Audio
Transcript
Source: 1955 St. Louis International Convention – BILL WILSON – WITH REV SAM S FR ED D CD 1 – RS 58896.mp3 File: 1955-st-louis-international-convention-bill-wilson-with-rev-sam-s-fr-ed-d-cd-1-rs-58896.mp3 Duration: 00:45:05
============================================================
Dear friends, it is needless for me to tell you that one cannot stand before a great gathering of this kind without being filled with the deepest and the finest emotion. All of us know that God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Through the ages he has worked through divinely inspired men and women who have carried his message far and wide to various segments of the people of this great universe that they may be inspired and that their problems may be solved. He sent to us, among others, St. Francis of Assisi, who at one time was obliged to beg for his living, and yet who later lavished his attention and his affection upon the poor, particularly upon the lowly despised lepers of his day.
He sent to us David Livingston, a missionary, a man who took God, as we understand him, into the depths of darkest Africa. He sent to us George Washington Carver, the noted Negro botanist and scientist, who at one time said, In the peanuts we find food and clothing and shelter and medicine as well. God, why did you make the peanuts? And he answered his own question, Ye shall know, and your knowledge shall set you free. He sent us Joan of Arc, the maid of Orleans, heroine of France. Burned at the stake, she died with undaunted fortitude. And nearly five centuries later, she was beatified and subsequently canonized by Pope Benedict XV. He sent us Helen Keller, from whom he took away her eyes, that her soul might see a way to bring faith and hope and courage to all those who have no sight.
On this beautiful Sunday morning, filled with sunshine and hope, it is a glorious privilege for all of us to gather together here, hand in hand and heart to heart, and give thanks and adoration to God that he sent us Bill, that through him he has seen fit to release us from bondage. Just as God gave the world Francis of Assisi, Livingston, Carver, Joan of Arc, Helen Keller, and other great servants of mankind, so in his wisdom and in his compassion
[00:05:11]
he gave us Bill. And Bill, with his vision and his faith, his love and his patience, and his indomitable courage, has shown us a way out of the wilderness. Shall we follow? It is with deep humility and with a sense of thanksgiving which words cannot express that I now turn this meeting over to Bill. And with hearts full of love and undying gratitude, we rise to salute him. We are assembled together here this morning to thank God, the Father of life, for all those blessings he has bestowed upon us, who have been the children of the night, who have been the light issued from darkness into light. Among the greatest blessings that we can count are the friends of AA. This great auditorium was presented to us for our use by this hospital.
We want to give thanks for all that great service. And I think it is most appropriate that all of us visitors record our love and gratitude for the hospitality that we have received, not only at the hands of the people of this city, but of certain people in this town. And I refer to our AA friends in this town who have done so much to make this feel like home. And I am thinking of some of those who have especially devoted themselves to this. I mentioned a couple. I think we ought to have a standing vote of approval, let us say, for a couple of them. Say, George and Louise, who have done this job.
George mentioned Francis of Assisi, and to me he is one of the greatest exemplars of that kind of giving that demands no reward, the giving that has no price tag on it. His is the perfect description of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, if we could only
[00:10:01]
relate ourselves to the world around us and to our families as we relate ourselves to the alcoholic we are trying to help. If the phone rings and somebody says, here is a job for you. Do you mind running over and seeing this suffering couple? At any time of the day or night we go. And on arrival there we find that the drunk is very obstinate. He says, I don't want any part of this. My wife got you here. Get the hell out.
Do we feel robust? Do we feel rejected? No. Not at all. We give the wife what information we can, what comfort we can. We tell her to go to a family group meeting if there is one around. We tell her how she can manage better. And without the least sense of rejection we come away with a glow in our heart. Then we are called to the next house. And lo and behold the alcoholic is ready. Ah, says he, you painted a picture of me. Yes, I am one of you. So we take him to a meeting. And there he finds a kindred spirit, somebody else. Maybe we hardly see him again. In the eagerness of his identification with this new fella, he neglects us, us who linked him to AA, now saving his life. Do we feel rejected? No.
We say, well, how he's getting along, how much 12-step work he does. Maybe he even declares that he doesn't like us. He confesses our sins. Are we affronted? No. We say, well, he'll get over that, and maybe I have got some sins too. And then we go to the third house. And our friend comes into AA, and that is the beginning of a lifelong companionship between this stranger and the one who made the visit. Well, that friendship was the extra dividend of the kind of giving that demands no reward. We offer what we have, and what comes back is the extra dividend.
This afternoon, you will see AA functioning as a worldwide entity with this same kind of giving, the kind of giving that demands no personal reward. And yet the extra dividend of it, which so many of us found in this very place, is just beyond measure. But this sort of giving is not all. There is something else to the AA life, something that I myself have neglected. In the excitement and joy of this giving, and in receiving its rewards, I have too often I have too often forgotten that God has supplied me with these blessings. Therefore, this meeting
[00:15:13]
very properly concerns itself with our relations to God. In the giving, we receive meat and drinks and great sustenance. But what human being can live on meat and drink alone? Must he not breathe, take in air, if he is to be a going human concern? Well, I like to think of the grace of God as the spiritual air that we breathe, if we will. And prayer and meditation is the means by which we do it. So we are devoting this meeting to breathing in the grace of God.
How eloquently Jim's story tells us that we cannot live by meat and bread alone. How we must breathe the air of the Spirit. In AA, practically all of us know someone with whom we have especially identified. In our jargon, we say, well, we've clicked with that chap. Years ago, in 1940, not long after the AA book came out, I was lying upstairs in the little clubhouse at Old 24th Street. It was a sleety, bitter night, and up came old Tom, our janitor, who was now on the job and, by the way, being paid for it. Old Tom knocked at my door. I was lying on the bed, suffering from one of my imaginary ulcer attacks, and Tom says, Bill, he says, there's some damn bum from St. Louis down there. Do you want to see him? Oh, I said, what, not Tom tonight? Well, yes, Tom, send him up. I heard a slow, labored step on the stairs, and finally a figure appeared in my doorway, and his coat was drawn about him, and it was covered with sleet. And he wore a hat which looked something like a cabbage leaf, also covered with snow. And it was 11 o'clock at night, and he'd come there to see me. And when he threw back his coat, I saw he was a clergyman. He had been the one who had discovered the resemblance between AA's steps and the Ignatian exercises of his Jesuit order. Ah, but far more than that. He proved to be one of the greatest examples of the grace of God that this society knows. And as we sat there and just joyfully chatted about
[00:20:06]
this and that, somehow that room seemed illuminated. You could feel the presence and almost see the light. Father Ed. I forgot to bring my store keys, and so if I am not being understood, if you just wave a handkerchief, I'll try to do something about it. I asked my friend, a very recent vintage, Dr. Shoemaker, to say a prayer for me and for you during this talk, and he said, God is with you. And I think you know what he meant, and it is reassuring. And I think in the spirit of the 11 steps, through prayer and meditation, try to improve our conscious contact with God. May I suggest a few thoughts on the three words of our assignment, God, we, and understand. And if you will listen with your hearts, as I know you will have during this whole meeting, rather than your ears, I think God will bless us. Man trying to understand God, somehow, reminds me of a definition of psychiatry which I just heard a day or two ago. It is the id being examined by the odd. And I think that that could be our breakdown of topics. The id, the primary reservoir of power, God. Examine could mean understand, and the odd is us. First of all, us. We are three things, I think. Alcoholic, alcoholic anonymous, and agnostic. Alcoholic, which means to me that we have the tremendous drive of fear, which is the beginning of wisdom.
We have the tremendous drive of shame, which is the nearest thing to innocence. Thackville Mallon, Honorable Secretary of all Irish alcoholics of both Irelands, likes to quote some author whose name I forget. And he says, and alcohol doth do more than Milton can to make straight the ways of God to man. Alcoholics anonymous, not merely alcoholics, but alcoholics anonymous. Bill spoke last night of the outside bouncer in alcoholics anonymous, John Bonicorn. But I've always felt that there's an inside bouncer who is crueler. And that is a
[00:25:06]
corporate sneer for a phony. And who of us is not a phony? I think that is in all groups. You have the problem of people of linkside virtue. And that is a drive. Third qualification, I think we are agnostic. I believe there are three groups qualitatively in AA. First of all, they are the devout, who didn't seem to be able to apply their old-line religious truths. They were agnostic as to application. Then there are the rusty, the priest who passed the man on the ditch before the good Samaritan helped him. A very good priest friend of mine who says, I really think that the first thing we shall say when we get to heaven is, my God, it's all true.
I think all of us are rusty in some phases of either our substantive or application of beliefs. And then there are the sincere 18-carat agnostics, who all, who have difficulty with that spiritual hurdle. The second word is understand. And I think as we move from an obscure and confused idea of God toward a more clear and distinct idea, I think we should realize that our idea of God will always be lacking, always to that degree unsatisfying. Because to understand and to comprehend God is to be equal to God. But it will grow. I'm sure that Bill sitting in that chair, and Dr. Bob, whose angel is probably sitting on that oddly misplaced empty chair, are growing in the knowledge of God. An old German saying is, and it applies here, very few of us know how much we have to know in order to know how little we know. And I'm sure Dr. Bob and Bill would certify that. The approach to this understanding, first of all negative, and the first step as we examine ourselves who was our latest God, is a fine approach to God. It was the approach of Peter the Apostle, Lord to whom shall we turn. I think we should realize that there is, I doubt if there's anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don't think we should despise the negative. And I know I have a feeling that if I ever should find myself in heaven, I think it will be from backing away from hell.
At this point heaven seems as boring as sobriety does to an outcry. Sobriety Does to an Alcoholic Ten Minutes Before He Quits.
[00:30:01]
However, there are positive approaches, and the Twelve Steps mentions one. I still weep that the senators of the movement have dropped the word experience for awakening. Experience is one of the ways that's mentioned by the Twelve Steps, and in the second step, another way, belief. Now experience can be two kinds. Sudden, passive insights like Bill's experience, like the grapevine story of that Christmas Eve in Chicago. Those are all in the valid pattern of Saul having that sudden, passive insight as he was struck from his horse on the road to Damascus. There are other types, probably dearer to God since they are commoner, and those are the routine, active observations of what? I am sober today.
I am sober today. This meeting this morning, this convention this week, and as experience distills and condenses, it becomes suffering. The other night, Bernard Smith, chairman of the AA's, trustees, I get that hierarchy all mixed up, said something which to me was so good that I took it down. He said the tragedy of our life is how deep must be our suffering before we learn the simple truths by which we can live.
Sometime before Whitaker Chambers became a well-known character, in his sister publication, he was on time then, he wrote in life an article called The Devil, and quoting Satan, Whitaker Chambers says this, here's Satan talking, and yet it is at this very point that man, that monstrous midget, still has the edge on the devil. He suffers. Not one man, however base, quite lacks the capacity for this specific suffering, which is the seal of his divine commission.
The second approach, which is mentioned in the second step, came to believe. I've known some of my Catholic friends who at that step said, well, I believe already, so I don't have to do any came-ing. And in a great burst of kindness, they kept drinking to let the Protestants catch up with them. So belief is capitalizing on the experience of others. You see, blessed are the lazy for they shall find their shortcuts. What others? Your sponsor.
The AA experience of two decades on two continents. Newman says that the essence of belief is to look outside ourselves. Dr. Thiebaud seems to think that psychiatrically, the great problem is
[00:35:03]
the turning of our affection from self outwardly. Faith is hard, as hard and as easy as sobriety, and has been called the greatest of our undeveloped resources. What experience should we seek? What beliefs should we accept in our quest for God? The third word then would be God. Bill Early wrote a letter, I have it, in which he said, as far as how the alcoholic shall work out his dependence on God is none of AA's business. Whether it's in this church, whether it's in a church or not in a church, whether it's in that church or this church is none of AA's business. In fact, he implied, I don't think it's any of the alcoholic, the member's business. It's God's business.
And the AA's business is charted in the 11 steps. Seek through meditation and prayer to find God's will and to seek the courage to follow it out. And not in the spirit of propaganda and abusing this opportunity, but rather to share what I have found to be God's will, I'd like to offer some thoughts. I do believe that the problem which half of this room has had in attaining sobriety, I have had in attaining belief and faith.
Where do you start? Well, I believe there's something to be said about starting at the nearest manifestation of God. Where is God's nearest to me? Where is God's nearest to me? Does the fish soar to find the ocean? Does the eagle plunge to find the air? That we ask of the stars in motion, if they have rumor of thee out there, not where the wheeling systems darken and our benumbed conceiving soars. The drift of angel pinions, would we hearken, beats at our own clay shuttered doors.
Somewhere out in the swirling universe, light years beyond the reach of our strongest telescope, Halley's Comet is making its round. Some of us saw it in 1910. Some of you in this room will see it in 1986. Those are called the perihelions. There's a point at which they are closest, Halley's is closest. And obviously to study Halley's Comet now is a waste of time. It must be done at 1910, or it must be done in 1986, when it's closest. Where is God's perihelion?
Where is God's nearest? When is God's nearest? Life magazine, in this recent article on the great religions and the great leaders, mentioned, of course, all the significant beliefs available, systematic beliefs. Moses, Muhammad, Buddha, none of them claimed divinity. None of them ever claimed that, for routine purposes, that God is visible on earth, save one.
[00:40:04]
And that is the man who says, he who seeth me seeth the father. That's blasphemy, a lie, or the truth. He said, I am the father of one, before Abraham was, I am. And even to escape crucifixion, he wouldn't hedge on the accuser's indictment, who felt that he was guilty of blasphemy. And his answer was to the claim, thou hast said it. Dostoevsky says that faith in the divinity of Christ is the Christian faith, pure and simple, and down the ages, that has been the central belief of his followers.
Of all of life's series of religions, Christianity claims to present God at the closest perihelion. We know AA's 12 steps of man toward God. May I suggest in God's 12 steps toward man, as Christianity appeals to me. The first step is described by St. John, the incarnation. The word was God, and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. And he turned his life and his will over to the care of man as he understood him. The second step, nine months later, closer to us in the circumstances of it, is the birth, the nativity. Third step, the next 30 years, the anonymous, hidden life.
Closer because it was so much like our own. The fourth step, then three years of the public life, closer to us because it met our cravings, our aspirations, his teaching, his examples, our Lord's prayer. The fifth step, his emphasis in that public life was to people like ourselves, sinners, wine-bibbers, poor, skid-row panhandlers. The sixth step, bodily suffering, including thirst on cows. The next step, soul suffering in Gethsemane, that's coming close.
How well the alcoholics know, and how well he knew, humiliation, and fear, and loneliness, and discouragement, and futility. Finally, death, another step closer to us. And I think the Pieta, where a dying God rests in the lap of a human mother, is as far down as divinity can come, and probably the greatest height that humanity can reach. And down the ages, he comes closer to us as head of a sort of a Christian's anonymous, a mystical body laced together by his teachings, Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me. I can fill up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ. I was in prison, and you visited me. I was sick. I was hungry, and you gave me to eat.
The next step, tenth, the Christian church which I believe in.