AA’s Secret Language

When I first joined the fellowship some years back, one of the things I immediately noticed was the rich body of coded language that we shared. Two strangers could meet in a crowd, connect immediately, and have a perfectly secret conversation consisting of phrases we can lift out of any sentence in the hundreds of pages of our collection of literature. I have even passed unknown people on the street speaking our coded language and knew instantly they were some of ours. (Did someone just use the expression, “half measures”?) What tribe can make such a claim? This was quite an adventure: Better than being a Freemason or an ancient Knight Templar! So too did I also have to learn new vocabularies or, to be exact, new meanings for words that I thought I knew the meaning of. I learned that sobriety is not a physical

state but a mental and a spiritual one. I learned that fear is not a result of danger but the absence of love. I learned that spirituality is a state of nature, a result of action and not a metaphysical abstraction. Lastly, I learned that humility is not synonymous with humiliation and not an attribute of meek and unassertive people. It is the state that comes about through the destruction of the ego which is the construct that creates an illusion of separation from our creator and its creation. Humility is the opposite of ego. Ego is destroyed through self-forgetting and selfless actions. When we do this, the state of humility strengthens and we learn, finally, that the meaning of faith is not belief but that which sustains us until we have experience. Love, Jeff