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Source: 1955 St. Louis International Convention – BILL WILSON – WITH REV SAM S FR ED D CD 2 – RS 58897.mp3 File: 1955-st-louis-international-convention-bill-wilson-with-rev-sam-s-fr-ed-d-cd-2-rs-58897.mp3 Duration: 00:45:10
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But I don't like churchianity, and I can understand that. I understand it better than you do, because I'm involved in churchianity, and it bothers me too. But, actually, I think that sounds a little bit like, I do love good drinking water, but I hate plumbing. Now, who likes plumbing? And you have people who won't take AA, see? They like sobriety, but so-and-so with AA. And then the eleven steps are several great big inch pipes, lines, or sacraments of God's help. And the twelfth step, to me, is the great pipeline or sacrament of communion.
The word that was God became flesh and becomes our food, as close to us as the fruit juice and the toast and the coffee we had an hour ago. Now, oh, we know the story of alcoholics' flight from God and movement toward him. Lord, give me sobriety, but not yet. Lord, I believe, hath thou my unbelief? I don't think there's an AA in this room who isn't worrying about one of those steps. And praise God, Lord, let me make that step, but not yet.
And I think the picture of AA's quest for God, but especially God's loving chase for the AA, was never put more beautifully than in what I think is one of the greatest lyrics and odes in the English language. Written by a narcotic, and I think alcohol is a narcotic, so he might be able to make it. It's a poem called The Hound of Heaven that likens God to a hunting dog. Let me just pull off a few of the lines and I'll sit down. I fled him down the night and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the years. I fled him down the laboring ways of my own mind, and in the midst of tears I hid from him.
And under a running laughter, up-visted hopes I sped, and shocked, precipitated, a down-tight tent he gloomed, a chasmed fears from those strong feet that followed, followed after. But, and here's his description of God, with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, and majestic instancy, they beat, they beat, and a voice beat, more instant than the feet. All things betray thee who betrayest me, and I'll skip. Not shelters thee who will not shelter me, lo, not contents thee who contentest not me.
In the rash lusty hood of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours, and pulled my life upon me. Grimed with smears, I stand amidst the dust of the mounded years. My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. My days have cracked and gone up in smoke, have popped and burst as sun starts on a stream. Now the long chase comes at last to end. That voice is around me like a sounding sea, bursting sea. And the voice says, in conclusion,
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And is thy earth so marred, shattered in shards and shards, lo, all things fly thee, but thou flyest me. Strange, hideous, brutal thing, wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I, God says, seeing none but I make much of naught, and human love needs human meriting. How hast thou merited of all man's clay, clotted clay, the dingiest clot? Alack, thou knowest not. How little worthy of any love thou art. Whom wilt thou find to love, ignoble thee? Save me, save only me. And this I find to be so.
All which I took from thee I did but take, not for thy harm, but just that thou might seek it in my arms. All which thy child's mistakes, fancies has lost, I have stored for thee at home. Rise, clash my hands and come. And the alcoholic or the non-alcoholic answers, Halt, by me that footfall is my gloom after all. Shade of his hand outstretched caressingly. And God's answers are fondest, blindest, weakest. I am he whom thou seekest. Thou drovest love from me, who drovest me. Thank you.
Dear friends, is it not as I have told you? There goes a man that we'd all like to be like. Now sitting just beyond him is another man that we'd all like to be like. I thought as I listened how many thousands of hours have some of us in this room, including me, spent in deriding the men of religion. And yet is it not true that they have taught us all we know of things spiritual? Isn't it true that compared with their examples, we're only a little way along the road?
We have in AA a saying that principles ought to come before personalities. Well, it is through Sam that most of our principles have come. That is, he has been the connecting link for them. It is what Abby learned from Sam and what Abby told me that makes up the linking between Sam, a man of religion, and ourselves. How well I remember that first day I caught sight of Sam. It was a Sunday service in his church. I was still rather gun-shy and diffident about churches.
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I can still see him standing there before the lecture. And Sam's utter honesty, his tremendous forthrightness, his almost terrible sincerity struck me deep. I shall never forget it. I introduce to you one of the great channels, one of the great streams of influence that have gathered themselves together into what is now AA, Sam Shulman. Congratulations. Whenever Bill gives me a chance to talk to AAs, he says things about me to other people in my hearing, which if I said them about him in the hearing of other people, he would say was bad for him.
The rest of us suffer from egotism just as much as any alcoholic does, and it's just as bad for us, I'm afraid, to be flattered. I got well-flattered the other day when I first got here. A girl that I had never met before said to me, are you an alcoholic? And I said, no. And she said, well, you talk like one. Now just to get this record straight, I have always felt that Bill gave me a great deal more credit for having anything to do with getting this amazing outfit started than I really should have been given.
But Bill's perceptions are very deep, and as we have noticed in many of the meetings where he has spoken to us, his memories are very sharp. And so I just fearfully accept these allegations of his because one of the most joyous things in my whole very joyous life has been the association that I've had with the people in AA. And I am deeply grateful for the privilege of being here with you for this tremendous occasion.
Last autumn, at his 20th anniversary dinner, I first heard Bill give the story of the various strands which, woven together, have made the strong cable of AA. We all know by now that the first things that got into his mind as offering any real hope was talking with some men in whom there was the beginnings of a real religious experience. One of them is here now. They had begun to find this through the old Oxford group in its earlier and, I think, better days, and much of its work centered at that time in my old parish, Calvary, on Gramercy Park in New York.
I take it that it began to be clear quite early in the movement's life that Dr. Young's simple declaration that science had no answer, and Dr. Silkworth's incalculable help from the medical angle, and William James's great wisdom in the varieties of religious experience still left the need for a spiritual factor that would create a kind of synthesis and offer a kind of positive dynamic. The problem was how to translate the spiritual experience into universal terms without letting it go to waste.
Into Universal Terms, Without Letting It Evaporate, Into Mere Ideals and Generalities, And So Immediately
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After Step One, Which Concerned the Unmanageableness of Life, Came Step Two, We Came to Believe in a Power Greater Than Ourselves, That Could Restore Us to Sanity, The Basis of That Belief was not theoretical, it was evidential. Right before us were people in whose lives was the beginning of a spiritual transformation. You could question the interpretation of the experience, but you couldn't question the experience itself. In the third and fourth chapter of Acts is the story of the healing of a lame man by Peter and John. A lot of ecclesiastics wanted to know how this came about. And the apostles told them that it was through the name of Christ that this man was healed. And it says, And beholding the man which was healed, standing with them, they could say nothing against it. Now, you can fight a theory about an experience, but you've got to acknowledge the experience itself. A. A. has been, I think, supremely wise in emphasizing the reality of the experience, and in acknowledging that it came from a higher power than human, and leave the interpretation part pretty much at that. It would, I think, have been easy, and must have been something of a temptation, to go into the theological business.
Here the evidence was. It was evidence of spiritual power. All right then, let's define the power. But that would have run against several possible difficulties. If they had said more, some people would have wanted them to say a great deal more, and define God in the way acceptable and congenial to themselves. It would only have taken two or three groups like this, descending from one another, to wreck the whole business.
Moreover, there were people with an unhappy association with religion. The dead church, or the dull party, or some church-going people whose work-weekday lives did not support their Sunday professions. And that would have added another factor to be overcome, as if we didn't have enough already. Also, there are the agnostic and the atheist. Who either say that they don't know anything at all about these ultimate realities in the universe, or possibly that they disbelieve in God altogether.
I would like to quote, for those who believe themselves still to be without faith in God, a wonderful word from the Roman Catholic Spanish philosopher Onomoto, who said, those who deny God, deny him because of their despair at not finding him. For an outfit like this to become dogmatic would have been fatal, I think. So they stuck to the inescapable experiences, and turned people, told people to turn their wills and their lives over to the care of God as we understood him. And that left the theory and the theology, as Father Ed has just been saying to us, important as they are to the churches to which people belong. And if they belong to no church, and could hold no consistent theory, then they had to give themselves to the God that may fall in other people.
That's not a bad way to set in motion the beginnings, I think, of a spiritual experience. Maybe that's what we all do at the point where religion changes over for us from a mere tradition to a living power. Now, I believe in the psychological soundness of all this. Don't think that applies to alcoholics alone. I think that applies to everybody who is seeking genuine spiritual faith and experience. When one has done the best he can with intellectual reasoning, there yet comes a time for decision and for action. It may be a relatively simple decision, such as to enter fully into the experiment. I think the approach is much more like science
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than it is like philosophy. We don't so much try to reason it out in abstract logic. We choose a hypothesis. We act as if it were true and see whether it is. And if it's not, we discard it. And if it is, we are free to call the experiment a success. You can sit about in a vacuum, whether that be the privacy of your own room, or an academic classroom, or indeed a pulpit, and discuss the truth of a theory forever, and it may do you no good. It's when you let truth go into action, it's when you hurl your weight after your held conception of truth, that things start to happen.
If it's genuine truth, it will, I believe, accomplish things on the plane of actual living. If God is what Christ said he is, he is more eager to help us than we are to be helped. He does not trust us on man's freedom, and we can reject him and deny him and ignore him as long as we like. But when we open the door on a spiritual search, with our whole lives thrown into it, we shall find him always there, ready to receive our feeblest approaches, our most selfish and childish prayers, our always entirely unworthy selves, and get out of business with us.
The experimental approach seems to me to be of the essence of our finding the help of a higher power. We first lean on another human being who seems to be finding the answer, and then we lean on the higher power that stands behind him. William James, in the famous passage in The Variety's Religious Experience, says this, The crisis of self-surrender is the throwing of our conscious selves on the mercy of powers, which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption.
Self-surrender has been, and always must be, regarded as the vital turning point of the religious life. That was almost a turning point in my thinking, that sentence. Self-surrender has been, and always must be, regarded as the vital turning point of the religious life. He goes on to say, one may say, that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender. Now that, of course, becomes a heart of all real religion. Most of us come to God in the first instance from a need.
If you want to say so, we come selfishly. But I would like to point out that before we can possibly be of any use to anybody else, we must find the beginnings of an answer for ourselves, so that this may represent a necessary step in progress. There's a great hue and cry today on the part of some people about those who seek benefits from God. I would like to know where in heaven's name a bewildered and defeated person is going to go for the help he desperately needs if he doesn't go to God for it.
Of course he's concerned about himself. He can't help it. He ought to be. He must be, if he is ever going to be made useful to other people. But later on, he must also grow up and stop just using God, and begin to ask God to use him. Stop asking God to do what he wants, and begin to try to find out what it is that God wants. Many a person tells you they've given up faith. They prayed for something they wanted and it didn't come, and either there's no God or else he hasn't got any interest in them.
What childish nonsense. How can anybody expect God to listen to the half-baked prayer that a lot of us send up to him? He'd have the world in the worst chaos and it is now in five minutes. Prayer is not telling God what we want. It's putting ourselves at his disposal so they can tell us what he wants.
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Prayer is not trying to get God to change his will. It's trying to find out what his will is. To align ourselves or realign ourselves with his purpose for the world and for us. That's why it's so important for us to listen as well as talk when we pray. Why it's good to begin these meetings with silence. Now oftentimes we come feverishly and willfully and we've just got to quiet down before God can do anything for us. While our own voices are clamorous and demanding, there isn't any place for the voice of God. When we let that willfulness cool out of us, that's the thing most of us non-alcoholics get drunk on. Just willfulness. Just wanting life on our own terms. And it's as neurotic as any neuroticism ever was. Everybody that's away from God and trying to do his own will in defiance of God is half-crazy. I say till our own clamorous, demanding voices quiet down, we can't hear the voice of God. When we let that willfulness cool out of us, God can get his will across to us as much as we need to see directly ahead of us.
Danny said in his will is our peace. Now a lot of people don't like the weakness that is implied in that word surrender. And I was deeply thankful to hear Dr. Thiebaud use that word, and the medical doctor the other day also. These people like to think that they are strong characters who can secure their own destiny. That is always fictitious thinking. Everybody in this world is some kind of a weakling.
And if he thinks he is not, then pride is his weakness, and that's the greatest weakness of all. People may think that they have overcome, or never been overcome by, the overtly disreputable sins. But who of us avoids selfishness, and self-centeredness, and the love of adulation, and the love of power, and pride? I think that man is fortunate whose problems are of such a kind as to get him into trouble, so he's got to do something about them. Would that temper, and pride, and laziness, and scornfulness, and irritability, and indifference to human trouble, and that god-awful littleness, which is the worst thing about most of us in a day when everybody's meant to be bigger, would that those things got us into difficulty? For they're just as bad as anything that ever got you into difficulty.
Nobody is strong, and the people that think they are strong are only self-deceived. We act as if character and reasonably good behavior were the end of all existence. The real questions in life which underlie these matters of behavior are definitely of a religious nature, and they have only a religious answer, an answer that comes from God. Where did I come from? And what am I supposed to be doing here? And where do I go when I die?
Those are questions that, unanswered, leave us really without direction, without mooring, and actually without value. But science hasn't got any answer to those things, and philosophy only has the answers of good human guesses. Religious faith is the one candle in man's darkness, in the mystery of life. If Christ came down from heaven to represent God and speak for To represent God and speak for Him, we have got an answer. The lesser revelations to prophets
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and seers are of the same nature, but not of the same authority, as Father Ed has been suggesting to us. But all truly wise men begin with the acknowledgment of their finiteness, their darkness, and their need. When we get through to God, by whatever name we call Him, or rather when we let Him get through to us, then we begin finding light and the answer. Now I think the great need of our time is for that worldwide spiritual awakening. There are many signs that it is upon us. Western man is gradually getting it through his head that he owes the greatest of all blessings, human blessing, the blessing of liberty, to God and religion. When Benjamin Franklin was in Paris at the end of the 18th century, he took his son around one day to call on Voltaire. And as they were leaving, he asked Voltaire to give the boy a blessing. Well, I could think of better people than Voltaire to ask for a blessing, but that's what he did. And Voltaire put out his old bowling pins on that boy's head and he said, God and liberty, my son, remember those words. Those words are cognate, they are correlative. There's an indissoluble connection between the two things. And I think the gradual perception of that fact, as well as our personal insecurity, lies behind the greatly increased interest in religion that characterizes our time.
Now I believe there are four universal factors in all genuine spiritual awakening. And those four factors are conversion, and prayer, and fellowship, and witness. By conversion I mean the place where a person turns toward God, where he begins to walk to be honest about himself in the light of his religion. I don't mean perfection, I mean the search for it and the start towards it. That start is within the reach of us all, and that's the beginning.
You know what a lot of religious people are like? They're like a lot of people sitting around a railroad station thinking they're on a train. Everybody's talking about travel and you hear the names of stations and they've got tickets around them and the smell of baggage and there's a great kind of a stir, and if you sit there long enough you almost think you're on the train. But you're not. Now you start to get converted at the point where you get on the train and get pulled out of the station. And you get pulled out, you don't walk out. When I leave for Pittsburgh this afternoon, I won't be in Pittsburgh right away, but I'll be dark when I get out of St. Louis. Now I think you're converted when you get on the train. That means you've got to go downstairs and get in there. That means you've got to go downstairs and you've got to get up those steps and get in there.
Now the second thing is prayer. And prayer, either private or group or public, is the place where we get in touch with God and God's power. God's power is always there, as there is always potential electricity in a wire that's plugged into a socket that's in touch with a dynamo. But you don't get the power till you close the circuit by turning the switch. Prayer, in ways to me theoretically quite unfathomable, but always open to us actually, turns on the switch, opens up the power by closing the circuit. We don't so much know they've got a great need gathered together to find an answer in worship, talk, and fellowship with one another. The Church is not a museum, it's a hospital. That's why
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we all belong to it and why we all should. Two old peons went into the Episcopal Church one day and they got in just in time to hear the minister say, we've left undone the things we ought to have done and we've done the things we ought not to have done. And he nudged his pal, he said, we're in the right place, all right. Get over the idea that because you go to church you're good. You go to church to try to get in touch with God and let God redeem you, and incidentally you're trying to get good by the grace of God, not your own bootstrap. And then witness comes by life and by word. I think there are a lot of self-righteous people in the world who think they're being a tremendously good influence, but they're so much like everybody else in the world. There's not much edge, there's not much difference.
If any spiritual experience has begun that changes us deeply on the inside, the chief characteristic of which I think is not that it makes us better, but that it makes us more humble and more conscious that we're not very good at all. Then I think people begin to get interested. They wonder what happened to us and they begin asking questions. Then there's time to open up by the witness of word. We don't preach to other people, we don't talk down to them. God knows we don't point to ourselves as answers, but we share the beginnings of a victory that we know. Every real believer shares in twelve-step work. Every real believer wants to get his belief across to other people, and he will take the trouble to try to learn how to do it by light and by word. Now the parallels between those four points and your twelve steps are obvious to anybody. To me, it is one of the great signs of spiritual awakening in our time. It is experimental and experiential in nature, not dogmatic. But none can doubt that God is what has made AA today, what inspires it, what keeps it going, what is that perfectly intangible but absolutely unmistakable spirit that we have felt again and again since we've been here in St. Louis. I'm thankful that the Church has so widely associated itself with AA, because I think AA people need the Church for personal stabilization and growth, but also because I think the Church needs AA as a continuous spur to greater aliveness and expectation and power. They are meant to complement and supplement each other. I believe that AA will go on serving men and women as long as it may be needed, if it keeps open to God for inspiration, open to one another for fellowship, and open to people outside for service. I think AA has been wise to confine its organized activity to alcoholics. But I hope and I believe that we may yet see a wide effect of AA on medicine, on psychiatry, on correction, on education, on the ever-present problem of human nature and what we shall do about it, and not least on the Church.
Indirectly, I believe that AA has derived its inspiration and its impetus from the insights and the belief of the Church. Now perhaps the time has come for the Church to be reawakened and revitalized by the insights and practices found in AA. I don't know any fields of human endeavor in which the Twelve Steps are not applicable and helpful. I believe AA may yet have a much wider effect upon the world of our day and contribute greatly to the spiritual awakening which I believe is on the way, but which has come none too soon. For the world
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at this time is not sitting pretty. And so on this occasion, when AA turns a historic corner, when the leadership will soon fall upon a wider company than in the past, let's give thanks to God for his goodness to us, for the way he has guided and prospered and used and enriched and developed this wonderful force in our time, and for all the promise that AA holds out for uncounted thousands and perhaps millions in the future. God bless AA forever.
Lecture 6 Divine Justice and Mercy 6 It is a conflate of AA to say that our leaders do not drive by mandate. They lead by example. Surely we have been led this morning by magnificent examples, examples without which this society might never have been. And I think it is altogether fitting, if as my concluding part of this session, if I would read to you the prayer of one of the saints, whose example is so near and so dear to us all. I say that because he talks of pure love as we understand pure love. Lord, make me a channel of thy peace, that where there is hatred I may bring love, that where there is wrong I may bring the spirit of forgiveness, that where there is discord I may bring harmony, that where there is error I may bring truth, that where there is doubt I may bring faith, that where there is despair I may bring hope, that where there are shadows I may bring thy light, that where there is sadness I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood, to love than to be loved. For it is by giving that one receives. It is by self-forgiving that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. And it is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.
May we rise now and close this meeting. May we rise now and close this meeting with the Lord's Prayer.
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Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.