Ray A
Ray A. is a recovering alcoholic who’s been sober in Alcoholics Anonymous since April 26, 1984.
He drank for 25 years and, as with most drunks, alcohol touched every aspect of his life. Early on he earned an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages and a graduate degree in English. As his disease progressed, however, he left a doctoral degree in Comparative Literature unfinished. Alcohol also exacted its toll on his marriage, his family, and a series of promising careers. In midlife, Ray came to AA homeless, alone, and unemployable.
Once in the rooms Ray made progress on many fronts, from personal relations to the establishment of a successful business. By the time of his twelfth sober anniversary, however, he began to suffer an emotional relapse that would worsen over the course of the next six years, result in the collapse of his business, and bring his life crashing down again.
This drawn-out bottom ended in a surrender experience which put Ray on a new path to healing and growth. He was forced to take a hard look at his recovery and find out where things had gone wrong, since he believed he had worked the Steps and done everything the program said to do. In the process, he was also forced to probe into that program and those Steps more deeply than ever.
It was then that he finally began to understand what he had never understood before: the true nature of the principles underlying the 12 Steps and how the practice of those principles can actually bring about the spiritual growth and emotional sobriety that had eluded him all those years and that continues to elude so many recovering alcoholics today.
His progress in this new journey led to the writing of Practice These Principles, a work that reflects his experience as well as years of research into the AA, 12-Step, recovery, and related literature. The first volume discusses Steps 1, 2, and 3 and the second Step 4. Further volumes on the remaining Steps and the 12 Traditions are planned.
The AA Grapevine published Ray’s story in its October 2009 issue under the title “Rebel Without a Cause.”
“Yet, Step 2 and AA spirituality is about nothing if it isn’t about faith in God. Many good reasons exist why AA makes a distinction between religion and spirituality, but a denial of God is not one of them. – p. 127”
“Gratitude becomes spiritual, a spiritual virtue and a spiritual emotion, when we are moved in our response by a God-centered view of the three: gift, recipient, and giver. – p. 56”
“In AA we don’t come to God through theology but through experience, mostly of the humbling and humiliating variety, often reluctantly, and sometimes even kicking and screaming. – p. 179”
“The essence of humility in Step 3 is acknowledging and accepting our dependence on God. The essence of faith is trusting God. – p. 167”
“AA is a spiritual program and Step 3 is a quintessentially spiritual Step. It is the ultimate anti-self Step. Thus, in a very real sense, we cannot practice the 12 Steps of AA merely as self-help. They are not intended to be. – p. 159”
“We arrive in the rooms tangled up in a web of complexity and confusion. Our lives are unmanageable because our minds are unmanageable.” – p. 134”
“The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them. Alcohol gave us the false courage to do it and numbed our conscience as we did. Alcohol was the great enabler, and the great anesthetic. It wasn’t God who was dead. We were. – p. 116”
“Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God’s existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. – p. 113”
“To know that we are not God, to know that there is a God, and to know that God, these are the Steps in their essence. – p. 93”
“When we look back from the vantage point of sobriety, many of us realize that when drinking we often felt like a fake, a fraud, and a phony. That’s because we were. – p. 74”
“Saying that 'I am a grateful alcoholic' will then reflect the truth about who we have become in our person, having understood deeply and intimately that God in his grace can turn any evil, any pain we have suffered or inflicted, to good purpose. – PTP1, p. 53”