Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

Step Eleven

"Sought through prayer and meditation to im-
prove our conscious contact with God as we un-
derstood Him, praying only for knowledge of
His will for us and the power to carry that out."

PRAYER and meditation are our principal means of con-
scious contact with God.

We A.A.'s are active folk, enjoying the satisfactions of
dealing with the realities of life, usually for the first time in
our lives, and strenuously trying to help the next alcoholic
who comes along. So it isn't surprising that we often tend
to slight serious meditation and prayer as something not
really necessary. To be sure, we feel it is something that
might help us to meet an occasional emergency, but at first
many of us are apt to regard it as a somewhat mysteri-
ous skill of clergymen, from which we may hope to get a
secondhand benefit. Or perhaps we don't believe in these
things at all.

To certain newcomers and to those one-time agnostics
who still cling to the A.A. group as their higher power,
claims for the power of prayer may, despite all the logic
and experience in proof of it, still be unconvincing or quite
objectionable. Those of us who once felt this way can cer-
tainly understand and sympathize. We well remember how
something deep inside us kept rebelling against the idea of
bowing before any God. Many of us had strong logic, too,