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Source: 1960 Long Beach International Convention – 1960 Long Beach Bill W introduces Sam Shoemaker.mp3 File: 1960-long-beach-international-convention-1960-long-beach-bill-w-introduces-sam-shoemaker.mp3 Duration: 00:31:39
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Whatever person can bring it to us, that God is the ultimate reality. Whoever can bring it to us, that is, he is among us. Whoever can convey to us the consciousness of his presence. Whoever can vision God, give us a beatific vision in which we can wonder and rest, that man is our benefactor. And we have just felt and heard such a benefactor. So to Fr. John, I think this meeting would say, good sir, thank you and your fellows, and thank God for your infinite benefactions to alcoholics and non-alcoholics.
It's so chanced that Sam, our next speaker, our friend of old time, was the first to stand in this relation to me. I shall never forget my first sight of him there in his pulpit. But it was more than a sight and a sound. It was a feeling that here was utter honesty, great courage, complete forthrightness, and here was the man who more than any in those early days made me feel that the vision which had been so suddenly given to me was real.
So Sam, to me, and to Ebby, and thence out all into our society, has been a channel of grace like no other. I think he is called the Rev. Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, but I'm going to call him up here as Sam. Dear Bill and dear Lois and dear everybody in AA, because there isn't any crowd in the world that I love more or feel more at home with than I do this crowd. In St. Louis, after this same occasion, a gal said to me, you may not be an alcoholic, but you sure do talk like one.
Well, I've been looking forward to this tremendous 25th anniversary as you have. It has been one of the privileges of my life to be associated with all this from the early days. I still think that Bill gives me more credit than I deserve, but he does that with a lot of you, and that's why he makes swans out of so many geese.
[00:05:03]
We were doing some work in my old parish in New York, Calvary Church, that was helping some people to find God, and Ebby and Bill and some of the early founders saw some things going on that they felt might be helpful to alcoholics. And they incorporated them in principles. We also had made some mistakes that didn't need to be made twice, and they didn't incorporate them in. And these 25 years have seen millions of people's lives different because of what began to happen in those early and sometimes unpromising days.
Together with you all, I thank God for what's happened. Now, in a way, principles are more important than persons, hence anonymity. But principles alone never saved anybody from defeat and trouble. You probably preached many a sermon to yourself when you were in the greatest need like I have. Principles have got to be found at work in people so that they become incarnate and visible and available to people in need. They've got to be clothed with life and with caring and with intelligent action and emotion.
Behind people that have found an answer, there are other people that have found an answer. And so on back through a long kind of apostolic succession of real, genuine spiritual discovery that must have been set in motion originally by God. But he didn't give those principles a kind of primal push, and I expect them to go by themselves. He was in the principles. He was also in the people who were living out the principles and whatever spiritual methods they used to find helpful in carrying those principles out and winning their battles. I think in all human transformation, whether of a directly spiritual kind or whether through that which doctors and psychiatrists and other men of science do, God is present and at work.
Whence otherwise, otherwares, comes faith and hope to desperate people or indeed any desire to be better instead of crawling away to die like an animal? Now the program of recovery turns, as we all know, on to faith and a power greater than ourselves. Willpower and the appeal to it as sufficient to get anyone out of his trouble are a standard illusion. That is not only true about alcoholics, that's true about everybody else.
When you think you're able to manage your own life without God, you add pride to whatever other sin you may have. And pride is not only the first of the seven deadly sins, but it ought to have a category all by itself. Because it's vastly more subtle and vastly more dangerous than any other sin whatever. It's always striving to sit in the seat of God. Many people's problems begin to be solved the minute they know they can't solve them by themselves. That puts pride right out of the driver's seat. God would be psychologically necessary even if he weren't theologically necessary.
Nobody but God is big enough to tell the human ego to move over. But now how's that going to be suggested in a program that was to reach not only Catholics and Protestants and Jews, but skeptics and agnostics and atheists and total non-believers and any kind of a God? Some people have had unhappy experiences with churches, and many think they have. How are you going to avoid the recalling of those experiences with possibly disastrous emotional consequences?
A word or a phrase that brings back an unfortunate association isn't the right one to use, especially in these early stages. And it was, I think, one of the true inspirations of the twelve steps that phrases like, A power greater than ourselves, and God as we understood him, were used. They meant that if anybody came into AA with already formed loyalties that concerned, let's say, any one body of Christians, that loyalty would not be interfered with, it would be strengthened by their AA association. They meant nobody was going to tamper with their religion. They meant you could begin with a very modest faith for really what one was dealing with.
[00:10:02]
Whatever power is helping these other people, we may not know much about what that power was. We only knew these people used to be defeated, and now they were victorious in one very important area of life. Now that never did mean, nor can mean, as the Monsignor was telling us a moment ago, that we remain satisfied with the truncated idea of God with which probably we began. The God that is, is a great deal more than we can ever understand of him, and we learn more of him by experience than ever we do by arguments or futile discussions with the beliefs that our own church is better than some other church.
Now if we're satisfied with the beliefs that our church tells us to hold, then we'll go along with them and grow as that church encourages us to do. But if we come to AA with little or no faith, our initiation does not begin by being asked to swallow a lot of doctrine that we're not yet prepared to swallow. AA says begin with as much faith as you've got. There's something, there is some higher power that's helping these people.
What we have to deal with is the God that really is, and not our human concepts of him. It's much better for anybody to pray to the God that is, he with no name and we with no words, than to pray to your own creation of God with words prettier than a poem but fictitious. I think the first prayer gets through because it's trying to be in spirit and in truth, and we hear that the Father seeketh such to worship him. The second will not get through because it's set out of conformity to somebody else's faith and not out of the heart.
Sometimes for beginners, suggestion is better than explication. Some of the often absurd modern names for God, like the man upstairs, are crude attempts to use an easily grasped picture to suggest God rather than to use theological language to dogmatize about him. Beginners need all kinds of practical self-starters, encouragers to experiment. For nobody ever found faith sitting in a chair reading a book wishing he had it.
We often begin by acting as if faith were true in order to find out whether it is true. And that's precisely what the scientist does when he thinks a hypothesis may be true. He treats it as if it were true in order to find out whether it is true or not. And it works out the same way with faith. I've always thought the first steps taught at ought to be made severely experimental and put within the reach of the greatest skeptic, provided he's got an open and an honest mind. I can't get away from the feeling that fundamentally it is a spiritual experience. What gives the lift is the power greater than ourselves.
I remember the very early days of Calvary Mission in the gas house district on 23rd Street in New York. A character came in one night named Larry. He came because he had met on the street an old pal of his in the days of what they call sin and drink, whose name was Fred. But he was called in the underworld the Spider. And he greeted the Spider by saying, I thought you was dead. And Fred said, I am.
The fellow you used to know is dead. This is a new one. And Larry was puzzled and intrigued. And he asked how it happened. Fred said, you see that sign across the street? He said, yes. He said, you come down at 8 o'clock tonight and you will find out what changed the Spider. And that night, without any vestige of faith of any kind, never having heard of God or Christ as anything except a swear word, Larry made a start. He'd been brought up by an atheist who had been kind to him.
And he wound up in the underworld with no knowledge of religion whatsoever. Now, to what did he begin that night to surrender his life? To the God he saw at work in Fred. To the God that had changed Fred and might change him. And let me tell you, Fred, thirty years after, is still going strong. Now, A.A.A. has never had any of the usual connotations of a rescue mission. But this combination of exposure and experiment, of seeing the higher power at work in somebody else, and seeking the same experience in one's own life, goes on in the lives of all A.A.As who have no faith whatever in God.
[00:15:02]
It's an experimental approach to faith, and I think it's a good one. There'll come a time when you can't leave it as just an experiment. You've got to grow, as the Montana's been telling us. You've got to go on and think out what has happened and use your mind about it. You'll probably be a good deal stronger if you link up, as he suggested, with some outfit that exists to help people definitely with their religious faith.
For we need to grow in the spiritual dimension, and we certainly don't want to make a church out of AA. That would cause trouble. But as a precursor to the church, what St. Paul called the law, to the gospel, a tutor, a schoolmaster, to get us ready for the church, I think AA stands second to none. But it has been wisdom to keep the church and AA, ordinary religion, and AA separate, as it has been wisdom in America to keep church and state separate.
Doesn't mean they don't work together. It just means neither of them tries to use up the functions of the other. Thank God for the amount of cooperation that there is between the churches and AA. Now this is one thing that I think the churches and all agencies that deal with need for a change in human nature would do well to heed. This experimental approach. We need our scholars who can give us reasonable approaches to these great realities of spiritual faith and life.
But I think it's very seldom that mere good reasons or arguments get people much above their trials and temptations and illnesses of body or of soul. It's evidence that does this. It's the sight of somebody who's been healed and changed. Arguments very often confuse and irritate and drive wedges. But the evidence of experience makes clear and draws and unites. There's a verse in the Acts which says, Seeing the man that had been healed standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition.
Do it and people are glad you did it. Get into a discussion about how you did it or what did it and you'll be separated from it in about five minutes and knock all the bloom off it and somebody's going to get mad. In many places the churches are giving people good arguments. What they ought to be doing, and at best they are doing, is giving people some samples instead. I think this is the thing that AA is doing all around the world.
We don't hold up these people as saints and paragons anymore. The church holds up its people as saints and paragons. We don't say, look how good these people are. We say, look what they used to be and how much progress is being made and come join this fellowship of honesty and of need. If there's ever got to be a league of dry and righteous people, well I'm not going to finish that sentence because you'd all be drunk with sundown.
I've known a good many saints and spiritual leaders in my time and I don't know a single one of them that didn't have clay feet. I don't mean they were insincere, I don't mean they were hypocrites in the ordinary sense. I just mean they were human beings like myself and human beings sin and fail just as long as they continue to be human beings. That's not a cynical statement, that's only an honesty.
That's to get people out of this sky blue atmosphere they think they get into when they come inside churches. It doesn't exist. All claims to perfection are for the birds. But sobriety and mended lives and new relationships are within the grasp of everybody provided we seek and accept the help of God as we understand it. I'm going to say something else. While we must always allow for some people in AA who continue to say that they don't believe in God in any conventional way, I hope there's some people I got here this morning, and recognize that they have found sobriety as well as those who do so believe, we must speak of how much AA has done to change what we meant when first we may have said God as we understood him.
For all too many of us, God has been a concept only. As the Monsignor said, a figure with a long beard and a book in which is being kept a record, usually the unfavorable record. And he's been a figure to frighten us or to call us to task while he sat there in a kind of celestial judgment on the sons of man.
[00:20:01]
That picture of God goes out of the window when you discover him as a power and a force, someone to whom you go when you need the response of understanding and the offer of help that is called grace. We may say this represents the difference between a dogmatic and a dynamic God. Between a God who asks of us, or he asks of us, the impossible, and a God who helps to bring his will within our nearer reach by helping us all the time to draw us closer to him.
The whole world, non-Christian as well as Christian, owes an unspeakable debt to Jesus Christ for revealing to us a God who is like himself. Loving, patient, forgiving, eager to help, while yet expecting us to live according to his laws. But he has provided an important footnote to this. None needs to know the reality of this kind of God more than those who have known the ghastly loneliness and terror and desperation of most alcoholics.
Before anything else is suggested about a change and a cure, the first impression that people of God ought to give is the impression of what may still be called the everlasting mercy. Now God's expectations of us, and they are high, are part of the everlasting mercy. But when we have disappointed those expectations, as who of us has not, and when we know ourselves to be beyond the reach of any merely human help, the first face of God we need to see is the face of love.
Jesus didn't always show that face to the professional religious of his time, but he consistently showed it to the needy and the disreputable, the outsiders and the outcasts, the helpless and the desperate, and eventually even the unlovely Pharisee recognized that he needed the challenge presented by Christ when he spoke, even in scorn and in judgment, for that was the only thing that would puncture his hard skin and get through to his heart.
We've been seeing already that wonderful picture of the prodigal and the Pharisee in the famous story of the prodigal son. That bad boy went off and raised Cain in a far country, and the good boy stayed home and behaved himself, but with what seething resentment toward his father. And when the wayster came home and the old man had a party for him, that good boy was furious and he wouldn't even go in.
And all he said to his dad was, you never even gave me a kid that I might make merry with my friend. We had a great witness in the Episcopal Church, Bishop Johnson of Colorado, who was preaching about this one day, and he said, as for any friends that fellow had, a veal cutlet would have done him. But I've always had a kind of a hope that after the prodigal stayed away a while, stayed home a while, those two brothers might have gotten to know each other in a new way.
I suggest it was a little frosty between them when he got back. But maybe the prodigal learned something about discipline from his brother, and maybe the brother learned something about forgiveness from the prodigal. Truth is, the good brother's heart was almost farther from his father's heart than the prodigal's was, way out in the far country. Good people often need to learn a lot about mercy. There's just one thing that out and out sinners can thank God for, and that is for a problem that is too serious to hide.
It's a good thing to have learned, even the hard way, that all of us need continuous repentance, and that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. Not only are the naughty God's problem, even more of God's problem, I think, are the good. Years ago, in New York, an older woman in my parish asked me if I would talk with a young woman alcoholic who was a friend of her granddaughter's about drinking.
This older woman had belonged to the church since before I was born. I said to her, you're a Christian, why don't you talk with her? She said, well, you see, I've never had that problem. And I said, neither have I. But I went on to say some things to her about getting tight on impatience and self-will and self-righteousness and some other things, so that there never has been much of a jump from me to the people that get drunk on gin and whiskey.
[00:25:02]
You see, she had told God many a time on a Sunday morning that she was a miserable offender, but she didn't really feel like it. Else it wouldn't have been hard for her to talk about any kind of sin with any kind of person on the face of the earth. That's what the Christian church is. It isn't all the best people in town on parade, it's the people in town that know they need help. Now, if that's the church, I belong, and you belong, and everybody belongs.
You know the story about the two old Ruys that went into the Episcopal church one Sunday morning, got in just in time to hear the minister say, we've left undone the things we ought to have done, and done the things we ought not to have done, and indulged his friend. He says, we're in the right place. And he says, we're in the right place. And he says, we're in the right place. And he says, we're in the right place.
And he says, we're in the right place. And he says, we're in the right place. Now, there's just one answer for any sin and any need on the face of this earth. And that lies in the forgiveness of God for the past and the grace of God for the future. I take that to be the spiritual angle of AA because it is the spiritual angle for all mankind. I close with a prayer that is said to be the prayer of a long-dead slave.
O Lord, I ain't what I ought to be. And I ain't what I want to be. And I ain't what I'm going to be. But O Lord, I thank you that I ain't what I used to be. I'm sure I speak to this meeting when I say that our hearts are very full for these wonderful hours together. And for the ever-deepening sense of the presence of God and His grace among us. Father John, Father Sam have spoken. And we know they have spoken to God.
I know it also to be the sense of this meeting that it would be impossible to add anything more to it than the final contribution they have made. We wish to convey to them both and to their several communities a timeless gratitude of the Fellowship of Alcoholic Denialism. Thank you. And we hope that in these last days and here in this last hour we have so conducted ourselves toward them that they can truly feel that we say our thanks in the language of the heart with the deepest of love.
As in time there always comes the ending so now we are in our last moments as one together. The older members the older members of AA five years ago turned over to you, the younger members Members, the care for the destiny of this fellowship under God. We, who you were good
[00:30:07]
enough to trust as your servants, have long since turned these solemn but joyous responsibilities over to a new generation. And this we do in utter confidence that the future is safe in your hands. And as another token of this transference in confidence, in trust, and in love, I think that one of our trusted servants of the younger generation, to whom the future belongs, should close this meeting. And to close, will those who so desire join us all in the Lord's Prayer.