Yeah it's pretty awesome. It's like my/our AA fortune cookie each day basically. Or our daily Alcoscope (Horoscope). It's struck me as pretty funny how on certain days the entry literally seemed to be about the biggest thing I was struggling with on that given day. Now I know and feel comforted by the notion that it wouldn't be in there if it wasn't that these are the things we/alcoholics all struggle with and aspire to on a daily basis. It's a good way to try and focus on living each day by the principles of AA. I need to get back into reading it every day. Especially since it's posted here AND the book is in my car on the passenger seat.

-- Edited by pinkchip on Thursday 4th of June 2009 08:25:29 AM

The three most published A.A. authors are Bill W., Richmond Walker, and Ralph Pfau, in that order. Ralph, who lived in Indianapolis, became in 1943 the first Roman Catholic priest to get sober in A.A., and under the pen name "Father John Doe," wrote the fourteen Golden Books along with three other books, all of them still in print and read by A.A. people today. Richmond Walker got sober in Boston in May 1942, and later moved down to Daytona Beach in Florida, where in 1948 he published Twenty-Four Hours a Day, which became the great meditational book of early A.A. from that point on.

The old timers in my part of the country say without hesitation that they got sober by using two books: the Big Book and Richmond Walker's Twenty-Four Hour book. Phrases and topical advice from both books are sprinkled throughout everything they say when they talk about their own experience of the program, and when they give advice to newcomers. A.A. people carried the little black book with them everywhere they went. It was always considered permissible to read from the Twenty-Four Hour book during A.A. meetings, and to base the discussion on a topic from that book. By 1959, it had sold over 80,000 copies, which means, given the number of people in the program at that time, that roughly fifty percent of the A.A. members owned their own copies, and most of the rest had attended meetings where it was read from or used. As of 1994 (the latest figures which I have), it had sold six and a half million copies (see note 1).

In the Big Book, the eleventh step said "Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." But there were only a handful of extremely short prayers in the Big Book to use as examples, and even if one added the Lord's Prayer and the Serenity Prayer, this was still an unworkably short list. Early A.A. people often used the Methodist meditational book called the Upper Room, and listened to the radio broadcasts of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, but they had nothing of their own. The traditional western books on spirituality and meditation were, most of them, tied to the life of the medieval monasteries and convents and religious orders, and were not tailored to people who were married and had jobs in the secular world, nor were they, most of them, designed to deal with people who had suffered the kinds of trauma, violence, internal torment, and degradation which many alcoholics had experienced. There was an acute and desperate need for something which would teach recovering alcoholics how to pray effectively, and how to meditate on the spirit of the twelve steps.

So Rich produced a little book which I myself would put on my short list of the world's ten or fifteen greatest spiritual classics -- and I include eastern as well as western writings in my assessment. I have been a scholar and a professional in this field for forty years now, and I have seen an incredible number of people make far more spiritual progress in their own lives by meditating daily on that little book, and accomplish this far more quickly, than with any other spiritual work I know of.
http://www.hindsfoot.org/rwfla1.html

Thank you for the Topic, and sure enjoyed reading the responses, and Tomylll, thank you for that background on our cherished little One Day @ A Time Book.

I have just finshed a house search, still have the book, but am pretty disorganized, but will find it. I used it, in the first 2 or 3 years, always had it with me. and miss that soo very much. Want to go back to doing that practice.

and Turninggrey, I feel the same, LOVE that little book, thanks again for bringing it up to the surface of brain and heart. Also want to say I really enjoy all that you write.

Hugs, Toni