Telling Stories Around the Fire

by Bill Wigmore

Ernie Kurtz is an historian who writes about AA and the history of our 12-Step fellowships. A few years back, Ernie wrote a book called, The Spirituality of Imperfection. He subtitled it: Storytelling and the Journey to Wholeness. In his book, the author asks why the spirituality of AA works for alcoholics & addicts when so many other approaches have always failed. 

He comes away from his study convinced that our 12-Step Fellowships work because their spirituality is grounded in two important principles. The first rests on the bedrock of our complete and absolute failure. We don’t get here because we were smart or holy,and we got promoted to the head of our class. We get here because we’re too smart for our own good and all our very best plans to drink & to drug & to control life successfully -- all led to failure.      

That failure is our common bond.

That failure is what binds us together in fellowships designed especially for the dying and the desperate. 

The more desperate we are when we arrive – the more willing we are to follow the directions of those who’ve successfully traveled the path before us. As the Big Book says: “We are not saints – but we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.”But it’s the second principle that Ernie spotted that I’d like to focus on here. The second thing that makes our 12 Step fellowships successful, he says, is that we seem to have tapped into one of the oldest and yet, one of the most neglected sources of spiritualwisdom and healing: we tell our stories. 

Stories account for most of the pages of the Big Book. Stories are told both there and at our meetings. We hear the stories of “old-timers” who’ve traveled the road before us – men and women we can relate to because they failed, just like we failed. But then, wehear what that guy on the radio used to call, “the rest of their story.” We hear about the power of God they each tapped into – each in his or her own unique and personal way. They tell their stories of God doing for them what they could never do for themselves. In their drunk-a-logs we hear echoes of our own failures; they cut through the layers of our denial and make our failures safe to share. Then, when they tell of their recovery, we experience our own first rays of hope. We hear the stirrings of a voice inside us whispering, “Maybe, just maybe, what happened to them could happen to you too.” 

Storytelling is what all of the Great Teachers and Spiritual Masters of the past did with their students. It’s how spiritual wisdom is passed on from one generation to the next. There isn’t a quick “wisdom-fix” for the spiritual hole that’s inside every human being.That hole inside of us is the place made for God and, as the Big Book says, that hole keeps us feeling “restless, irritable and discontented” until it’s filled. In this regard, we aren’t any different from anybody else on this planet. We all need God – we all need to have that hole inside us filled by him. The great difference between us and the “Earth-People” is that if we don’t get it filled, then we drink and we drug again – and for us to drink and to drug is sometimes to die. 

And so those of us who come to a 12-Step fellowship in search of God, we do what human tribe members have done for a million years. We gather around a campfire at night and with the smoke rising from the fire, or in our case rising from the cigarettes,we listen as we hear our sacred stories told. 

There, the high-priest, more commonly known as our sponsor says, “Take the cotton out of thine ears and stick it in thy mouth! First, learn to listen! Not just to hear, but to listen! Listen to our stories because it’s only there that you’ll find the wisdom you seek. Open the ears of your heart, and there, deep inside where the Great Reality resides –hidden below the level of our words - you’ll finally understand what has eluded you for so long.” Bill Wilson called this deep and mysterious language we speak to one another, “the language of the heart.” One addict opening his heart – another opening his and hearing words he’s been searching for desperately. 

Before we come into recovery we don’t really have stories. All we have is chaos and confusion and maybe a long rap sheet. We have plenty of pain and suffering – but the pain doesn’t have any purpose and the suffering doesn’t have any meaning. But once weenter into the sacred circle – and join with our fellow sufferers – then our pain & suffering begin to take on meaning & purpose. Now they’re seen as the price of admission we each had to pay for the right to sit at the fire. And so, when it’s time, we’re asked to tell our story of what it was like, and what happened, and what it’s like now. Finally we belong. We’re no longer alone in that god-awful isolation that every addict knows so well. 

Jesus’ followers complained to him asking, “Why do you tell us stories? Why don’t you just lay it all out for us plain and simple so we can see it clearly and understand it once and for all?” But like the good Jewish teacher that he was, Jesus said, “Let me tell you some stories about why I tell stories!” And so, he told them stories of prodigal sons who went and blew their inheritance and their health while searching for the good life. And he told them of one lost sheep who strayed so far from his home that he needed a crazy shepherd willing to leave the other 99 and come in search of him. The dozens and dozens of stories that Jesus told and his disciples remembered form the heart of the wisdom literature that’s been passed on to us. The stories in the Big Book are also part of the wisdom we addicts have received from those who’ve gone before us. Without their stories we are reduced to searching for magic formulas and meaningless rituals. With them, they open the door to the personal transformation that awaits every newcomer willing to exchange misery and pain for his own hard-earned wisdom as he writes the chapters he’ll then be asked to pass on to the next addict who shows up lost and searching at the fire. 

When that time comes, he’ll probably pass on something like this: “Once upon a time, we too thought we could find a softer, easier way, Kid. But we could not. And so now with all the earnestness at our command, we beg of you to be fearless and thorough from the very start. Remember what we’re up against: alcohol & drugs – They’re cunning, baffling, and they’re powerful! Without help they always proved too much for us. But now we’ve found the One who has all power – that One is God. We’re making our home here by his fire. See, we finally found him, Kid. Turns out he was hiding where we last thought to look for him – right here in our own hearts. That’s our story, Kid – and we’re stickin’ to it!

 “We hope you don’t turn out to be quite as stubborn and hard headed as some of us were - but if you do, that’s your business – that’s your story. You alone get to write it. But in the meanwhile, keep comin’ back! We’ll just be sittin here by the fire – telling stories and staying sober – and doing it all one day at a time.”