The Hold of AA

My mother, Pat. went to AA for sixteen years. She had started out in the local Alano Club, then worked her way into more civilized meetings in the South Bay. The type of people who attended these meeings where more civil, more upscale. Women who struggled to stay sober, who relapsed frequently, never frequented those meetings, since the members of these meetings knew each other so well.

After sixteen years in AA, she would tell my sister and me about her last time attending a meeting. She sat with all the women whom she had knownn for so long, and she noticed that the same people showed up with the same upsets, the same gripes, the same physical problems, and nothing was changing. She often talked about one of her friends from the meetings, Jay, an older woman who had stopped drinking, but instead she was smoking packs of cigarettes and taking medications of all kinds. Pat often pointed out that she was not sober.I look back on those days, when she complain how Jay was not really sober, and I can safely so that my mother acted like a real Pharisee, demanding perfection for herself and from everyone else in a program which was fraught with error and folly.

The last meeting she went to, she quickly stormed out as soon as he went in, disgusted with the fact that many of the women whom she congregated with were not "working their program".

Looking back on the nearly ninteen years that passed from the day that she left AA  meetings to the day she died, she was convinced that the program was fine, but that people did not work the program well.

The truth is, no one can work the AA program perfectly, and the steps do not give a person the righteousness, peace, and joy that they are looking for, the triple needs which only God grants us through His Son.

The law, crystallized to an extent in the Twelve Steps, can never make someone righteous, at peace, or joyful:

"19Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. 20Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin." (Romans 3: 19-20)

Imagine that -- law of any kind does not produce a sense of peace and fulfillment, but a neverending uneasiness, bringing us to a guilty end before God. Paul explains this more fully in 2 Corinthians:

"But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away" (2 Corinthians 3: 7)

The Law is the ministry of death, and the minstry of condemnation (2 Corinthians 3: 9). No one can keep the law, no one can live by a set of rules and expect to live, let alone thrive.

The problem for my mother, and later for me, was the idea that there was nothing wrong with the program. The real problem was with all the people in the meetings, and later in the world, who were not serious about "working their own program."

So, Pat left the program, the meetings of AA, but the program never left her. Yet Bill W. did not die for my sins, Bill W. cannot grant me the life that I need. Dr. Bob or AA #3 could never grant me the righteousness that would forever give me peace and calm in the face of a fallen world, a fallen body, and the fallen Accuser of the Brethren.