Speaker Meetings – I Came to Believe

I Came to AA to Stop Drinking

As a committed non-believer, when I drank, my life was devoid of peace of mind until I came to AA. I was a know-it-all. I never came to AA to find God; I came to see if there was a solution to my drinking problem. The best thing that came out of my last drunk was that I stopped cold turkey and wanted to stop.

When I finally attended my first AA meeting in a foggy state of mind, the good thing was that I had no preconceived ideas about what AA was all about. If it was about learning how to stop drinking, I was okay with that, but I wanted to learn how to stop and stay stopped. Stopping was the easy part; staying stopped was where I had difficulty.

My first meeting was a beginner’s meeting before the main Step meeting. A young man briefly qualified and shared, and I identified with what he had to say. That intrigued me, and I went downstairs into the Step meeting to learn more. However, that night they were discussing the Ninth Step, which was way over my head. Still, I was told to keep coming back.

Someone handed me a list of meetings, and I started scheduling them one day at a time. In AA, there were different kinds of meetings, and discovering them became an adventure that kept me coming back. There were discussion meetings, open meetings, closed meetings, First Step meetings, and AA speaker meetings. They were all good, but the speaker meetings grabbed my attention. These were the miracles of recovery.

A Speaker Meeting I Will Never Forget

One of my first speaker meetings is something I will never forget. The meeting was held on a Sunday afternoon in August. It was in a hot, smoky church basement. It had to be 96 degrees that day, and the basement was not air-conditioned. The large room was more of an auditorium, filled with over 150 people attending an open speaker meeting. All the seats were taken, and people were standing along the side aisles and in the back. It was an impressive crowd crammed together in a very warm church basement. Many were dressed in their Sunday best.

In the back of the room were two massive urns of coffee and some cake. I thought it was odd that they would serve hot coffee on such a hot day, but then again, coffee seemed to go hand in hand with cigarette smoking.

The meeting opened the same way as others I had attended. We began with the Serenity Prayer. Someone read “How It Works,” another person read the “Twelve Traditions,” announcements were made, and then the speaker was introduced. The format was typical of an AA speaker meeting. As taken from “How It Works”, the speaker would share what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now.

The Speaker Began to Share

The speaker walked to the podium, shared a little humor, and began his story. The room was sweltering. The only relief came from four large fans positioned in the corners of the auditorium. A few side doors were open, but there was no breeze that day, and the noise from a busy street did not help the acoustics.

People fanned themselves or wiped sweat from their brows with handkerchiefs. Yet everyone was focused on the speaker. They were glued to every word. Those in the middle and back of the room strained to hear over the roar of the fans. I enjoyed the share. It was both humorous and poignant.

Then, shortly into his talk, they started turning off the fans. One by one, they were shut down. I thought this was insanity. These people are nuts, I told myself. Do they know how hot it is in here?  Then it dawned on me. They wanted to hear every word the speaker was sharing. I was impressed. I have never forgotten that day, and throughout my early sobriety I made speaker meetings regularly. They inspired hope.

Humpty Dumpty Stories

Back in the 1970s, many of the old-timers were still around. Many were low-bottom drunks. Their stories were awe-inspiring and miraculous. Their hope-filled shares were a testimony to the grace of a loving God and AA. If they could get sober, there was a possibility that I could too.

Over the years, I started calling speaker meetings “Humpty Dumpty stories.”

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

How could a person be broken down so completely and beaten by alcohol, yet start life anew and find that the new life was more rewarding than the old one?  By the grace of a loving God, who is my Higher Power, I found that in AA, Humpty Dumpty could be put back together better than ever.

Speaker meetings have played an important role in AA since its early days. Now, with more than 50 years of continuous sobriety, I can see how important they were in the foundation of my own sobriety. 

For me, the healing began with listening and then identifying. After all, I was just following the old AA advice: “Take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth.”

It was then that my own AA miracle began.