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Source: Ernie K – Ernie K (AA) – Spirituality and AA – Speaker Talk (2015) – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ernie-k-ernie-k-aa-spirituality-and-aa-speaker-talk-2015-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:59:58
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I presume that you're here because you know who Ernie K. is. I have known Ernie for a couple of years, several years now, both as a teacher and a colleague and a friend, and it is a privilege for me to introduce a man who has spent years studying the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, studying what, not how it works, but the inner workings of it and the things that happen to people who get into recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous.
His presentation this morning is one that I think is a seminal presentation, a presentation which is absolutely important, at least the topic, if anyone is to understand the phenomenon that is Alcoholics Anonymous. He will speak to us today on an A.A. approach to spirituality. Dr. K.? So we'll give us time to sit down and that's just how long it takes to get the microphone on. Thanks, Jim, and others. Time is important at these institutes. I really am impressed by everyone here. I cannot tell you how much you impress me.
People who come to the opening event at any institute are the real obsessive compulsives, and it's good that we know each other. If I may for a moment use the vocabulary of a spiritual tradition that is not my own, it requires a great deal of chutzpah, and indeed it probably signals precisely the lack of spirituality to undertake the announced topic. I always sit there shivering in this particular introduction because I expect everybody to get up and walk out. Who in the world would set himself or herself up to talk on a topic of spirituality, especially A.A. spirituality?
What do I mean by spirituality? It has to be clarified by what follows, but there are three sensitivities I'd like to begin with. I am profoundly aware of A.A.'s claim, presentation of itself as spiritual rather than religious. Spiritual rather than religious, and that sense that there is a distinction and understanding that underlies what we're going to examine. Secondly, I am convinced that the wide history of human wisdom teaches that spirituality is one of those realities that cannot be defined, but it can be described.
And so please do not come expect me to define spirituality, and I would suggest you be wary of those who pretend to define spirituality, because I believe the nature of spirituality is such that it cannot be defined, but it can be described. And I hope to describe, that's my task, not define. And finally, another heading of spirituality, I am aware of Tom Shaw's comment about 20 years ago, which is at least as true today.
Shaw has observed, Marx said that religion is the opiate of the people. In the United States today, it would seem that opiates have become the religion of the people. Another one, another of Shaw's throwaway lines, Freud said that religion is a neurosis. Today, it would seem that for some people, at least, neurosis has become a religion. And I think that, too, is true. I would emphasize, secondly, the word approach. I want by the word approach to get across the idea that this is tentative. None of these ideas are carved in stone.
In fact, I'm working on a book on this topic, and I really would appreciate any comments you might have. The ideas, if they're unclear, point out to me. If you have a story that would illustrate that you don't mind my stealing, please, I'll be here through Wednesday. This is tentative on my part. It also, I want the word approach because I think AA is tentative in its approach to spirituality. Bill W. always liked presenting Alcoholics Anonymous as a spiritual kindergarten.
To literally thousands of AA members who commented or raised questions or presented difficulties, Bill said, never forget that we are but a spiritual kindergarten. You must always remember that AA is a spiritual kindergarten. And, therefore, there is a certain tentativeness also. Respect, reverence, whatever word you want. I'll stay with tentativeness in AA's approach to spirituality, not a claim to possess.
AA, this is tricky. More safely would I say 12-step. I'm always wary. 468 Park Avenue South holds me at arm's length, and I'm sort of grateful for that.
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Nothing, of course, is official in any way, obviously. There are no spokespeople for AA. I know that they don't like AA used in titles, however. One reason that I do it is that it's more honest. In one way, 12-step, but my specific competence is the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. I've not studied all those 12-step groups. Please understand that's why I use the word AA. I'm going to use AA's story, its experience, strength, and hope.
It's all that I mean to convey by the word AA. No implication of special access or anything. It's AA's story from which this understanding is drawn. AA spirituality arises from AA practice and, therefore, from AA's own story. I'm going to start with the assumption you already know something about AA's origins. AA's growth out of the Oxford Group. The impact of the insights of the thinkers William James and Carl Jung.
And, especially, the significance of the actual experience of AA's earliest members. That's AA's story. It's also the story of AA's spirituality. See, at its very origin, Alcoholics Anonymous, as fellowship, learned first from William James and Carl Jung an openness to unconventional spirituality. That's the main significance of William James and Carl Jung that unites them. They are the last two major thinkers who were openly and publicly spiritual.
Intellectuals. Neither, however, was religious in any conventional sense of that term. And, therefore, there may have been other influences, but I think that one impact, the examples of James and Jung on AA, the possibility of an unconventional spirituality. A spirituality that did not necessarily find clothing in a particular religious tradition. The Oxford Group experience, in fact, reinforced that understanding.
AA's Oxford Group experience exposed it to a 1920s version of primitive Christianity. Ever since the second century, Christians have been trying to recapture first century Christianity. That was the Oxford Group's first name. First century Christian fellowship. And the vision of the Oxford Group, this fundamental Christian vision. Again, we're not passing judgment on it, either positively or negatively.
This is what AA inherited from the Oxford Group. It was the evangelical vision that there is good news about a kind of salvation. The word evangelical, evangelium, evangelion, good news about a kind of freeing, saving, conjoined with the pietist insight that the claim to be in control, the claim to be in the driver's seat, verges on blasphemy. That the way in which one finds the good news, the old pietist insight, going back to Spanier, one lets go and lets go.
AA influenced pietist. Also from the Oxford Group, however, AA found, within the Oxford Group, AA found a kind of via negativa. They found what not to do, what would not work. In a letter that Bill wrote in 1949, he observed, the early members of Alcoholics Anonymous intend to say the greatest contribution the Oxford Group made to our fellowship was to show us what would not work for alcoholics. The most important development in AA's spirituality in the fellowship is not James and Jung, it's not the Oxford Group, this is just a framework, it's the earliest members' own experience.
A keystone of AA's spirituality is the primacy of experience. Classically, any spirituality is attained not by teaching or learning or discussion or argument, only by experience. Ideas on spirituality are a dime a dozen. Actually, it's very difficult to get them for that. Most gurus charge considerably more. But basically, everybody's got ideas on spirituality. Where do they come from? In no way, let me make clear, do I claim that the ideas that I am going to present follow from the experience of my own spiritual life.
I wish that they did. They don't. My approximate source for what follows, for this specific angle of vision, is the continuing research I've done, not so much at AA meetings, although I continue to study there, but especially the AA grapevine. Some of you, in fact, I hope all of you are familiar with the most recent of the AA publications, the book, The Language of the Heart, which brings together all of Bill W.'s grapevine articles.
I had the privilege of working on that book, putting those articles together, digging them out. And the marvelous thing is this came across after I had my heart attacks and bypass surgery.
[00:10:00]
I couldn't read stuff that was heavy. And for about three months, I read the grapevine from 1944 up to the present. I read all those stories over three times. Marvelous, marvelous reading. Because, see, the idea that Bill had, Bill's intention was to write a last book. In 1961, 1960, Bill said he wanted to write a last book specifically on the topic of AA spirituality. That book was tentatively to be titled Practicing These Principles in All Our Affairs.
Bill began that project in a series of articles that appear in the grapevine in 1961 and 1962. There are six articles that have the headline over their title. It will become Bill's forthcoming book, Practicing These Principles, or just In All Our Affairs. And then the seventh article isn't as headed. It sort of breaks off. I'll talk about it a little later. The series breaks off. As you know, Bill never wrote that.
And the idea was around about five years ago at a general service conference. What would that book have been? And gathering together all of Bill's articles to make them available so maybe the membership can draw that out. Bill's intention, over 25 plus years, Bill wrote over 150 articles. And, of course, there are so many articles by members in the grapevine. These ideas come from there. I suggest when anyone offers to present on the topic of spirituality, whether AA spirituality or any other, you ask them, where do your ideas come from?
So far as I am aware, beyond the fact, of course, that I am a historian and I bring that approach. So understanding I'm going to present today, these eight core ideas come from this source, immersion in the AA grapevine. I don't know. Some of you, I'm sure, are recovering. Some of you, I'm sure, are non-recovering professionals who are recovering from something other than alcoholism, something like being human.
It always troubles me when professionals say it's so hard to research AA. You go to meetings, they have anonymity. Going to meetings takes so much time. My first question to them always is, do you read the grapevine? 95% of them say no. What do you mean? Many of them haven't even heard of it, and I think that's a member's problem. The grapevine is not as good as going to a meeting. However, it can in some ways be better.
At a meeting, it's very hard to get up and ask someone exactly what did you say. And when something's written, you can go back to it. Any professional who moans it's so hard to get to know AA who doesn't read the grapevine is engaged in denial. If you would get to know AA, yes, go to meetings. Yes, talk to AA members. Yes, read the literature. But don't forget the grapevine. And may I suggest to you who are members of Alcoholics Anonymous, especially these days where AA varies in places, that if you are trying to help professionals understand your fellowship program, you suggest and perhaps even make available to them the grapevine.
What's a one-year subscription? $8, $10, something like that. Most professionals can afford that. Historians can, but most other professionals, treatment professionals can. From their own ongoing experience, what this source reveals is that members of Alcoholics Anonymous worked out a way of life that involved a way of thinking that became incorporated in a language of recovery. Notice where I've gone.
A way of life. AA presents itself that way. Any way of life contains a way of thinking. And the way of thinking became incorporated in a language of recovery, a way of seeing, a way of thinking about, a way of feeling, a way of responding to, a way of experiencing and expressing reality. And this way of life emerges precisely from the practice of telling stories of what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.
Primacy of experience is language of recovery. This AA spirituality is not a group of truths to be believed, dogmas to be affirmed, practices to be engaged in. It is a language of recovery. And one learns to speak and think in certain terms. There are three layers here. First, the overall frame, the only two sentences in the big book that are successively italicized. They appear in the appendix. Willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness are the essentials of recovery, but these are indispensable.
That overarches everything that I say. Willingness, honesty, and open-mindedness, these are the essentials of AA spirituality. Within that frame, I'm going to move from that microphone for a moment. Is this working? I guess shout. There is an overarching canopy of discoveries. I'm not going to use the board very much. This is for a picture. There are four discoveries that the earliest members made that the more I look at this material, I'm convinced every new member of the fellowship must make.
And my excitement. And my excitement is how the earliest members made it, because they were the first in a
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long time. And these four initial discoveries, the spiritual is essential, but it is different than you think that it is. There is a difference between magic and miracle. The spiritual is essentially open-ended, and the spiritual is pervasive. I'll talk about each of those. And under those four discoveries, within the language of recovery, emerge four themes, four ways of understanding reality that are the essence of this AA spirituality.
I put it in the shape of a diamond because it's sort of a flow chart. Release, the experience of release, gratitude, humility, tolerance. That's the outline. That's where we're going to go in the next roughly 35 minutes. It should be 40, but I'll try to give you five back. The earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous made, first of all, these four discoveries. The first one, the vital importance of the spiritual to their program.
They saw understanding the spiritual to be as important as understanding alcoholism as a disease or a malady. This is the main way that Alcoholics Anonymous was different from concurrent thinkers such as Richard Peabody. His book, The Common Sense of Drinking, where you can find virtually all of the understandings of AA except for the centrality of the spiritual. The earliest AAs discovered that in order to recover, the new member of Alcoholics Anonymous had to shatter two stereotypes, two images that he or she had inside the head.
And the first one was, what is an alcoholic? And as long as the person thought that an alcoholic is a skid row bum, a moral degenerate, some sort of a weak-willed, evil type of person, as long as that's what the word alcoholic meant, that person could not get well. The shattering of the stereotype, what is an alcoholic? The second stereotype that had to be shattered, as important, was the old notion of what is the spiritual.
This essential nature of the spiritual, the closest thing you're going to find to a definition of alcoholism in the big book, the book entitled Alcoholics Anonymous, is it is an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer. Central to the AA dynamic has always been the shattering of both of those false stereotypes. This was done differently in New York and Akron and in the AA that derives from each of them.
I don't know where AA in this area came from, and many of you are not, of course, immediately from Ashland. But it's always interesting because most AA groups come from one root or the other. Bill told someone in a letter he wrote in 1963, the phrase, it works, originally meant that 80 to 90 percent of agnostically inclined newcomers come to some belief in God. And I can go back to a series of letters from 1939 and 1940, how early in AA, especially in New York, they tried to deny the centrality of the spiritual and they kept having a lot of slips because of the expression Bill always used, we pussyfooted on the spiritual.
We've got to stop pussyfooting on the spiritual. We should have greater success in Akron. They were much more explicit about this in Akron. Let me draw from the wider spiritual tradition the Russian thinker Lev Shestov observed, I believe the third decade of this century and therefore before AA, it is only when man wishes the impossible that he remembers God. To obtain that which is possible, he turns to those like himself.
And that captures the experience of many of those earlier states. They had tried every other way of getting sober. They had done everything. It is still true, I'm convinced, again, if it's not, you'd better tell me, if you watch any newcomer to any AA group, you'll notice after about six months of regular attendance, he or she is thinking very differently about two things. One, what does it mean to be an alcoholic?
And two, what is meant by the spiritual? Okay, the first discovery, the spiritual is essential to recovery, but it ain't what you think it is. The spiritual is essential to recovery, but it is different than the way you've always thought about spiritual. And let me reiterate again, not so much as a challenge, but an invitation, if your experience is otherwise, please tell me, because what I see, even today, that goes on, the same.
The second discovery that they made, and this was extremely important, I'm intrigued that in the earliest grapevine articles, this contribution was made also by non-members
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in the early grapevines. There are a lot of more articles by non-members of AA, professionals of various kind, and the Reverend Sam Shoemaker, Episcopalian priest, was one who emphasized this theme. Members did also, but Sam was a very good writer and stated it clearly. Especially on the topic of the spiritual, the second discovery, Ron, there is a fundamental difference between magic and miracle, or if you prefer, between magic and mystery.
That's what the M&M stands for up there. Essential but different. Spiritual is essential but different. Secondly, not magic but miracle, not magic but mystery. See, the quest for magic involves the claim and the attempt to control, to manipulate. Seeking the magical is the antithesis of spirituality. In fact, it replicates the experience of the drinking alcoholic. This is one, now if you are religiously inclined, you will say it's a canard leveled against religion.
If you're not religiously inclined, you will say it's one problem of religion. I'm not going to get into settling that one, but religion tends to be, it seems, whether necessarily or accidentally, a tendency to engage in control, to tell God how to run the universe. Alcoholic addictive thinking, however, is precisely the claim, the search, the demand to be in control. What the demand to be in control reflects is the self-centered hydrology of self-worship.
Spirituality involves not the seeking of control, of a magical way to control, but rather being open to miracle, being open to the reality that one is not in control. Spirituality involves accepting life as a mystery to be lived rather than a problem to be solved. A quotation that I'm sure you've heard, I like to attribute it to Gabriel Marcel usually. Life is not a problem to be solved, it's a mystery to be lived.
See, the problem with the quest for magic, again, I don't know how many of you out there are recovering, if you're an alcoholic, you know where magic is. Magic booze is magic, if you're an alcoholic. And once you start looking for magic, you're going to go back to booze. That's the problem with looking for magic. The alcoholic knows, as few other people in our culture know, where real magic is. And spirituality, the bane of spirituality has always been the quest for magic, the quest to be in control.
There is a profound difference between magic and spirituality. And this pursuit to discover this, to realize that spirituality is not some, you know, you get close to God so you can tell him or her how to do it. This spirituality, rather, involves, to coin a phrase that you've never heard before, seeking only a knowledge of his will and the power to carry that. That sense. Not magic, but an openness to mystery and miracle.
Now again, the word miracle can be used particularly in AA, the word mystery can be used at times of service of obfuscation. All profound, valuable reality is subject, because we are all flawed, to be used less than perfectly. But this is the insight. As long as the search is for magic, recovery will not take place. Thirdly, they discovered, related to miracle rather than magic, the earliest members did the discovery of the open-endedness of the spiritual.
This issued in the emphasis of progress rather than perfection. Bill W.'s favorite image for what the alcoholic did was, borrowed from Bunyan, we are on a pilgrim's progress. This sense of open-endedness, parenthetic, let me come back to this now, this is why Bill never finished that last book. Would it be marvelous if we had his book, Practicing These Principles in All Our Affairs? My answer is, no, I don't think it would be.
And the reason is, the reason why I think Bill broke off the series. The seventh article in that series, it's in the July 1962 grapevine, it's entitled Spiritual Experiences. You know how small the grapevine pages are? It's sort of one page with a large heading, and one-third of the opposite page. And Bill tells this little story on himself. Bill is looking into spirituality, he goes to a meeting, and at this meeting he sees this guy who really is obviously tremendously spiritual, just everything he says is spiritual, and Bill can't wait for the meeting to be over.
He goes up to the guy and says, gee, you really seem to have this spirituality, could
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you, and the guy just brushes him off, doesn't let him finish, and says, no, no, no, if you're interested in spirituality, go talk to him. And Bill says, what is the main characteristic of the spiritual? Those who have it don't know that they have it. How is someone who comes to that discovery going to write a book on spirituality? The project page. The main characteristic, spirituality is open-ended.
If it's this journey, one is always aware of the distance yet to be traversed, not how far one has come. In a sense, spirituality and humility, which we'll look at later from a different aspect here, are the same. I don't know how many of you know this, maybe some of you do, but put out together by the United Nations and the World Federation of Planets, they have a medal for the humblest person in the universe.
And the reason none of you has ever seen it is as soon as somebody puts it on, they take it away. And spirituality is like that. Spirituality is like that. How, then, can we recognize spirituality, Bill? The last paragraph of this article, it's a cry of both hope and despair, but it comes down on the hope side, because Bill ends his article by quoting from a rather good source. The last paragraph runs, how, then, shall we recognize spirituality, quotation marks, by their fruits, ye shall know them.
Those quotation marks, end of article, end of series, end of book project. By their fruits, ye shall know them. Two manifestations of this assumption, this discovery, I think, are especially intriguing to me in current AA. Also over time, there's been an emphasis in AA on being teachable, that sort of waxes and wanes. Currently, I think it's waning a little bit. It's great AA. I remember one of my favorite groups, and I lived down in Georgia, I used to go to a meeting rurally, because they don't care for meetings around the academic setting.
And old John in this group, John had started drinking, John was Southern Baptist, he was a good Southern Baptist. He started drinking at age 45, and he thought of it at age 48. You wouldn't believe his story. When John, at every meeting, would talk about how I came to his meeting, and I was too stubborn, and I wouldn't listen to anything, and by God, the main gift you people made to me is you people made me teachable.
John could never say the word teachable without hitting the table. And John, the main thing, I came to AA, and you people made me teachable. God, I love John, and I love teachable. God knows I need him. But the emphasis within AA on being teachable. Alcoholics know all the answers. Alcoholics can explain anything. Actually, no, they can't, but they can explain anything away. There's a difference between explaining and explaining away.
And in one way or another, I've heard this, usually it is the word teachable without John's emphasis on it. And while this gets reflected, I'm told, I do not see, I'm in a guest house in Michigan now, which is a treatment center for alcoholic Roman Catholic priests, brothers, seminarians, deacons, and those types. We don't get too many cocaine users. I'm director of research education, I'm not a clinician.
I work with alumni mainly. We don't see much cocaine use. They can't afford it, at least the reason I think. But I'm told by those who work with cocaine users that this seems to be the essence of teach being, becoming teachable, becoming teachable. The final little corollary that flows out of this perhaps, and understanding the essence of Alcoholics Anonymous spirituality, AA is a spirituality of not having all the answers.
Not having all the answers. In the beginning, this was connected with why Alcoholics Anonymous left the Oxford group. That will not put up with anyone who has all the answers. This is part of their intelligence, their genius. If I were put on a torture instrument and told, summarize in one sentence or less, AA spirituality, this is what I would say, AA is a spirituality of not having all the answers.
Again, as a historian of religion, which is my primary confidence, this is what troubles most people about religion. This is what troubles most members of AA about religion. Back in the early days, religion seemed to claim to have all the answers. AA is a spirituality precisely of not having all the answers. Go to your next meeting, ask, walk up to someone and say, what should I invest in in the stock market?
You will probably get the answer. Notice I say probably. I don't know. What does that have to do with drinking? I was brought up in Boston, I hope you will forgive me. I was brought up in Boston. I hope you'll forgive my accent. I mean, my AA vocabulary is Boston, general accent.
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On the other hand, of course, the flip side of this is AA does have all the answers. Did you ever notice any question you ask of an AA member, the answer they give you is, Don't drink and go to meetings? No, my God, I've got this obsession. What should I do? Don't drink and go to meetings. My God, my marriage is breaking up. What should I do? Don't drink and go to meetings. My God, I just won the lottery. What should I do? Don't drink and go to meetings.
My God, I just, having the same answer for everything precisely testifies to not having all the answers. AA is an open-ended, an open-ended spirituality. It forthrightly acknowledges, I don't know, just don't drink, go to meetings. Guess what? 54 years now, it's worked pretty well. And finally, again, they discovered this because those who thought they had all the answers were the ones who went out and got drunk.
These lessons were learned the hard way. Let's never forget that. Some of what helps members of Alcoholics Anonymous to keep sober was purchased literally at the cost of the lives of some of the earliest alcoholics. The way in which you discover what works is you discover what doesn't work. And while there should be a great deal of gratitude and a great deal of praise for those who discovered what worked, those of you who owe your lives, your sobriety, your serenity, your very being to the fellowship in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I might at least suggest I may be getting trifle sentimental here, but anyway, please indulge that part of this historian.
Remember occasionally when you're speaking to your higher power, those who didn't make it. But who helped discover the knowledge that helps you keep sober. As fellowship, AA has learned from its mistakes. In the same way they learned that the spiritual has to be pervasive, the fourth and final reality concerning spirituality that they discovered despite many attempts to deny it, Bill W.'s All Our Affairs emphasis in that book, that phrase of course comes from the 12th step I'm sure most of you recognize, the spiritual pervades, the spiritual is not some kind of separate category, it is rather the glue that makes the whole.
The spirituality is that kind of reality that unless it touches everything in your life, touches nothing in your life. Man, that one came tough to the early alcoholics. You can see it in chapter six of the big book, the into action chapter. Right after, how it works. Many years ago when I began working these ideas, I was at the renewal center at Hazelden, they just built it, they have a marvelous fireplace there, this chimney down in the lower lounge, if any of you have been there, with the glacial rocks in the Minnesota countryside, you know, these beautiful rocks, red and green and blue and sort of gold.
And someone's telling me when I come up with this idea, what is an image for this pervasive and the spiritual? And I look at that chimney and I thought, which is the spiritual? You know, these beautiful red rocks, silver, the green. And suddenly it came to me, it's the only image I've ever been able to come up with, it's so hard to do metaphors for the spiritual. The spiritual, it was the mortar holding those rocks together.
You don't have categories, physical, mental, spiritual. The spiritual, spiritual is one of those realities that unless it touches everything, touches nothing. This is the emphasis in the stories in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. This is the early experience on slips. Who slipped in the earliest? They read those stories again in chapter six or the stories in the first edition of the big book or the second edition where they put in explicitly slippys.
Who are the ones who slipped? Those who got honest and took an inventory and did everything except they, well, you know, they didn't have to apply this to this little hand in the cash register deal they were involved in. Or all these ideas were wonderful and put them in practice, except for this little bit of hanky-panky going on in the side. Or these ideas are really wonderful and totally good and everything, except for this little resentment that I was going to hang on to against that particular group.
Invariably, those people got drunk again. I went in some different way when I first came to Guesthouse in October of 86. Our host director at Lake Orient is a man named Eamon Higgins. Eamon Higgins. He got off the boat from Ireland 38 years ago. To hear him talk, you'd swear it was yesterday. But Eamon called me on the phone after I'd been there for a week and he said, Ah, Ernie, would you like to discover a reputation for being wondrously wise?
I said, My God, Eamon, anyone would like a reputation like that. And with my ego and my narcissism, of course. I mean, my God. Please come down to my office and film. And so he came trundling down and sat down with his bald head gleaming in the sun.
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Through the window. And he said, You know, many of our men, as you probably know, after we treat them for their disorder, we send them back. He says, All of them did not make it the first time. And some of them, they had wee little slips. And some of them come back to us. And when they come back, I ask them two questions. Oh, they think I can see right. They think I'm so wise. Let me share with you.
I said, Eamon, what are those two questions? He says, The first one I ask him is, And when did you stop going to meetings? And the second question I ask him is, What are you hiding? What are you hiding? What part of your life have you not put in your inventory? Have you not shared with your sponsor? Are you keeping from looking at yourself? What are you hiding? The spiritual is pervasive. Again, I know of no other way to say it.
The spiritual is the kind of reality that unless it touches every aspect of our lives, touches none of our lives. No matter how many games we might play about that. Indeed, perhaps one of the privileges that alcoholics have, it's a fearsome privilege, is they learn that. Others can play games longer. Alcoholics learn as they live their program. If we're going to grow, the spiritual is pervasive. And again, those earliest members of discovery, you can read their discovery.
I've given you the references twice. I see that again as they come in. This every new member has to make all of these four discoveries. I tend to think that one thing that makes a good group, a good group is one that facilitates making these discoveries. It's a good group. Language isn't firm, of course, and so we cannot speak of them in this way. We tend to speak of the physical, the mental, the spiritual.
That is why the spiritual must talk about directly in aid and transmitted by story. Alcohol and drugs give the illusion of wholeness. Stories bring the reality of wholeness. The unity of these discoveries is conveyed only by story. The only story reveals the connection between thinking and acting and willing and feeling. They all become one. That is the core of any spirituality and is also the core of the AA experience of sobriety.
AA storytelling, like all spirituality, involves not talking about it, but the actual living of certain qualities. The practice of telling stories of what we used to be like, what happened, what we are like now, actually elicits and reinforces those qualities, those realities that we shall explore under these four headings, release, gratitude, humility, and tolerance. The point, please notice, is not that these are talked about in stories.
It's rather that the very practice of storytelling elicits, calls forth, these experiences in both the teller and the hearers. They're not always named and not every experience in every talk. Please let me emphasize, because this tends to get misunderstood. I'm not saying that people, when they tell their stories, necessarily talk about. Talking about isn't important. It's rather that you entrench the story.
The experience, the experience is implicit. It is called forth. It is brought into being. The experience of release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, about which we're going to speak. I want the word release rather than freedom for the first theme because release is something that is received. Freedom is one. No one can give you your freedom. That's the philosophical understanding. It may be just explicit.
It's mine, which is why I prefer the word release. The language that is used, sometimes this is conveyed. A person describes a weight being lifted. It seemed that chains had fallen away, especially the more intellectually inclined or those addicted to comic books. Sometimes those are the same group. We'll talk about suddenly a light went on. The three aspects, three levels, I think, where this is experienced, again, more than described.
First, the release from the bondage to alcohol. Someone who could never go out to dinner, never choose a restaurant without making sure that they served booze, discovers one day in sobriety that they're in this marvelous restaurant enjoying a marvelous dinner, and booze isn't served, and they don't give a damn. That's an experience of freedom.
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Someone whose life was ruled in one way or another by obsession with alcohol. Another mild example, I realize. The release from the fear and dishonesty of self-deception. The release from the slavery of self-centeredness. In all three of these, the emphasis is on the sense of release, not control or triumph. The person in talking about this, there's a sense of wonder. You know, not, I attain this, but rather wonder, one day this happened.
Notice one does not tell one's story in order to attain release, but release does emerge from the practice of telling one's story. How does this happen? When we let the truth about ourselves be revealed, we experience a kind of release. Notice when we let the truth about ourselves be revealed, this is not a kind of exhibitionism. Someone doesn't stand up in an AA meeting to reveal the truth about himself or herself.
At least that's not the idea behind it. Rather, someone stands up, and because he or she has been told, this is the only way in which you yourself will stay sober, he or she shares experience, strength, and hope. And in the course of that sharing of experience, strength, and hope, let's self be revealed. A sense of wonder can come because a release is experienced. Release is one of those things that as long as you try for it, you're not going to get it.
Release reflects the core paradox of the mystical tradition. One attains a sense of release only if one oneself lets go. Marvelous images in the medieval mystics of this insight. I have one from a more of a modern mystic. There's a Polish gentleman that I knew when I was living in Chicago. His name was Patrick Murphy. And he decided, this was three or four years ago, he decided he wanted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
And this was a plane for being hijacked. And of course, poor Patrick did not want to be hijacked. So he made all these tremendous plans. And he got on the plane, headed off to the Holy Land. The plane climbs up through 18,000 feet. Bomb is under his seat, goes off, blows him out the side of the plane. And as he's falling, he thinks about all these marvelous plans he'd made. First of all, which airline was he going to fly?
Pan Am or TWA? Definitely Pan Am. No one was flying TWA back in those days. What day of the week is he going to fly? Weekend or weekday? Definitely weekday he'd chosen. That very morning as he got on the plane, bare hours ago, the cabin attendant had asked him with a smile, window or aisle? And he had said window. Figured it would be a safer seat. By this time, he's falling through 9,000 feet. His situation is getting fairly desperate.
And so from the depth of his spirituality, he cries out in a heartfelt prayer, St. Francis, save me! And lo and behold, this gigantic hand reaches down out of the sky, grabs him by the scruff of the neck, and he's danged. And suddenly he becomes aware which St. Francis. Only those we do not attain release directly, because that would be under control, it would again be magical. Again, language will limp here.
But only those who have experienced letting go, it seems, are able to experience release. And one advantage that alcoholics have is that the moment that you hit bottom, if you're an alcoholic in recovery, the one thing you knew as you hit bottom is that you hated that substance, you hated that alcohol, you hated that booze, but damn it, you needed it. If they take it away from me, I'll die. It's killing me, but I have to have it.
And if you let go of nothing ever in your life, it should be rather doubtful. If you are a recovering alcoholic, you have this recovering kind of person of any kind, you have this advantage at least once in your life, you have gone through the experience of letting go of something you were convinced you absolutely needed. Now, having done that once doesn't necessarily make it easier from then on. But at least you know that it happens.
At least you know that it happens. The second of the themes is the theme of gratitude. This is, I'm concerned about a little bit Gratitude, this is, I'm concerned about a little bit because it's talked so much in AA. This is one of those examples where there's a difference between naming something and experiencing it.
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Gratitude is a keystone relationship with release. The best expression of my gratitude that I have at hand comes not from AA literature but from Elie Wiesel's 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, where Wiesel said, No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace. Every hour and offering not to share them would mean to betray them.
Our lives no longer belong to us alone. They belong to all those who need us desperately. I'm not equating alcoholism with the obscenity of the Holocaust. I'm sure you understand that. I'm simply saying that Wiesel, one of our modern spiritual wisdom figures and an incredibly skilled writer, has captured in words better than anything else I've ever read what, in my experience, all alcoholics who are recovering experience.
No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace. Every hour and offering not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone. They belong to all those who need us desperately. That's not codependence, ladies and gentlemen. That is spirituality. Gratitude flows from the sense that release is a gift.
It's unearned, unmerited. It's not attained by being deserved. In fact, it's not attained at all. We've lost the sense of gift in our culture. We have all these ritual occasions of giving. We need an excuse to give a gift. I remember one time I was traveling and seeing something. I thought my wife would like a cashmere sweater. Bringing it back home, giving it to her, and having her reply. I believe it's a story as much on me as on her.
What's this for? What is gratitude? Gratitude is the only possible response to a gift understood as a free and spontaneous boon. Especially in a way of life that involves a way of thinking. Gratitude is a kind of vision that enables recognizing a gift. Gratitude is vision rather than feeling. Would you like a warm feeling that courses through your whole being, sort of making you shiver and giving you a warm glow?
If you'd like that, pee down your pant leg. That's borrowed from an old Peanuts cartoon. One of my favorite theologians is Charles Schultz. But Schultz is reflecting there, and this again is two decades ago, the reality that in any tradition of spirituality, feelings are not to be denied. But they are not where the essence of spirituality is located. Gratitude is a vision. Gratitude is that vision which allows us to see how gifted we are.
What do you have that you have not received? Every great spiritual teacher has asked. What do you have that you have not received? What is meant by gratitude is the vision that enables us to see that we have been gifted, that we have received. And that is a way of looking at things in vision. I know why I'm standing up here and you people are sitting down there. While you were out in high school dating and having a lot of fun by God, I was in the library and I was pounding books.
And I worked hard and I got to Harvard and I studied in the library and I earned a Ph.D. and I sat up nights and I ate tuna fish out of cans and I published a book and by God I deserve to be up here. I earned my right to get up here. There's a couple of little slivers of truth in there. But the real truth is that I can less believe that I'm up here than you can. I mean, parents, neither of whom have gone to college.
A father who sacrificed his whole life working two jobs so his children could go to college. Even with that, would have been unable to make it to college, but I went to seminary for a time, as some of you can probably tell. Generosity, therefore, of the people who supported the seminary and then a New York State scholarship program because even that would not have been enough. Working for a time, going back to graduate school, yes, at Harvard.
Doing so bad because I went out of school for a time, but I really should have been thrown out of school after my first seminar. In fact, they were sort of on the verge of it, but one of the mentors saw a glimmer of hope and gave me some extra work to do, extra time. Handed in a version of what eventually became the book on A.A. that is still absolutely unreadable even by me. It was worked on, worked with not only by my mentor at school, by editors at Hazelden.
I could not even begin to name all the people who in one way or another made it possible for me to be here. Father Jim, Mitty. Now there are aspects of truth in both of those stories. You decide which is truer.
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And you'll understand gratitude is a vision. It's a way of seeing. Gratitude is difficult in a culture that rewards those who go out and get things and who are self-starting and autonomous. And by God, what I have is mine because I earned it. We do not live in an age of gratitude. This is the gratitude that, again, the A.A. themes. I've got two minutes. I cannot do both humility and tolerance. Humility means accepting the both and-ness of the human condition.
We are both beast and angel. We are both not in God. The tragedy of our existence as human beings is that we are both and beings who try to be either or, one or the other. All or nothing, Bill always said. The essence of humility is accepting that being human is good enough. One can be both sober and alcoholic. One can be both alcoholic and sober. Being human is good enough. That is the essence of humility.
It is transmitted. It is transmitted. Every time someone stands up and says, I am a sober alcoholic, it basically means I am a flawed perfectionist. It will translate right out to you. And that's an embrace of one's humanity. That's the meaning of humility. Tolerance, if we can accept that we ourselves are mixed, we can accept that others are mixed. If I accept my own both and-ness, perhaps I can accept the both and-ness of those, not only those who I love and respect, that's harder than my own, but even those whom I don't love.
Earliest day, very often, you know, they look around and someone may say, how in the world does that blankety-blank stay sober? And let me tell you something, if you can turn that from an exclamation into an honest question, you'd be surprised at what you might learn. Stories of what we used to be like, what happened, what we are like now, are both a sameness and a difference. The sameness that is rooted in shared weakness allows the differences that arise from shared strength to be appreciated rather than resented, to be seen as enriching rather than threatening.
I love the way they get this across at AA. You know, they tell you, identify, don't compare. They never say anything about differentiating, but you get this marvelous plurality of models. Isn't that a fancy expression? You go to an AA meeting and they say, identify, don't compare, right? You know, so you go with this little notebook because you want everybody to think you're a graduate student. They might think you're an alcoholic otherwise.
And the first speaker gets up and says, my God, I'm glad to be here because those psychiatrists damn near killed me until I found AA and by AA. And I want to tell you another way that I get sober is I get down on my knees in the morning, I ask for help, and I get down on my knees at night and I say thank you. And thank you for listening to me. And everybody applauds me right in this time. Psychiatrists, kneeling.
That's what they do in AA. Next speaker gets up. Next speaker. And says, I'm grateful not only to the Fellowship and Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm grateful to my psychiatrist. He didn't help me much back when I was drinking because I wasn't so honest with him, but some of the things we talked about have been helping me since I've been staying straight. Helped me a little bit. As far as the kneeling down goes, I mean, I always remember what they say in AA, some are sicker than others.
I mean, kneeling down in the morning reminds me too much of making love to Gloria. If you don't know what that means, you haven't read the back of a good toilet bowl lately. In Boston, all toilet bowls have the word Gloria on them. Did you ever notice, if you listen to how foreign people tell their stories, you're going to hear eight different ways of saying sorry? And this is at stories where based on a shared weakness, a shared disability of alcoholism, the differences can be seen as strength.
You choose. This then is not mere tolerance, it's an act of appreciation. It may take two or three extra minutes, I just want to close the story up because it's a true story when I moved from Chicago to Detroit. The greatest truth in AA is that spirituality and religion flourishes through heresy. The meeting I was going to in Chicago, in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, at the entrance of the University of Chicago, after a while, somebody objected.
They were reading from a 24-hour book and someone said that's sexist. They started reading from each day until the beginning and someone objected to that. Finally, they were reading from nine different meditation books at the beginning of their meetings. Somebody came along one week and said, the trouble is there's too much reading going on here at the meetings. There's not enough time for discussion.
And the response was, of course, in the charity that informs all of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, what do you mean there's not enough time for discussion? How are you appointing 100 academics? All you want to do is talk, talk, talk, talk, and off they went to the races. Every week, for two and a half months, a group conscious meeting after the regular meeting. You know a group is in trouble. Finally, this isn't so true, so help me God.
I mean, this is absolutely true. I was beginning to commute from Detroit. I had just gotten this job, so I wasn't there for all of these. They finally, no way, I mean, the fight got so deep, the language became vile. I mean, one group was heard to refer to the other group as hazelden lovers. Clearly, no way could this be reconciled.
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It was decided they'd have to meet in a different place, find another church, a Lutheran church, halfway up, but then if you met at the same time, there'd be a parking problem on the street. Everything possible to fight over, they fought over. Dividing the treasury wasn't hard. $14 divides very easily into two. But see, this was Hyde Park. It was a yuppie group. They didn't have Maxwell House coffee in cans.
They had beans of decaffeinated flavor, and they sat down, and so help, they didn't cut out the beans individually, but each bag sort of got separated out. This is vanilla decaffeinated. This is the beanie cinnamon. And the first week, you know, they got to Hyde Park, and the second meeting was starting 20 minutes later, and as the cars parked, they got out, and they glared at each other, causing black stones.
Three weeks it took. Three weeks it took. Someone came to the first group, a newcomer, and said, geez, you people do a lot of reading around here. And the response of the first group was, yeah, well, you know, others have thought that, and our daughter group, our daughter group, that leads over, and they took them all. And I wasn't around. Three or four weeks after that, someone came to the second group and said, you know, I heard that there's a lot of good literature in AA, but you people here, you don't seem to, well, no, we don't, but there's another group, and within a period of three months, where once there had been one AA group with about 23 corps members, there were now two AA groups, one with 18 corps members, the other with 16 corps members.
That's how AA has always grown. The greatest proof that AA is spiritual is AA has grown through heresy. What's the possible usefulness of this examination we've engaged in? First of all, let me make clear, these ideas are not an aid to taking other people's inventories. I'm sure you realize that. Yet AA does suggest sticking with the winners. I would suggest that perhaps the sensitivity to these qualities, to the language and its diversity of these qualities, may be one way of, perhaps one way of, I don't know, Likewise, these are not intended as suggestions for taking one's own inventory.
Remember Bill W.'s discovery, the surest sign of spirituality seems to be that you don't realize you've got it. So staring at one's own navel, seeking signs of release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, is probably the surest route to becoming not very spiritual. On the other hand, I suggest that once in a while, when you're telling your story, you also listen. And if you're listening, you also listen.
And if you're listening, you also listen. And I think it's, again, Bill did this, and not quite in his vocabulary, and the other members, listen for which themes are present and which are absent. This is one way of discovering the next step on the journey. Bill moving from sponsor to sponsor in this way as he did. Always choosing the person who had the quality that it seemed he had to work on next.
My purpose, in other words, is not to tell you how to be spiritual, but rather, I hope, my attempt has been to deepen your appreciation of the depth and the breadth of the riches of the wisdom of the program and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. In that purpose, I know that I've set myself an impossible task. Perhaps the ultimate spirituality is that such people as you, professionals, can come to the insight that you will best discover spirituality by studying a group of ex-drunks.
That's why you work in this field. That's why you're here. You know, if you are going to find your own spirituality, you'll find it in a bunch of ex-drunks. I have a hunch that making that discovery that you have already made is where real spirituality starts. And therefore, as always, it's a privilege to be able to share ideas with you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.