Editorial: The Shape of Things to Come

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online June 1944 Vol. 1 No. 1
In the book Alcoholics Anonymous there is a chapter called "A Vision for You". Wandering through it recently, my eye was caught by this startling paragraph written a short five years ago. "Someday we hope that every alcoholic who journeys will find a Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous at his destination. To some extent this is already true. Some of us are salesmen and go about. Little clusters of twos and threes and fives of us have sprung up in other communities through contact with our two large centers-----" Rubbing my eyes I looked again. A lump came into my throat. "Only five years," I thought. "Then but two large centers--little clusters of twos and threes--travelers who hoped one day to find us at every destination."

Could it be that only yesterday this was just a hope--those little clusters of twos and threes, those little beacons so anxiously watched as they flickered, but never went out.

And today--hundreds of centers shedding their warm illumination upon the lives of thousands, lighting the dark shoals where the stranded and hopeless lie breaking up--those fingers of light already stretching to our beach heads in other lands.

Now comes another lighted lamp--this little newspaper called
"The Grapevine". May its rays of hope and ex-perience ever fall upon the current of our A.A. life and one day illumine every dark corner of this alcoholic world.

The aspirations of its editors, contributors and readers could well be voiced in the last words of "A Vision for You". "Abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to Him and your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find, and join us. We shall be with you, in the Fellowship of The Spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the Road of Happy Destiny. May God bless you and keep you--until then."
Bill W.