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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Bill W Candidate Identity Review BW0209 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: jack-n-bill-w-close-of-1964-general-service-conference-warranties-aa-1964-archive-19122.mp3 Duration: 00:27:16
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We've heard talk about qualifications of delegates. In fact, the presentation that got the honors talked about the qualifications of delegates. No one has talked too much about the qualifications for Class A trustees. Or probably still better, what the qualifications are for the chairman of our general service board. Well, I'd say first that he ought to be utterly devoted. Secondly, he ought to be an able administrator. Thirdly, he ought to be considerate and patient.
Fourthly, he ought to have a respected position in his profession, in his community, in the nation. When you have all those, you'll have a very fine chairman. And when you have all those, plus a rich measure of humility, you have our Dr. Jack. Since Tuesday afternoon, we've been living on the heights, all of us. We've spent an awful lot of time thinking about and talking about our gratitude, our successes.
We've been living at the heights of fellowship, the sort that I have never seen in any other group. We've made tremendous progress, as I think back to the days when I first began to fail with alcoholics in my first years in practice. The thrill that I had as the years went by, I gradually came to know a little bit about AA and gradually more and more. As you accepted me into the fellowship, as we have tried to improve our communications with professional groups, with people who hadn't hit low bottom, I repeat, we've made tremendous progress, yet we're barely scratching the surface.
To me, this conference has been the best yet. We've faced some problems about which we could have really gone off the deep end. Faced them honestly. Faced them unemotionally. There's been much more discussion than argument, as I have seen it in this conference than we have had in some years previously. And it would be easy on the basis of this to feel that we had no more problems. Yet all of you know that there are many more people who come and look and turn away.
There are many more people who never come. There are many more people who have heard part of the story and who say, I want none of it. All of you know of spots in your own group where things aren't going too well. All of you know of points of friction, points of misunderstanding, points of arrogance, points of dogma, points of dishonesty.
[00:04:59]
This job will never be done.
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There's much that we all need to do. There is more than we can do. Back home. We've been talking these last few days about AA in the large. Yet we all know, if we stop to think about it, that the only way in which what we want to have happen happens is when one person talks to another at depth. When one person understands another and really communicates. This to me is one of the things that we must constantly work, those of us who have been given the privilege and responsibility of leadership, we must constantly work to maintain the one-to-one relationship.
What if we lose this? If because of our privilege and responsibility of leadership, because we are asked to speak at groups, because we may have had the privilege and responsibility of being a founder of a group, when we feel that we no longer need to take a twelve-step call for an individual, at this point we begin to be bleeding deacons. At this point we begin to view with alarm. At this point we begin to die.
This final meeting of the conference is always a little sad, in that half of you won't be back. We hear here and there of those who have been delegates, those who have come to the conference, that in the letdown that comes after having been on the heights as we have this last week, they never recover from the letdown. We hope this won't happen to anybody. And yet it may. We hear occasionally of those who, after many years of sobriety, many years of effective work, many years of enthusiasm for AA, slip and never come back.
There's one reason possibly here that they have not continued with their individual twelve-step work, that they've developed the Jehovah complex, the feeling that Father knows best, the feeling that I can do no wrong. I suspect this happens. I talk about the Jehovah complex more commonly about my professional colleagues than I do about most anybody else. It's the thing that makes me most annoyed at my professional confreres.
Our disciplines are bad. Almost everyone who comes to us as physicians comes to us asking. And when we tell people, expecting as we do that our advice will be given without question, when somebody questions it, we don't like it very well. But doctors are people too. And we need to be told. But doctors aren't alone in this.
[00:10:02]
Everyone who has had a position of leadership has been in this position of having had our advice, what little wisdom we may have acquired, looked to without question. This conference, the movement, can be subject to the same sort of hazard, the hazard of feeling that we have the answers. I hope we never have all the answers. I'm sure we won't. Because we're dealing with life. And life, whenever we try to define it, whenever we try to box it in, it's always too big for the box we've made.
But with this in mind, one of the things that I hope will happen to an increasing degree as these conferences are held is that we will think about our failures. One of the grapevines some time ago, a little squib at the bottom, it was said, the trouble with a half-truth is that we may have hold of the wrong half. Our successes may be the wrong half too. And until we have both parts of it, we don't have the truth.
I hope that as you go home, spend a week or so getting over the letdown, the emotional letdown of having been on the heights, when you get separated from this by days and miles, that you'll think about the things we missed this week. That you'll put them down on paper and send them in to GSO. This may be the most valuable contribution you can make to next year's agenda. In my job, I know I'm probably the last one that hears about trouble.
This can happen here too. But only as you people at group level, seeing the problems, knowing the problems, and telling us about them that we can be aware of our blind spots, that we can do a better job here at GSO in serving you and preserving for you and for those who don't yet know the privilege, the joy of honesty and service, which is AA. May I thank you at this time for making me an honorary member.
It's a privilege. It's been fun being with you this week. Thanks a lot. Dear Jack, I shall not try to summon any great adjectives to express our feelings toward you because it can't be put in words. But I know that all here and all to come will find in the annals of AA that you have been and always will be He's counted among one of the greatest friends our society can ever know. A man now standing up there for days can do things to you other than giving you whiskey legs.
He can do things emotionally and physically.
[00:15:01]
But I don't think the experience has quite made me silly enough yet to try and prepare an introduction for our last speaker. I'm just going to say, we must… For the 14th time, I have seen the closing of my life. Of these successive conferences, and I cannot think of one, among all those many, that has left me with such a great sense of security and joy and love. As we heard the speakers this morning, my mind crossed over the gambit of our affairs.
When I heard Roy talk about Dr. Bob and Ann, and his good name, and about those early days, my mind went back to them and to those people in immense gratitude. I don't know if I am accurate when I say that it may be that Roy and I are the only ones in this room, perhaps Dave, perhaps another, who can remember so far back. When I contrast the state of affairs in which we then found ourselves with the state of affairs in which we now are, the contrast is unbelievable.
Roy told us about the afflictions of the upper and nether millstones, the conservatives and the radicals, who were already being groomed to grind out what is today the tradition of AA. It reminded me of how little we knew our part functioning and carrying the message could ultimately come to and mean. We had a little light, but not a lot. But praise God, it was enough. In and between the lines of his talk, Roy also seemed to be saying to us, is it not a miracle indeed that such a perfect thing as AA, in its principle, has emerged, through God's grace, through so many fallible people who still lack maturity.
I think that we have been animated by several great forces. Let us take the lowest common denominator. The first is the threat of death itself by alcoholism. We are propelled toward this society, and we, most of us, arrive on an either or basis.
[00:20:00]
It's do or die. We must. But when a little grace is oozed into us, and some of the mist is passed from our eyes, we find ourselves in a new world. But we find that we are faced with immense responsibilities. Responsibilities for our own growth and development, as well as our society. For the welfare of our group, for the welfare of AA as a whole, for better homes, for better relations with the world around us.
We are met with all these vast responsibilities, and of course we recall, and of course we rebel. But little by little, prodded from behind by John Bollycorn, and drawn by the love we feel here, and finally by the love of God, we pick up the tab for a little more responsibility. This is not maturity, this is just a step toward that distant goal. So we pick up these tabs, sometimes rather unwillingly we pick them up, because now it seems the right thing to do.
And then finally we come out on another plateau, where some of us can stay for a little while. I know I find myself there briefly and then I slip up. But finally we conform to these principles and their practice in all our affairs, because this is what we really want for ourselves. Not only because John Bollycorn is going to kill us off if we don't conform, not just because this AA community says they are right, because we want them for ourselves.
A place of pride. A place, you might say, even beyond good and evil. So my mind went back to those early times, and I thought how valuable to us is a sense of history. But like all things of value, it can be misused. As Adams said, let's not be deceived by nostalgia. Let us not suppose that we have all the truth, else the past can lay a dead hand on us. But I am sure that in all these years in the main, we have been drawing inspiration and a measure of wisdom from the lessons of the past.
And this has finally brought us out to where we are now. I think it would pay, in closing, just to have a look at the warranties upon which the functioning of this conference stands. These are really, in broad brushstroke, the measure of our several and collective responsibilities. Responsibilities which I feel this conference has magnificently met. Responsibilities which do not entitle us to call ourselves mature, but which do entitle us to say that we are now arrived at the age of full responsibility.
Let us remind ourselves of these warranties to AA of today and to AA of tomorrow, respecting our responsibilities and conduct here. In all its proceedings, the General Service Conference shall observe the spirit of the AA tradition, taking great care that the conference never becomes the seat of perilous wealth or power.
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That sufficient funds plus an ample reserve be its prudent financial principle. That none of the conference members shall ever be placed in a position of unqualified authority one over another. That all important decisions be reached by discussion and vote and, whenever possible, by substantial unanimity. That no conference action ever be personally punitive or an incitement to public controversy. That though the conference may act for the service of Alcoholics Anonymous, it shall never perform any acts of government.
And unlike the society of Alcoholics Anonymous which it serves, the conference itself will always remain democratic in thought and in action. That is the statement of what our responsibility is to AA of today and AA of tomorrow. May each and all of us continue to be worthy of this great and unique trust which God has reposed in us. And may he keep the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous to do his work in this world for so long as we are needed.