Note from the Delegate Chair

Dear Fellow SA Members:

This past year I have been blessed to attend many home group meetings, business meetings, and service meetings. As I reflect on my gratitude for the blessings and peace I find throughout our fellowship, I would like to offer a meditation on the topic of “meetings” from the writings of Roy K., published in Discovering the Principles: Our Growing Experience with the Traditions. Enjoy!

“Group conscience meetings test our program, our sobriety, and our serenity, but like life itself, they are necessary for our growth. If we can discover, through our get-togethers, the tools and strength to live and work together—and God does for us what we cannot do ourselves—we prepare ourselves, our groups, and our SA Fellowship as a whole for what God has in store for us next” (DTP 5).

“Use of other literature or non-program approaches in SA meetings has the tendency to dilute, distract, or completely sidetrack what should be the primary thrust of the SA meeting—that special spiritual quality that develops as the meeting moves from preliminaries into the personal opening of each life to the light of one another and God in honesty, surrender, release, hope, and joy. . . . [A] few artless words spoken from the heart, revealing the truth of what and where a person really is, are more effective in letting light and life break through in a meeting than volumes of ‘truth’ or great literature. It is life that our souls crave, not knowledge. And life comes through self- disclosure, when it lets God in” (DTP 11).

“The ideal meeting quality. . . is an elusive, fragile, but very precious thing, certainly not attained in all groups or meetings. It is the pearl of great price. . . Such an ideal meeting does not happen automatically; it usually takes time, pain, sobriety, recovery, and, I believe, God-consciousness and hunger and thirst after righteousness. There is no filling of the void in our hearts without such hunger, no hunger without sobriety, and no group sobriety and recovery without unity. Any practices that are a threat to the essential and precious unity upon which our personal recovery depends should be avoided” (DTP 12).

“Our common SA experience to date is showing us how the good can be the enemy of the best. Thank God, the best is possible for us today in SA, if we pursue it together under God, ‘putting principles before personalities’” (DTP 12-13).

May all of us stick around for the miracles in our own lives. Wishing all of you the blessings of sobriety for today and for the coming year.

Yours in service,