Few of us are any longer afraid of what any newcomer can do to our A.A. reputation or effectiveness. Those who slip, those who panhandle, those who scandalize, those with mental twists, those who rebel at the program, those who trade on the A.A. reputation- all such persons seldom harm an A.A. group for long.
Some of these have become our most respected and best loved. Some have remained to try our patience, sober nevertheless. Others have drifted away. We have begun to regard the troublesome ones not as menaces, but rather as our teachers. They oblige us to cultivate patience, tolerance, and humility. We finally see that they are only people sicker than the rest of us, that we who condemn them are the Pharisees whose false righteousness does our group the deeper spiritual damage.
grapevine, august 1946 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My head was a noisy place with all the bells that got ringing. I pulled out AA Comes Of Age for this from Father Dowling's speech at the 20th anniversary of AA.: "Bill spoke last night of the outside antagonist in Alcoholics Anonymous, John Barleycorn. But I have always felt that there is an inside antagonist who is crueler, and that is the corporate snear for a phony, and who of us is not a phony? I think that in all groups you have the problem of people of lynx-eyed virtue."
