Area 46 Literature Committee Report
January 2023
Greetings Area 46,
And Happy New Year!
I hope things are off to a great start for each of you. First I would like to apologize if anyone tried to join the December Literature Committee meeting and it wasn’t there. I had a brake fluid spill while working on my motorcycle just before 7 pm and joined the meeting about 15 minutes late. I didn’t hear from anyone but would like to say I’m sorry just in case.
As I’m writing this there are just two days until our January Committee meeting and I’ve sent out a copy of the “AA Guidelines – Literature Committees” to all of our DCM’s and Literature Chairs that I know of so that we can have a discussion and put together a list of suggestions for incoming District Lit Chairs to help them best serve their members.
I have one update from GSO regarding literature. The “Mixed Title Quantity Discounts” are going to continue in 2023, which means that orders of 20 to 99 items will receive a 6% discount, 100 to 199 items get a 12% discount, and 200+ items will get an 18% discount. This means that the sum total of all books, booklets and boxed sets placed in one order receive the discount, rather than on a certain quantity of one specific item, as was previously the case. GSO continues to encourage members to purchase literature from their home groups and local distribution sources (Districts, Areas, Intergroups and Central Offices).
My Service Sponsor and I are reading “Our Great Responsibility” which is a collection of Bill W’s General Service Conference talks, and recently read the chapter that begins on page 89, “1953 – Variations on the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”. In it he covers some of the history of how our Steps and Traditions came to be, and where the inspiration for them came from as a way to talk about “whether this program of ours is frozen solid as an ice cube or whether there is any elasticity in it or not: whether we are going to get into the business of insisting upon conformity, whether we are going to get into the business of creating an authority that says that these Steps and Traditions have to be this way.”
There is a lot of valuable history in there, but more important in my opinion is that once again, as is made clear in “AA Comes of Age”, “The Language of the Heart”, “The 12 Concepts for World Service”, and more of Bill’s writings, that he was very much concerned with the ability of AA to grow, adapt and change in order to remain relevant and be able to reach the still suffering alcoholic for generations to come. He writes over and over that we need not fear change, and that the message of AA is strong enough that proposed changes such as Buddhists in Thailand suggesting the word “God” be replaced with the word “Good” in the Big Book in order to facilitate understanding from their cultural perspective did not tarnish or weaken our Book or our Fellowship, but it did what it was intended to do and carried our message of hope to alcoholics in Asia (AA Comes of Age” pg 81).
Discussing the emotional quality that has dominated the conversation by both those for and those against proposed changes and innovations affecting our literature with my Service Sponsor, she suggested that it might be valuable to facilitate an Area fear inventory about our literature, and that this might be a way for our members to be heard and come to terms with all of the different points of view. I’m considering this as something we could do after this year’s General Service Conference. It is certainly a helpful exercise in our personal recovery, and I’m certain it would be healthy for our Fellowship and the future of Area 46.
If you have any thoughts about this or other ways that I can be of service, please send me an email at literature@dev.aa-nia.org.
Thank you for letting me be of service!
Phillip F.