bill writes.
Someone suggested that the prayer be printed on a small, wallet-sized
card, to be included in every piece of outgoing mail. Ruth Hock, the
Fellowship’s first (and nonalcoholic) secretary, contacted Henry S., a
Washington D.C. member, and a professional printer, asking him what
it would cost to order a bulk printing.
Henry’s enthusiastic response was to print 500 copies of the prayer,
with the remark: “Incidentally, I am only a heel when I’m drunk .. . so
naturally, there could be no charge for anything of this nature.”
“With amazing speed,” writes Bill, “the Serenity Prayer came into
general use and took its place alongside our two other favorites, the
Lord’s Prayer and the Prayer of St. Francis .
Thus did the “accidental” noticing of an unattributed prayer, printed
alongside a simple obituary of an unknown individual, open the way
toward the prayer’s daily use by thousands upon thousands of A.A.s
worldwide.
But despite years of research by numerous individuals, the exact origin
of the prayer is shrouded in overlays of history, even mystery.
Moreover, every time a researcher appears to uncover the definitive
source, another one crops up to refute the former’s claim, at the same
time that it raises new, intriguing facts. What is undisputed is the claim
of authorship by the theologian Dr. Rheinhold Niebuhr, who recounted
to interviewers on several occasions that he had written the prayer as
a “tag line” to a sermon he had delivered on Practical Christianity. Yet
even Dr. Niebuhr added at least a touch of doubt to his claim, when he
told one interviewer, “Of course, it may have been spooking around for
years, even centuries, but I don’t think so. I honestly do believe that I
wrote it myself.”
Early in World War II, with Dr. Niebuhr’s permission, the prayer was
printed on cards and distributed to the troops by the U.S.O. By then it
had also been reprinted by the National Council of Churches, as well as
Alcoholics Anonymous.

Dr. Niebuhr was quite accurate in suggesting that

the prayer may have been “spooking around” for centuries. “No one
can tell for sure who first wrote the Serenity Prayer,” writes Bill in A.A.
Comes of Age. “Some say it came from the early Greeks; others think it
was from the pen of an anonymous English poet; still others claim it
was written by an American Naval officer… .” Other attributions have
gone as far afield as ancient Sanskrit texts, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St.
Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza. One A.A. member came across the
Roman philosopher Cicero’s Six Mistakes of Man, one of which reads:
“The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or
corrected.”
No one has actually found the prayer’s text among the writings of
these alleged, original sources. What are probably truly ancient, as
with the above quote from Cicero, are the prayer’s themes of
acceptance, courage to change what can be changed and the free
letting go of what is out of one’s ability to change.
The search for pinpointing origins of the prayer has been like the
peeling of an onion. For example, in July 1964, the A.A. Grapevine
received a clipping of an article that had appeared in the Paris Herald
Tribune, by the paper’s correspondent in Koblenz, then in West
Germany. “In a rather dreary hall of a converted hotel, overlooking the
Rhine at Koblenz,” the correspondent wrote, is a tablet inscribed with
the following words:
“God give me the detachment to accept those things I cannot
titleer;
the courage to titleer those things I can titleer;
and the wisdom to distinguish the one thing from the other.”

These words were attributed, the correspondent wrote, to an 18th-

century pietist, Friedrich Oetinger (1702-1782). Moreover, the plaque
was affixed to a wall in a hall where modern-day troops and company
commanders of the new German army were trained “in the principles
of management and . . . behavior of the soldier citizen in a democratic
state.”
Here, at last, thought A.A. researchers, was concrete evidence-quote,
author, date-of the Serenity Prayer’s original source. That conviction
went unchallenged for fifteen years. Then in 1979 came material,
shared with G.S.O.’s Beth K., by Peter T., of Berlin. Peter’s research
threw the authenticity of 18th-century authorship out the window. But
it also added more tantalizing facts about the plaque’s origin.
“The first form of the prayer,” Beth wrote back, originated with
Boethius, the Roman philosopher (480-524 A.D.), and author of the
book, Consolations of Philosophy. The prayer’s thoughts were used
from then on by “religious-like people who had to suffer first by the
English, later the Prussian puritans . . . then the Pietists from southwest
Germany . . . then A.A.s . . . and through them, the West Germans after
the Second World War.”
Moreover, Beth continued, after the war, a north German University
professor, Dr. Theodor Wilhelm, who had started a revival of spiritual
life in West Germany, had acquired the “little prayer” from Canadian
soldiers. He had written a book in which he had included the prayer,
without attribution, but which resulted in the prayer’s appearance in
many different places, such as army officer’s halls, schools and other
institutions. The professor’s nom de plume? Friedrich Oetinger, the
18th century pietist! Wilhelm had apparently selected the pseudonym
Oetinger out of admiration of his south German forebears.
Back in 1957, another G.S.O. staff member, Anita R., browsing in a New
York bookstore, came upon a beautifully bordered card, on which was
printed:

“Almighty God, our Heavenly Father,

give us Serenity to accept what cannot be changed,
Courage to change what should be changed,
and Wisdom to know the one from the other;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord.”

The card, which came from a bookshop in England, called it the

“General’s Prayer,” dating it back to the fourteenth century! There are
still other claims, and no doubt more unearthings will continue for
years to come. In any event, Mrs. Reinhold Niebuhr told an interviewer
that her husband was definitely the prayer’s author, that she had seen
the piece of paper on which he had written it, and that her husband-
now that there were numerous variations of wording -“used and
preferred” the following form:

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity

the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
 While all of these searchings are intriguing, challenging, even
mysterious, they pale insignificance when compared to the fact that,
for fifty years, the prayer has become so deeply embedded into the
heart and soul of A.A. thinking, living, as well as its philosophy, that
one could almost believe that the prayer originated in the A.A.
experience itself.
Bill made this very point years ago, in thanking an A.A. friend for the
plaque upon which the prayer was inscribed: “In creating A.A., the
Serenity Prayer has been a most valuable building block-indeed a
corner-stone.”
And speaking of cornerstones, and mysteries and “coincidences”-the
building where G.S.O. has now located borders on a stretch of New York
City’s 120th St., between Riverside Drive and Broadway (where the
Union Theological Seminary is situated). It’s called Reinhold Niebuhr
Place.

(end of the article)

(A long version of the Prayer)

God grant me the SERENITY to
accept the things I cannot change;
COURAGE to change the things I can;
and WISDOM to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it:
Trusting that He will make all things
right if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen
(Another long version of the Prayer from Ireland)
God take and receive my liberty,
my memory, my understanding and will,
All that I am and have He has given me
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference
Living one day at a time
Enjoying one moment at a time
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to his will
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy in the next. AMEN
(thanks to Noel D. from Ireland for the long version)
I am responsible. When anyone, anywhere, reaches
out for help, I want the hand of AA always to be there.
And for that I am responsible.

If I move past all of the early lessons in my sobriety and the work that
turned my life around, a few things become clear. One of them is that
the fellowship of AA is a place where I can draw upon wisdom and
strength. It is where I find respite in days of dreary doings (when they
feel like that) and community when I need to have contact with the
world to get me outside of my own head.

Step Five – Building An Arch

Copyright © The A.A. Grapevine, Inc., March 1989
I first heard about Step Five from my sponsor. He had recently taken
him, and it didn’t sound like fun. His immediate reaction to his own
“spiritual house cleaning” was to launch me upon a Fourth Step. He
wanted to give away what he’d received. I thought, “What happened to
‘This is a selfish program’?”
Step Four took a very long time. At all of it I balked. I thought I could
find an easier, softer way, but I could not. With all the earnestness at
his command, my sponsor became cunning, baffling, and powerful,
constantly reminding me that half measures availed me nothing. I
hated him.
The day finally came when even I had to admit that I’d completed Step
Four to the best of my ability. That’s what had me so upset. The best of
my ability didn’t look so hot in those days. I called my sponsor to tell
him I’d finished, expecting to take a six-month to a one-year sabbatical
from the Steps after this arduous trek into my life. That’s when he
lowered the boom. “Great,” he said. “The best time to take the Fifth
Step is right after you finish the Fourth. Meet me at my home tomorrow
at six.” Son of a gun! “Who do you think you are?” I thought, but aloud
I said “Okay, I’ll be there.”
I hung up the phone and said to myself, “I bet Bill W. didn’t have to go
through this!” I used to think the Big Book referred to Step Five when it
said, “What an order! I can’t go through with it.” I thought, how can
talking about all this junk that I never wanted to write down in the first
place make any difference?
By the time I finished Step Five, I knew that I was well on my way
toward “building an arch” through which I would “walk a free man.”
What happened? Did God convert me into a religious AA dervish? Was I
brainwashed by some mystical technique into an AA true believer? Did I
go into permanent shock? None of these things happened. The truth is
much simpler. Step Five simply accomplished exactly what I was
promised, based on the tried and tested experience of Alcoholics
Anonymous.
This is what happened. For starters, I had prepared for Step Five by
making a beginning on the previous Steps. I had my Fourth Step
inventory which had given me new awareness, albeit a not completely
objective one. Nevertheless, I had it. Though the temptation to avoid
sharing with “another human being” was nearly overwhelming, my fear
of not following my sponsor’s instructions to the letter was even
greater.
I arrived at my sponsor’s home promptly at six. I didn’t want to be late
for my “funeral.” He ushered me into the living room and 1 sat in what
was obviously the condemned man’s chair. Given to redundancies in
times of hysteria, I commented on the weather at least twice, and God
only knows how many times I mentioned the state of local AA affairs.
Then my sponsor said those terrible words: “Why don’t you get out
your Fourth Step so we can get started.”
I feared that doors automatically sealed themselves during Fifth Steps.
But I prayed to God and “asked His protection and care with complete
abandon.” “Okay, where do you want to begin,” I asked, hoping for
mercy. “Why don’t we begin with your grudge list,” my sponsor said.
“But before we begin,” he added, “why don’t we pray and ask our
Higher Power for guidance. After all, this is a three-way deal. God is
very much a part of this. It’s his grace that brought you here.”
Sometimes sponsors can really surprise you. This was one of those rare
times. We prayed, then he became his old self again, indicating that it
was time I began. We went over my grudge list, item by item. I read
and explained. He listened and commented. Before we were halfway
through the list, I began to realize that the advice, counseling, and
experience he shared was not only his but that of others as well. It was
the experience of one drunk talking to another, but it was also the
resonating voices of countless men and women in AA who had shared
their experience, strength and hope with each other. Was this God-
consciousness? I wondered as I continued my disclosures.
Finishing the grudge list, we assailed my list of fears. To my surprise, I
discovered my sponsor and I shared some of the same ones. By this
time, occasional laughter interspersed the more serious portions of the
unfolding panorama of my life. I was beginning to feel a sense of relief.
It continued to grow even as we discussed pertinent aspects of my “list
of major human failings the Seven Deadly Sins.” It was incredible! As
years of humiliation, pride, and fear fell away into harmless debris, my
sense of isolation actually began to dissipate. I no longer felt like a
freak, a pathetic caricature of humanity, incapable of integrating
myself into the world about me. The existence of God’s presence was
no theory; it was fact. God was with us and my cup did indeed run
over. It overflowed with his love as it was translated into the
experience, strength, and hope of two twentieth-century alcoholics
joined in the miracle of a spiritual awakening known as recovery.
Those secrets that I’d sworn to take to my grave were now dead and
buried under the fertile soil of new freedom nurtured by truth and
sharing and laughter, moistened by tears of relief and joy, and warmed
by the sunlight of the spirit. “Step Five works! It really does!” I
marveled. I knew now that the man who was leaving was not the same
man who had fearfully entered this Fifth Step sanctuary just a few
hours previously.
Today, after many revisits to Step Five, I know that my initial
experience was no fluke, that “God does move in a mysterious way his
wonders to perform,” and that Step Five is one of those wonders. I’ve
also been privileged to share in the Fifth Step experiences of others.
Since there is nothing like personal experience to qualify one for this
extremely personal spiritual awakening, I would suggest having done
the Fifth Step as a prerequisite for hearing someone else’s. We must be
prepared to share our own Fifth Step disclosures, laughter, and tears so
that the experience of others might be as profound as our own. Being
able to keep confidential the disclosures of others is also essential. This
experience is only between God and ourselves.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his first inaugural address, “The only
thing we have to fear is fear itself” If we’re willing to expose the pages
of our lives to the love and understanding of our Higher Power and a
fellow alcoholic, we’ll surely know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We’ll discover that love is never having to feel alone again; that God’s
presence in our lives has become profound; and that the unity of the
Fellowship of the spirit can be ours so long as we are willing to pass it
on.
Chico C., West Palm Beach, Florida
Cop

Living The Program In All Our

Affairs
1397 views 5 aa

Big Book Stories – Updated (5 of 5)

This is the fifth article in the Grapevine’s series by authors of personal
histories in the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. The Big Book was
published in 1939; a revised, enlarged version came out in 1955. Now,
the author of “The Career Officer,” page 523 in the revised edition,
reports on thirteen more years of sobriety in Ireland, where he first
found AA twenty-one years ago.

Living the Program in All Our Affairs

Copyright © The A.A. Grapevine, Inc., March 1968
More than twelve years have passed since I ended my story in the Big
Book with the words “AA has made me very happy.” Nothing that has
happened since has made me change my mind. The personal details of
my life in between are unimportant to anyone but myself. They have
made me more grateful to our founders and to the vast army of my
comrades in Alcoholics Anonymous. But the passage of time has given
me more time to think. And in the hope that what I write will not be
taken as the views of an Angry Old Man, I put forward some of the
things I think about.
In No Man Is an Island, Thomas Merton wrote, “Tradition is living and
active, but Convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us
automatically; we have to work to understand it. Convention is
accepted passively, as a matter of routine. It offers us only pretended
ways of solving the problems of living, a system of gestures and
formalities …. One goes through an act, without trying to understand
the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same.”
Convention does rule the lives of most of us. We do go through life
saying things and doing things because others do them and say them.
For instance, our Slogans. A slogan originally was the war cry of the
Scottish Highlands. Anyone who can imagine a Highland chief urging
his clan into battle with slogans such as Think or Easy Does It cannot
be very well acquainted with the Scots. Yet for us, today, these AA
slogans are very useful pieces of advice. When we merely accept them
passively, as if brainwashed, that is lazy thinking, and lazy thinking can
become an important defect if applied to our Steps.
The Twelfth Step sets out that our founder members tried to practice
these principles in all their affairs. And still, so many tell us that no one
could possibly apply these principles to his whole life. Is this not lazy
thinking? Do some of us just accept the Steps, to be “with it,” without
working out what these principles really are for each of us?
My own list of the principles I must practice consists of: realism, with
its frequent reminders of humility; faith, anchored to some unchanging
norm of goodness )God, as I understand Him); atonement; patience;
and thinking with spiritual discipline. Can I honestly tell myself that the
practice (though not the finished accomplishment) of these principles is
impossible for me in all my affairs?
Perhaps with advantage to ourselves — especially at the start — we
might pay more attention to a few words in our purpose: to solve our
common problem. Our common problem is not, as we quite naturally
may have thought, just to stop drinking period; we can all remember
from our past the dreary, unending sequence of stop, restart, stop,
restart. The problem is to remain securely abstinent permanently,
albeit we work at it one day at a time. Obviously, no one will stay dry
for long or willingly unless life without drink gives him satisfaction. He
can arrive at that satisfaction only by learning to live with himself in
peace, with his neighbor in charity, and with his conscience in
reasonable repose. That, at least for me, is the guide motif of our
Steps. That is why it doesn’t now seem right to me to go about saying,
“AA is a strange program,” though I used to fro a time. It no longer
appears strange to me. It seems the only sort of recovery program that
could possibly work for an alcoholic.
Yet so many of us still tell a newcomer that he has only to stay dry for
today and to come to meetings. The meetings won’t practice the Steps
for him, though they may and should help him to persevere in his own
practice of them. Even the most meeting-minded member has to pass
 many hours of the day when he is alone and must depend on his own
inner strength. These are the hours when practice of these principles in
all his affairs must cease to be a conventional, superficial acceptance
of them and become a matter of the heart and the will.
I find that over the years I have acquired a few mild dislikes. The
calling of the Higher Power, or God as we understand Him, “The Man
Upstairs” is one. The advertising of some member as a star speaker
and a special attraction is another. (This isn’t envy!) Can we not take
every speaker, silver-tongued or tongue-tied, at his real value of being
another alcoholic who is doing his best to stay recovered himself and
trying to help us to do the same? And I do somehow feel from time to
time that the increasing number of conventions and the like, through
the amount of preliminary organization and work involved, are
diverting time and effort from our primary purpose. These distastes
are, however, very slight ripples in a sea of contentment.
In the sense that I have been a member of our group for all but five
months of its more than twenty years’ existence, I suppose I rank as an
old-timer. My group has always been marvelously kind to me and
tolerant of a personality that has consistently demanded a great
measure of tolerance. Old-timers must often be a headache to younger
members. But the old-timer who has come to realize, as I hope I have
myself, that he is not God’s gift to AA, but that AA is God’s gift to him,
still has something good to give to his group: the demonstration of his
continued sobriety, his active membership, and his gratitude for his
recovery to — under God — the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous.
My prayer for my AA contemporaries and myself is that we may to the
end remain, in Tennyson’s words, “Strong in will / To strive, to seek, to
find and not to yield.”
S. M., Dublin, Ireland
Copyright © The A.A. Grapevine, Inc., March 1968
Tags: aabig bookaa grapevinealcoholics anonymous1968grapevine
articles
Was this helpful?

5 Yes No

Related Articles

 Interview With Searcy W.

 An Interview With George E. Vaillant, M.D. – A Doctor Speaks
 The Real Thing – Louis M.
 Interview With The Author Of: “The Independent Blonde” – Nancy F.
 An Interview With Nell Wing – Spellbound By A.A.
 Indelible Humilit