The Letter and the Spirit

The threat that runs the other way from chaos is hardening: a group, or a whole fellowship, deciding there is only one right way to run a meeting and making it law. Bill W. saw it coming (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 5): "Should we ever harden too much, the letter might crush that spirit. We could victimize ourselves by petty rules and prohibitions; we could imagine that we had said the last word." The letter means the written rule; the spirit is what the rule was for. Tradition Four is the guard against it. Because the Long Form makes each group answer to its own conscience on its own affairs, no group can be forced into another group's format, and no outside body can hand down the approved one. A.A. stays alive because each group can try something, keep what works, and drop what doesn't. Freeze every group into one script and nobody can find a better way again. Today the hardening usually arrives from outside, as a standard format a program uses in all its meetings, read word for word everywhere, with a warning not to change it. Inside, it can look like loyalty: the way we have always done it. Test it tonight: ask whether your group could change one thing about its meeting next week, and who would have to agree.