By Anon
Growing up I had three sisters. My dad was a fireman, home away from work 48 hours but then gone at work for 24 hours, making every third day one with me being the only male in the house. Brotherly love was not a concept I grew up learning or knew. In the Fourth Grade, I was allowed to visit a classmate’s house alone, he and I hung out and interacted with his older brother. While that brother had been nice enough to me on the school playground, in the privacy of the family home, this brother was a terror to his sibling and, by extension, to me. That became my understanding of Brotherly Love. Years later when my parents “surprise” child was born, a beautiful baby boy, I left for college just when that boy was getting old enough to be interesting. He learned brotherly from me while trying to play a small joke on a Sunday morning by splashing water in the face of his hung over, passed out, older brother. I lashed out of my stupor and smashed the small but sturdy container [ironically – a shot glass I had stolen the night before] back at him. The glass survived unscathed. My ten year old brother had to visit the dentist the next morning to have his front tooth which I had chipped in my anger, capped. This was my practice of Brotherly Love.
But many things changed as I, so very long after that Sunday morning debacle, ceased drinking one day at a time. Our literature chronicles how these changes played out amongst its authors. Those now following their path are promised many things, some of which might even be considered extravagant, but even as to these I like most just reply in earnest “We Think Not.” My experience, and that of others too I think, is that the “juice comes with the squeeze” but we must be “painstaking” in the process. For if we are painstaking, we do find a whole new attitude and outlook upon life has taken us over and that we have lost interest in selfish things and have gained interest in our fellows. This is Brotherly Love as I now have come to know it, understand it and, buoyed by the training wheels of Progress, not Perfection, work daily to live it.
I have often been its unexpected recipient. This has happened too often to be a coincidence. Such as when attending a new meeting and, after overcoming the obstacles of finding the meeting room at the proper time, I walk in, see the literature set out, empty chairs available and think, “Ah, I’m home.” Whether in a foreign City or State for business or pleasure, the experience has seemed universal to me. I have heard many others say, almost to the word, this was their experience too. In my case, some of the men I interacted with at those meetings are still on my Speed Dial. This is but a facet of the aura of Brotherly Love that has been showered upon me by our program. Then COVID-19 hit and things changed again, just not like anyone ever quite expected, but by some was anticipated nevertheless.
For our literature tells us how the spiritual principle underlying Step Three had its “first major test” in WWII.1 Though not on a Salerno beachhead, anyone who has the disease from which I suffer I believe has been landed upon the Beachhead of Loneliness in the COVID-19 war and may, like me, be struggling to stay alive on it. I have found in that battle, my tool of Brotherly Love works as both a Sword and a Shield. Lucky enough to be able to Zoom to meetings, I have cut through my loneliness and that of others, by reaching out to be a virtual sponsor to those in need of one. While quite different from my experience in the most obvious ways, the power of service revealed in the effort has staved off more than one assault upon me on Lonely Beach where I fight my battle with my disease. At the same time recently, my brothers abroad, and in of all places New Zealand [home of my real passion, rugby, and the Greatest Side in the world], have been my shield against my disease and helped me survive numerous assaults. My favorite Zoom group, meeting daily [tomorrow], bright and early there, produces the same blunt honesty that so attracts me to my 7:00 a.m. meetings in the States, whether my Home Group or a venue I am just visiting. With virtual open arms they have welcomed this yank, and others too, sharing their experience, strength and hope with us visiting and hearing ours. They have exuded Brotherly Love through the two dimensions of Zoom but in that process have kept me living in the Fourth Dimension into which sobriety has so marvellously rocketed me. For their Brotherly Love and that of others in this Program I am and will be forever grateful.
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- Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page 38. ↩︎
