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@vhs19721204
Truth without love is cruelty, and confrontation without a real answer is stark brutality
Don P. (via vhs19721204)
P. 14
There is a widely held belief in A.A. that if a newcomer will simply continue to attend meetings, “Something will finally rub off on you.” And the implication, of course, is that the something that rubs off will be this so-called miracle of A.A. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that many people in A.A. accept this statement quite literally. I have observed them over the years. They faithfully attend meetings, faithfully waiting for “something to rub off.” The funny part about it is that “something” is rubbing off on them. DEATH. They sit there–week after month after year–while mental, spiritual, and physical RIGOR MORTIS slowly sets in.
This literature is in our newcomers package we hand out at my morning meeting. Ask yourself one short question if meeting makers make it, WHY do people with long term sobriety go back out? IS there something missing? My sponsor once told me, if a heavy drinker puts down alcohol, there life gets better. Now if your a real alcoholic, and put down the bottle, your life turns to shit. WHY? Because I just put down my solution, and as a result of that, I become restless, irritable and discontented. A dry drunk as they say, unless I can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks. Well you ask, what’s our new sense of ease and comfort? Not just showing up at meetings. Thinking the miracle is going to rub off on us. Three fold dis-ease. Three fold solution. That’s why we have a triangle, body, mind, and spirit with a circle around it, which brings it all into unity. The base of the triangle is the most important part, the foundation which is recovery equals the 12 steps which equals spirit. Unity equals fellowship which equals body. Now we have service which equals carrying the message equals mind. Picture a three legged stool, remove any one leg, it will fall, just like us, as a drunk I need all three. Remove the steps, I’m drunk. Remove the fellowship, I’m drunk. Remove service, helping others, I’m drunk. The worst part it might take a month or even worst years but it would only be a matter of time. The sound of the clock coming to a slow stop, tick tock down to deafing sound of the second hand, click… click… click…. until rigor mortis sets in or drink. What’s your choice, ha like you even got one.
Trust God Clean House Help Others…. God Bless
The only person I try to be better than, is the person I was yesterday.
Chris D. (via vhs19721204)
The left side of my brain sell’s bullshit and the right side buys it
Chris D. (via vhs19721204)
You can’t change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
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We don’t change the message, the message changes us.
Chris D. (via vhs19721204)
He who angers you, controls you!
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I asked my sponsor, What is character? He answered, Doing the right thing when no-one is watching you!
Chris D. (via vhs19721204)
If God is your Co-pilot - Swap Seats!
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To recommend just sobriety is just about impossible for an alcoholic. The reason we drink is because we can’t stand living sober. It hurts too much - it’s too confusing. When I’m filled with self, there’s nothing but suffering.
Don P. (via vhs19721204)
The left side of my brain is never right …….. and to make matters worse the right side has left.
(via vhs19721204)
Bill W.
The Origin Of Our Serenity Prayer
As published in BOX-459, August/September, 1992 With Additional Information 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 alter; the courage to alter those things I can alter; 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 in significance when compared to the fact that, for fifty years, the prayer has become so deeply imbedded 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 Alcoholics Anonymous General Service Office is now located at 475 Riverside Drive borders on a stretch of New York City’s 120th St., between Riverside Drive and Broadway that is now named Reinhold Niebuhr Place.
(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
Bill
MUST BE HONEST WITH SOMEONE I chose my sponsor