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From: [email protected]
Category: Category 1
Date: 18 Feb 2000
Time: 03:11:58
Remote Name: ip26.atlanta14.ga.pub-ip.psi.net
Dear Fellow Members,
It is amazing that it takes so long to get down to cases. It needs to be understood by many of us working on this book why the other channels to create NA recovery related writings has become an issue in NA at all. Didn't we write out Basic Text from scratch out in the Fellowship under the auspice of the World Service Conference? We did.
One reason we don't lend our name to organizations outside NA is because it would distract our attention from our primary group purpose. If a corporation were to direct a massive amount of money and personnel to the writing of a piece of literature and the piece were to fail approval, it would jeapordize the corporation. As they say, heads would roll. It has been said that the old WSC Literature Committee was the WSO's dream come true!
To write the Basic Text from scratch, with no funds or technical support from WSO at all ever. To process, distribute, review, study, and finally take the book through the exhaustive review process that included four additional World Literature Conferences and then to turn the care of the BT over to the WSO with no strings attached. Well, it is the stuff of science fiction.
After all those years with no Fellowship writing, the saying I got from the WSO people was "addicts in recovery don't write". In NA today, we are the writingest Fellowship there ever was!
That was all back in the years between 1977 and 1982. Later, when people began to express first their doubt, then their certainty, that open processing was impossible due to our vast numbers. I had plenty of time to prepare my feelings and optimism. When ideas began to flood into my head in the late eighties, and I had a larger computer, I began to write down what we talked about on the phone - and everywhere else in the Fellowship.
I asked members how could we get the material out to people. All the members involved at the time told me to make copies available at 10 cents a page. I did that for years until the page count got prohibitive. Lately, we have gotten the price down to a measley $5. But all this: the webhosting, the page maintenance, the volunteer services, the occasional phone call and postage, all this is volunteer. It doesn't ever take any money from WS. It is just member who feel strongly about the writing.
For a long time, I thought we were doing it this way because the corporation couldn't bring itself to trust in the liberally spiritual techniques we were so good at making up. But after about ten years, it began to dawn on me that what is happening is the most visible form of a God given miracle most of you will ever see apart form the birth of a child. God makes books like this through people like us when the pain gets bad enough and we pray for strength and guidance. That's what is happening. It isn't something that we 'control.' We are just going along on a daily basis. All those who have been a part of ] this process a while know this to be true. We leave the outcomes to God. Now, what service committee or corporation could ever go along with a deal like that?
Thanks to all our patient readers. We're doing the better than the best we can with the grace of a loving God. That's the truth.
In Loving Service,
Bo S.