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We start with the voices of our cofounders, plus two early friends of AA. One friend, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, one-time minister of the Riverside Church in New York City, talks about the “essential truths” of our Twelve Steps. “Just as around our bodies there is a physical universe from which replenishing power comes into us,” he observes, “so around our souls there is a spiritual Presence in whose fellowship our lives can be sustained and our characters transformed.”

A spiritual presence in which characters are transformed. According to psychiatrist Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, another early friend of AA, central to this transformation is our AA principle of anonymity “The great religions are conscious of the need for nothingness if one is to attain grace,” he writes, later adding, “the maintenance of a feeling of anonymity—of a feeling ‘I am nothing special’—is a basic insurance of humility and so a basic safeguard against further trouble with alcohol.”

Dr. Bob takes up the topic of humility when he speaks of the kitchen table, “that modest piece of furniture” around which so much of AA’s early history was played out. “Experience has taught us,” he says, “that simplicity is basic.” Although, in Dr. Bob’s words, “the ego of the alcoholic dies a hard death,” in the transformation of sobriety we can find some measure of humility.

And finally, stirred by the simplicity of the gravesite where Dr. Bob and his wife, Anne, lie buried, Bill W. is led to comment that the real monument to his life is “one word only, which we AAs have written. That word is Sacrifice.”

Spiritual presence, transformation, anonymity, humility, simplicity, sacrifice. What better foundation upon which to build new lives?