The Powerful Cement

A shared disaster can fill a room, but the Big Book says it was never what held A.A. together. The Big Book (p. 17): "We are like the passengers of a great liner the moment after rescue from shipwreck when camaraderie, joyousness and democracy pervade the vessel from steerage to Captain's table." Steerage was the cheapest deck. Then the warning: "The feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us. But that in itself would never have held us together as we are now joined." What held them was the next thing it names: "a common solution". Today many rooms are filled by something else again: a court order, a probation condition, a facility van that drops a dozen clients at seven and collects them at eight. The chairs are full, and the people in them share a requirement, not a peril or a solution. When the order runs out, they are gone, and a room built on them goes too. The Long Form asks for a whole that lives on its own (Big Book, p. 563): "A.A. must continue to live or most of us will surely die." A requirement can't keep a group alive. Test it tonight: if every court slip and facility van stopped tomorrow, would your group still have enough members to open its doors?