A "Delusion" for You -- Ending the Vision

We have shown how we got out from under. You say, "Yes, I'm willing. But am I to be consigned to a life where I shall be stupid, boring and glum, like some righteous people I see? I know I must get along without liquor, but how can I? Have you a sufficient substitute?"

Yes, there is a substitute and it is vastly more than that. It is a fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. There you will find release from care, boredom and worry. Your imagination will be fired. Life will mean something at last. The most satisfactory years of your existence lie ahead. Thus we find the fellowship, and so will you.

The following passage emerges near the end of the Big Book, inviting new-comers who have gotten sober to enter the conviviality of Alcoholics  Anonymous, to have fun in the meetings.

I have been to many meeting in my life, and I can tell you that I have never met so concentrated a collective of bitter, empty, unhappy people.

Yes, this is a sweeping statement. Let me qualify it somewhat - the Big Book wants to give the newcomer that a warm and wonderful life await him or her upon entering the program..

From the first day, visitors and speakers who shared about their experience will tell you that they get tired of the same recovering alcoholics who repeat the same empty stories.

"What it was like. . .  what happened. . . what it's like now. .'

Yet I remember one guy, Gary, he was a gregarious fellow, a lot of fun, yet he admitted that his life had not gotten any better, aside from no longer drinking. He once shared with me that he had written a ninety-page letter to his Dad, who was living in a nursing home. What was that man still searching for that he had not found in AA?

In some meetings, members would bicker and fight with each other. I still remember how one member would pick on another man, an older gentleman who command a deep respect because he at least identified that people in AA did not have "drinking problems" but rather "living problems."

Of course, most people do not want to hear that their best efforts not to drink are enough. That is just a bunch of empty nonsense. We have more than living problems, of course, since we are all dead in our trespasses. Yet the older man was right on the  money when it came to the real problems that bedevil members of AA.

The idea of a warm and happy fellowship in AA is just not true, like a dysfunctional family that poses for the family portrait at the mall photo-shop, only to snap and bark at each other on the way home in the car, and then Mom passe out on the couch drunk while Dad abuses the kids.

The desire for happy, joyous, and free does not come from the meetings. I and many others can attest that the moment we walked out of those  meetings, our lives took a turn for the better!