34th Anniversary Dinner — New York, Oct 5, 1968

I think that probably now is the time that everyone has been waiting for. Our founder, and to start his introduction, we would like to begin it with the candle ceremony, where Bill will light a candle, pass it down to the first table, to symbolize the candle and the thought that was passed on from Dr. Bob and Bill to the first members of this program. And as he does this, and after he’s passed it down, we would appreciate it if everyone would light a light at their table. May I have a light? Thank you. And I think probably those lights are more of an introduction than anything that I might say. And I would like now to turn the mic over to one of our founders, Bill Levy. Thank you. Thank you, folks. I think those folks throw it over there. For Lois and me, and I hope for many of you, these hours together at this time of the year are among our most treasured experiences. This is especially true for the anniversary children, and Lois is one because she was there at the beginning. She’s still with us. And we want to express a gratitude that is really inexpressible for all of these magnificent arrangements. For this privilege, once a year, of getting the pulse of our society, the chance of seeing a substantial cross-section of what Mary called the beloved community. This is a very great privilege, a marvelous satisfaction. Thank you. Thank all conservatives. And thank God. Lois would like to share this giving of thanks to you with me. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. And thanks, and thanks a million for all your love that I can feel up here. And all the things that you have done are carrying the message of AA for all these years. This afternoon at the reception, I was taken unaware that I was going to have to say anything. And I told what I was going to repeat here and what I had expected I would say here. It’s just a little anecdote. But some 17 years ago, I spoke at the dinner here in a nearby hotel. And I said that it was 17 years that Bill had drank during our married life. And that then there had been 17 years of sobriety so that the score was even. And now we had started on a brand-new road. Now it’s another 17 years. And I can’t express my gratitude and wonder at these last, particularly these last 17 years. And I thank you all so much. Thank you. Just as anonymity is the foundation of our tradition, so is the spiritual awakening, the spiritual experience, the foundation of recovery in AA and progress in the life which has a new dimension. I would like to talk about the spiritual experience. And as a backdrop against which we may view it, I would like to tell you a succession of short stories. The first one coming to mind is a recent one. It had to do with a Japanese delegation coming over, I expect, on the occasion of the Congress in Washington, who wished to visit the office and pose the great dilemma that was facing AAs and would-be AAs in Japan. And the dilemma was what to do about the godless. They pointed out that the steps say, God as we understood him. And they had put a brand-new, entirely original construction on that phrase. They said, we understand that we should believe in the gods that the people believe in at AA General Headquarters, 305 East 45th Street, New York City. Nevertheless, though this has its humorous twist, they were posing a question very old. And theirs was exactly the dilemma that once I faced. I’m not going to detail my story at length. I’m going to touch on those spots that will best illustrate this theme of the awakening of spiritual experience. But you do remember how my sponsor, Eddie, came to me in Brooklyn, and how over the kitchen table, he told me of his release from alcoholism through the ministry of the Oxford group, the people from whom we drew so much. And as he told the story, unfolded the need for honesty, the need for restitution, the need for giving of oneself without reckoning the return, especially those with prestige and money. It was all fine up to this point. But then, when he said, I asked God to help me do these things. I found myself wincing. And he went away. His words had struck me deep, not because they were so new, but because they were spoken across a kinship of suffering, one which I know he had endured, and one that I could see indeed that he was released from. And release was worse. He wasn’t on the waterway. He wasn’t twisting up that spring that inevitably falls only to pitch it back into the drink again. No, he was released. And you could see that a good part of what had happened to him, he attributed to the grace of God. Now, I had never been a militant atheist, but I had been raised in scientific tradition, was so schooled, I had come to believe that the universe was a matter of time and space and particles, that we had evolved somehow from this mysterious background, probably because a cosmic ray had bumped into the genes of some of the lower animals, let’s say the apes and plenty before this, and this is set in process, mutation, that finally evolved human beings. This, in a way, was my release, my faith in science. I could not deny, necessarily, the claims of religion. Who would be so arrogant as to know? But nevertheless, religion for me, this hard-bitten Vermonter, well, that was out of the question, particularly this emotional evangelist. Now, Abbey, in a great and providential prudence, did not put any aggression on me. He merely said what his experience had been and what the result was. He admitted he was licked, he made a self-survey, he made restitution, he worked with other people, and he prayed to the God of his understanding, which I took to be the God of the Episcopal Church. Well, after he left, as you remember, I went on drinking, and then the identical dilemma that the Japanese are facing was armed. By this time, Dr. Silkworth, only months before, had told Lois that I suffered from a compulsion to destructive drinking with which my will, neither my will nor his resources, could cope with. If there was a physical component to this, and if it continued to be aggravated, this so-called allergy, I would go mad, or worse. Now, I knew what this sentence was. And through another channel, Abbey had brought in the same thing. A friend of his who had been to the famous Dr. Carl Jung, who, you remember, had said, my arm has failed, it cannot help you, your only chance, Roland, or such was the person’s name, is a spiritual awakening. You remember that Roland said, but I am a man of faith. And Jung said, but this goes further, this goes deeper. This means a transforming experience that mysteriously, we know not how, expels the effect. So here was another god of mine, Simon, pronouncing a sentence upon me. And I knew I had no recourse to Simon in my case. So I was caught in a terrible bond. Here, the nature of my illness was revealed. And God knows my whole experience for several years had confirmed this knowledge. So the bond increased, and my drinking increased. But all is the faith of my friends across that table. So at last, in desperation, and no hope, I’ll assure you, I thought I’d better go up to the hospital and get my adult brain cleared up, and see if I couldn’t take another look. And so I did go up there. And I wasn’t in too bad shape. And Dr. Silkworth put me to bed. And as the liquor wore it off, and the sedation was gone, the bind on me increased and increased. My God, I’m destined for more deterioration, insanity, and death, hell-bent. And now they seemed to be saying to me, the Oxford groupers and Eddie, only God can bail you out, and how can I believe in God? So the upshot was deeper and deeper, and finally agonizing depression. And then my friend came, repeated his formula, went away, and I took one more tremendous nosedive and cried out. In no hope at all. Just cried out. If there is a God, will he show himself? And you’ve heard me tell the story so many times. There was this great light. There was this tremendous, indescribable excellence. There was the exclamation. Exclamation by me. I’m a free man. So this is the God of preaching. And then the great peace settled on me. And I felt I was in a new world, or I certainly had a very different view of the old one. A universe in which all was somehow right, all was meaningful, that I belonged, that I had a place in. And then came the wonder, why at once, that I’d had this experience, but so few seemed to have it. Yes, I knew that drunks had got religion, and all through the centuries had sobered up. So then in came my sponsor, with a book in his hand of great moments to us of AA. And this is William James on Varieties of Religious Experience. And I began to devour this book. And the tenor of it was that those granted these transforming gifts of faith were generally people who had reached some impasse in some controlling area of life so as to render them inoperative as human beings. They were the people who couldn’t get over it or around it or under it. These experiences were set on a base of hope. Now then, at dinner after dinner, I have come here and recited this story. And I think I have been deeply amiss in not making it abundantly clear that however spectacular, however sweet, however unbelievable to many this experience of mine was, that it was in essence no different than that which any AA acquires. That he may acquire such a transforming experience by first deflation, by not suffering to rub out all rationalization, the attendance upon AA as a higher power to life, and the putting of all theological considerations and arguments on the back of his soul. You and I have sat in meetings time after time. We have heard guys and gals in AA get up and recite what was indeed a miracle of transformation. And then they say to us, but gee, this is a wonderful fellowship. This is saving my life. This is saving my family. This is marvelous. But I’m awful sorry to say, folks, I ain’t got the spiritual angle. Well, you and I looking at the newly wed, the newly born, we nudge ourselves one next to the other, and we whisper, holy smoke, he’s just reeking with it. He just hasn’t put a tag on it. I’m very mindful of this because early on there was an episode down in the old 24th Street Club, must have been in year two or three of Al Pollack’s Anonymous, oh, maybe a little later. And we had one of these no spiritual angle boys who had been doing a great, great job in AA. Gee, everybody liked that kid, you know. And he’d get up and say, well, it’s great, but I didn’t get the spiritual angle. But one night, lo and behold, he got up and announced and said, I got the spiritual angle. I got the higher power. Now I know I’m getting it made. And then he went on to say, you know what my higher power is? He says it’s that radiator over there. And when the steam comes in that radiator, the heat comes out and it warms up the place. But any time there’s any steam in my radiator, nothing comes out of it but trouble. So this is my higher power. And this group is my higher power. And that was really my higher power all the time because when I came along, most of you guys were sober and I was drunk, sure enough. Well, two or three years later, I remember this same chap saying, you know, I’ve been reading a book, funny, written by some psychiatrist, on the subject of cosmic consciousness. You know, as I read that book, somehow I realized that I’ve got a belt of that stuff, and some of it’s rubbed off on me. Now, that was beginning at just about the lowest common denominator of the experience. And yet his experience was just as valid, just as transforming as mine. Now, I think that it will sort of help if we look over the spiritual experience situation among our speakers here, for example, Al and Mary. And finally, I would like to speak for Dr. Bob, as best I may, on that subject. Before launching on that assignment, I’d like to tell another story. Back after the Saturday Post piece, I was approached by Dr. Foster Kennedy, one of the neurologists of world renown back in those days. Foster Kennedy had, for a long time, treated free a gal that thousands of us know. Her name is Marty. And as Marty will tell you, and as Dr. Kennedy will tell you, she was one hell of a mess, and a most difficult household. Well, he saw her come to her first meeting at our house on Clinton Street, and saving one slip a few months later, she hasn’t had a drink to this day. This solved the story. Dr. Kennedy, he came to me and he said, look, Bill, could I ask you a thing? I noticed in that Saturday Post piece that a number of physicians who had apparently watched you folks for some time said very, very good things about A.A. Now, said he, I wish that you could get one or two of those fellas, or some of your other medical friends, perhaps, to come to the Academy of Medicine, where I will arrange hearings for them, and let it be heard from these doctors what they think about A.A. and why they think it works. Well, this was great news at this early time, and gee, could you imagine a doctor not being glad to go to the Academy on the invitation of the great Dr. Kennedy? I couldn’t. So I began to canvass these dear medical friends of ours, and not one of them would go near the place. Not one. And I said, gee, folks, you went into the Saturday Post, you sure stuck your neck out that time, feature article, you broadcast it to the world, you’re right behind it. Why won’t you go up to the Academy and talk? Well, briefly summarized, the consensus of their answer was this. In effect, they said, look, Bill, UAAs have got quite a package composed of attitudes, principles, actions, and the sum of these forces that you have marshaled is great. For example, you have a kind of a crude catharsis. In religion, you might call it a confession. You know, a kind of an analysis. You take your survey of your so-called character defects. Then you have a program of trying to get down these barriers that you put up between yourself and other people, particularly those you have damaged. You make restitution, this is great. Then you have a great new compelling interest in life, this kind of giving of yours that demands no reward. Well, I could extend this list still further, but that was the idea. But they said this is the thing that to us is inexplicable. God knows of all people having worked with alcohol, we know the gravity of this obsession to destructive drinks. And if it weren’t for the fact that drinking is socially acceptable, it would be rated among the world’s number one lunacy, this alcoholism. This self-destruction by alcohol against the victim’s will, interest, lunacy. Now then, making due allowance for all the forces that we can see at work, we still can’t account for the results you’re getting. What you people accomplish or bring about is a re-motivation in alcohol that may expel this obsession to drink in matters of days, weeks, or even months. The change in direction is something that should have by any calculation taken you years, not weeks, days, or months. Therefore, we see and deeply feel that in this society there is an excess. Some force is operated that we cannot describe. We can only postulate its presence. Surely it’s there. We can’t explain it. So who would we be to go to the Academy of Myths to explain the inexplicable? I suppose, or we suppose in your language, that would be to explain God. Well, lots of other people have made similar observations. Of course, all of us realized sooner or later along our course that this is something more than just a society of people with a good work and a blood brotherhood and a kinship of substance. It’s more than that. Every speaker has brought this down, and dramatized it. And you’ll notice that their transforming experience was so often contingent upon the very beginning. So now let’s see if I can equate some of these other experiences with my own. Here comes Al. Al kind of comes in, I would gather from what he told me, sort of playing on this God bit. But at any rate, he was going to have a look. And so he did. Al had much more than a look. He plunged in. Now, it must be that Al found here much more than a society of nice and sometimes not so nice people and understanding crowd with a mission in life. Otherwise, why would he have gone to 22 meetings? Why, still taking his college courses, was he going to 10 a week? Was there not, and will he not tell you? Of course he will. That here was a magnet. One pole marked God might repel him a little, but the other pole marked love drew him on. And so he began to grow in spiritual stature without solving the theological riddle of which came first the hen or the egg. And was his experience just not just as valid as most? Less spectacular? You know, the good book has that phrase, by their fruit ye shall know them. You know, speaking of Al, I’ll remind you of young folks. The other day, I looked out the office door, and I said, holy smoke, what’s that one doing in here? And there was a gay little doll with a mini skirt about so long, and I guess she had love beads on, and she came, you know, pirouetting down the hall. I said, gee, what’s this? Oh, somebody said she’s from the young people’s group out in L.A. Boy, I said get her in there quick. I really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been trying so hard to understand the youth, you know. Well, maybe here will be a great chance. So in she came, and she sat herself down, and this young lady was sure full of joy. She said, you know, Bill, that young people’s group is just going great guns. She says, I’m the oldest member, and I’m 23. And then she handed me out a line of A.A. Well, it could make you cry for joy. It could make you know that if the young generation is like that doll and act, the future of A.A. is perfectly safe. Now, all this time it never occurred to me to ask the gal what she thought about God or the spiritual life or any of the old questions, nor did I try to snore with my exalted spiritual experience. This time it was the other way around. I was taking some lessons for a change. And so it has been in listening to A.A. and this gal. And now comes Mary. Gee, there was a hard nose. Oh, boy. Well, there were a lot of things Mary didn’t say about herself. And what I’m going to say, I don’t think she’ll take it as praise. She will only say that these are the gifts of A.A.’s grace to her. But since Mary came in, as a lawyer still having a practice in Chapel Cross, a practice dealing extensively with families in trouble, wives and husbands in trouble, kids in trouble, I keep hearing about the lengths to which Mary will go, far and beyond her legal responsibility, to bring faith and love into these situations. She’s tired in this respect in practicing the Twelve Steps in all her affairs. And this is amazing. Mary has done a great extent as a Twelve-Stepper. She came down when our magazine was in trouble some years ago. And she worked on that for years. And then she became a trustee. She says rather wryly, however, that this didn’t seem to impress her group at all. So, so are ways to question the fruits of Mary’s spiritual awakening. You know, I’m constantly surrounded by people whose spiritual awakening might be questioned on a strictly theological basis. But one, however, so effective that they, well, it just speaks loudly for itself. Now, my mind goes back to Dr. Bond. You remember I had gallivanted around New York. I’d forgotten that book by Jimmy James said there were lots of kinds of religious experiences. I got in the habit of thinking there was only one kind, and that was this bright light job I had. I figured if you put it in deep into these drunks, you know, they were hopeless. You’d fulfill one of James’s conditions, the base being hopelessness. They’d hit bottom, and boom, perhaps even ignited by me, they would go right up in a bright light. Nothing of the sort happened. For six months, drunks had run screaming away from me. While sticking around a little while, couldn’t take it, and they’d got two. So, by the time I got to Akron on this business trip, I was getting a little deflated, as I should have been. And I was further deflated and alarmed when my first temptation to drink came. James’s experience. Prior to the experience, my mind was just full of booze, booze, booze, where it was, where the bottles were in the house. If I wasn’t too drunk, how full they were. And I had found that in the whole six months of my experience after it, I had never even looked on the shelf to see whether there was a bottle there in the house. I had never thought of it. It was lifted bodily out of me. And that’s some miracle and that’s some gift in my case. Well, so I was coming to the end of my preaching. And the rich person in this room who had a good deal to do with bringing that about, I wish time permitted me to say more in thanks to a friend, but this is a friend of the very early day of AA. And her understanding, her friendship with Dr. Bob, resulted in our meeting. And her influence on us subsequently was enduring. A value beyond price. I see our old friend Henrietta sitting over here. Why don’t you stand up, Henrietta? So Henrietta brought me up to her house. And soon Dr. Bob and Ann were standing in the door. And she siphoned Ann off into the living room and put Bob and me in the little library. And he wasn’t going to stay for a little while and we talked for hours. Now this time I had got down to my right side. And this time I discovered a man of faith. In spite of his sickness, I discovered a man who had more actual enlightenment. Who prayed. Who did all sorts of things that I didn’t do much of, my experience notwithstanding. Here was a man of faith. Here was a man who had tried everything he knew. But he was still drunk. Now you notice in all the other cases I’ve cited, nobody had any faith at all. And most of us got over drinking very quickly. Or even the temptation to do so. And yet here was Dr. Bob. Lots of faith. Couldn’t stop drinking. Well, I thought I wouldn’t give this guy any lessons in faith. So I told him, quoting Dr. Silkworth, what an alcoholic is. And this was probably what made the difference. I just looked in the old AA book, the one Mary never got around to reading. And Dr. Bob, as you know, has the first story in the historic section. And when the preliminaries were done, he gets down to remembering my visit. And he said, June 10, 1935, was my last drink. And as I write nearly six years has passed, the question which might naturally come into your mind would be, what did Bill do or say that was different from what others had done and said? Now I must be remembered that I had read a great deal and talked to everybody who knew or thought they knew anything about the subject of alcoholism. But this was a man who had experienced many years of frightful drinking, who had had nearly all drunkard’s experiences, known to man, but who had been cured by the very means I had been trying to employ. That is to say, his spiritual approach. He gave me information about the subject of alcoholism, which was undoubtedly helpful. Now, and I challenge the old boys who I sit here, far more important was the fact that he was the first living human being with whom I had ever talked who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language. Now, when Bob hit the bottom, his faith took hold and he had an experience. But this was a gradual, imperceptible process. At another point in this story, he remarked that it was two and a half years after he sobered up before he ceased to want a drink. It was slow coming. And, said he, the only insurance I could take out was trying to help other alcoholics, of losing my life in their troubles instead of my own. Now we all know, and it should never be forgotten, that what Dr. Bob and that dear nun, Sister Ignatius, brought about in Athens between 1904 and 1950, in which they ministered to the needs of 5,000 alcoholics, a very large proportion of whom got well, that Dr. Bob did this although in his case it was a definite menace to his business. AA is no liability to the average MD, but believe me, it is to a surgeon, and that’s what Bob wants. So this kept them on the edge of being both for years, because everybody, when Bob was proposed with surgery, said, gee, we’re awful glad that guy is dry, but when nine o’clock in the morning strikes and he puts the knife on me, he just might be drunk. Moreover, he charged nothing for his medical work with these 5,000 customers. Now then, it took something more than the desire to do a good work for a man to go to this place. It took something more in a spiritual sense to activate a person for ten years up to the time of his death in such a fashion. This we know. And isn’t it great that his awakening was of the slow variety, the imperceptible variety, and that it was awful hard, and that as a result, he and Ignatius lit 5,000 candles in the city of Athens, enough to fill this room twice over in ten years? And how many descendants must there now be from those who made the grave a good 60 percent? They can be found in all parts of the world and will multiply from generation onto generation. So the Japanese, who were unavoidably sidetracked in getting over to the office, are people I’d still like to see. To give them the assurance that they need not fear evangelism here. They can believe in the God of their understanding. Whether God as he, she, or it, or cosmic force, or great humanity, the only requirement really for beginning the opening of this full dimension of experience is the willingness to admit utter deceit. Returning to a higher task, the admission is certainly I am not God. When these things are done in the climate of our beloved television, AA becomes possible to practically any outfall. And this is the news that I think we have failed to broadcast. When you stop to think about it, there are probably thousands upon tens of thousands of alcoholics in the world who could get well tonight and who are kept away by the impression that we are some sort of a cult, that theological demands will be made upon us, that we are do-gooders, that they can’t be connected with anything or anybody talking about God. As you see on the record, this is not so. Cannot we better carry this message to the professionals themselves? And I hear them constantly say, from where they sit, well, of course, AA is just great. The biggest thing yet, come along. But isn’t it too bad that none but the religiously susceptible can benefit by it? Well, what about that guy who pointed out the radiators? This doesn’t sound like a lot of religious susceptibility, does it? Or this young squirt over here who came charging in. Or this hard-nosed dame. Or me, this rock-ribbed Romano. Smitty was the only one in the whole bunch who had any faith who could be said on that basis to be religiously susceptible. So, as we go home, let us ponder new and better means of carrying a message to all who suffer out of religion. Let us not erect barriers of arrogance, spiritual arrogance being the worst of all. Let us throw open wide doors of AA. I’ve said how permissive it really is after you get in. But the people on the outside don’t think so. So, these candles will be passed on and on, we think, from hand to hand, and from one generation to the next. For so long as God may lead our beloved community. Thank you. Thank you. We’ve received numerous telegrams of congratulations for Bill, which I won’t go into except to mention that they range from the United States to Canada to Senior Bill. I would, again, before we close, like to thank all of the people who helped to make this night possible. And I just wonder if all of those that served on the various committees, who helped here in getting this place set and ready and helped, would just stand up for a moment so that we can see the ones that certainly devoted their time to making this night possible. Please. Thank you. The evening, of course, does not close with this meeting. There is dancing afterwards in the Sutton Ballroom. We hope that many of you will stay and meet and talk with your friends. We have severely taxed Bill today. He has to leave. He has other obligations, other meetings. He will be here for a few minutes. We would like to ask those who would like autographs to please mail them in to the General Service office where they can be signed and returned to you. Originally, the Reverend Albert Hammond was to deliver our benediction. He was, up until this afternoon, scheduled to be here. I am afraid that something has come up. We all hope that it’s nothing too severe. To give our benediction tonight will be Father Allen. And after he’s given the benediction, I would like to ask him to lead all of us in the hour of Father. Thank you. Let us pray. O God, our Father, we thank you tonight for our experience, strength, and hope that we have been able to share with one another, for the grace that you have given us in being sober today. And to your gracious mercy and protection we commit ourselves. May the Lord bless us and keep us. May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon us and give us his peace and strength this night and all the 24 hours of our lives. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. God is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.