12 Step & Recovery Friends discussion

We don't talk like this anymore (although it's damn sexy, isn't it?):

"LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and near,
who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate,
gave him gifts. (Beowulf)

The above quote has a certain poetry to it but I don't know if I would make eye contact with someone talking out loud like this on the bus. This language would sound out of place today. We don't even talk like this anymore, either:

"When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or Hie isn't. What was our choice to be?"

Spirituality isn't an all or nothing proposition. Language evolves. Roger C.'s The Little Book keeps up and evolves with the rest of language in our millennium. The ideas of the Big Book--while still functional, the language is frozen in the mid-1900s. It is an anecdotal account of the experience of the first several dozen members, told in their own worlds. What was intended as a wide tent to include everyone, now represents the smaller world from whence it came. The original text remains a vital tribute to 12 Step history than the language of all of today's recovering members. And there will be many who still say that it's all they need - thank you very much.

For others, the sexism and religious overtones makes the Steps uninviting and that is easily accommodated as the Little Book has done. This book is a collection of 20 very different 12 Step interpretations from Buddhists, Atheists, Aboriginals, Cognitive Behavioral Therapists and more. All are examples of Steps that are working in the lives of AA members as we speak.

Billions of people (spiritual people) don't believe in God or if they believe in a deity, call such a power by a different name. Were the 12 Steps not intended for them? I think they were and I believe that we were to beam down to 1940 AA we would find that fellowship as welcoming and inclusive as it could possibly be.

The Big Book itself says on pg. 63, "The wording was of course quite optional so long as we express the ideas, voicing it without reservation." The optional wording in The Little Book: A Collection of Alternative 12 Steps does voice the principles of AA without reservation. Also included are commentaries by other authors and practitioners. The book invites us all to write the 12 Steps as we would say them, making them our own expression.

The book is only 72 pages and is an easy read. If you or anyone you know is in need of but stuck on the Steps, this book might un-stuck them.