Another retreat...

Today I signed up for another retreat. But, it will not be like any other retreat I have ever been on.

The Lodge at Hazelden - a facility devoted to the study of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book and the spirituality that flows from it - is holding a special, free retreat for employees in two weeks. And, I'm rarin' to go! Here's why.

About two years ago, Hazelden published a book entitled, "The Book That Started It All." It is a large, oversized coffee-table book that is a very special book to AAers. In it were reproduced the original pages from the manuscript that Bill W. used to draw up what we now know as the first 164 pages of the Big Book. The pages are laid out, in order, and each page has the equivalent of a photograph of the original typewritten manuscript. You can tell it is old by the style of type of the old Royal typewriter it was written on (according to the secretary to Bill W. who wrote the Big Book). You can also see how it was faded and, in some places, torn or folded.

The most impressive part of it is that there are hand-written comments in the margins and crossed out or overwritten words throughout the pages. Many of these marks were made by some of the original proof readers of the manuscript - part of the corps of 100 drunks in recovery who formed the core of AA at the time. Hank Parkhurst was one of these people... you can see his trademark initials "HYP" in the lower left hand corner of every page. He was a professional editor at a magazine in New York and had a flare for presenting material in a very readable and acceptable way.

But, much of the marking up came from Bill W. himself. Bill was a brilliant amateur writer. He could put things in a certain way that the sentences rang out with clarity and precision. He was devoted to the topic, of course, but his folksy Vermont-based dialect was, and still is, an astonishingly wonderful way to communicate the process of recovery that these founders of the AA program went through. Bill was a pragmatist at heart: He knew that it was important to make compromises in the language of the book that could accommodate the needs of all the AA members. So, he willingly bent the sentences to make room for people under the broad tent that AA was to become for recovering people. Perhaps no more is this true than were Bill took Hank's advice and added the "...God as we understood Him" rejoinder to the places in the book that Bill had originally just let stand as "God."

So, in two weeks, I'll be among a small group of people who will examine this book in detail. It only deals with the first 164 pages of the Big Book. Throughout the years, these pages have survived four editions and numerous attempts to "refine" the original language. But AA, in its wisdom, has kept those original pages just as they were in 1939 when the first books rolled off the presses. So, we'll be studying history. We'll be deconstructing, page by page, the language and meaning that these words have for recovering people. We'll learn about how Bill did the writing (he dictated the entire book standing up over 9 months) and the philosophy that the pages put forth.

I'm really looking forward to that.

It's good to be back in AA after 24 years in Narcotics Anonymous where you couldn't breath a word about the Big Book or even mention Bill W.'s name. NA is still trying to carve out its own territory and is very sensitive to comparisons to AA. So, when I made the jump back to AA I found I was going home. This retreat is like settling in next to a warm fireplace in that home.

All the best,

Roger W.