To be vital, faith must be accompanied by self sacrifice and unselfish, constructive action.
( Big Book, Working With Others, p.94 )As the years go by and I try to persist in understanding and practicing the program of AA it's all become less and less complicated and surprisingly simple.
The fellowship at large tends to get inundated with many ideas and rhetoric from many sources. Those sources include the latest from detox, treatment and rehabilitation centers which tend to do nothing more than urge their clients to go to meetings after their stay. They do not, in my experience do any intensive study of the AA program but tend to be more or less safe places to dry out and learn about addiction or alcoholism "as they see it" and how the medical community understands it.
The program of AA however is, at it's core, a spiritual program of action. A way to seek and establish a relationship with a Higher Power to recover ; recovery through abstaining from alcohol and living life by new principles, spiritual principles. There is some confusion by many as to what the AA program actually is. Many believe it to be the meetings and the fellowship, but I have found through study of the literature that this is not the case at all. To be effective the program ought not be confused with the fellowship. The program is simply the 12 steps. The AA book "12 steps and 12 traditions" has one of my favorite statements about the AA 12 step program of recovery.
AA's Twelve steps are a group of principles, spiritual in their nature, which, if practiced as a way of life, can expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole.
- From The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 15.
