Principles Before Personalities

Sacrifice:  To surrender or give up or permit disadvantage to, for the sake of something else.  (Ed. Note: "something else" is presumed to be a euphemism for "not you." You are not going to come out on top in this one.)

Our Tradition Twelve: "Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities."  I like how the Twelfth Tradition serves as a clearing house for "all our traditions" just like Step Twelve wraps up all the work we've done in the preceding eleven steps: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps . . . "

In my not-so-humble opinion we could put the book down and stop reading after the first paragraph of Tradition Twelve: "The spiritual substance of anonymity is sacrifice.  Because A.A.'s Twelve Traditions repeatedly ask us to give up personal desires for the common good, we realize that the sacrificial spirit - well symbolized by anonymity - is the foundation of them all."

My long-serving and long-suffering sponsor would say to me all the time:"Principles before personalities, Seaweed, principles before personalities."  Eventually I had to ask him what the hell that meant, anyhow.  "You're not that important," he said.  "And you're certainly not more important than anyone else."  One of the easy affirmations I include in my Quiet Time each morning is that I be shown how I may be of service to someone else today, realizing that this will usually be presented to me as a tiny kindness shown to a single person in a private exchange and not the big, splashy, look-at-me! event that I so crave.  I figure if I can't be nice to the woman fixing my over-priced specialty coffee I don't have a prayer in my more substantive relationships.

Humility:  Modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance.

There it is again - that tension between my own personal desires and what is best for a larger group of people.  My inclination is to make sure I'm comfortable first and then - if I have any energy left - check on how other people are doing.  This Tradition suggests and not so subtly that I'll never experience the peace and ease that can be found when I practice a genuine humility.

Immense: Extremely large or great, especially in scale or degree; vast; huge.

The Long Form of Tradition Twelve includes these thoughts: ". . . the principle of anonymity has an immense spiritual significance.  It reminds us . . . that we are actually to practice a genuine humility."