Audio
About this recording
- Topic
- Oxford Group Meditation Methods Part 1 7th Archives Workshop
- Speaker
- Jay S
- Date
- 2002-09-01
Transcript
Source: Jay S – Oxford Group Meditation Methods Part 1 7th Archives Workshop – 2002-09-01.mp3 File: jay-s-oxford-group-meditation-methods-part-1-7th-archives-workshop-2002-09-01.mp3 Duration: 00:53:17
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To the alcoholic. And God's doing for me today what I couldn't do for myself, because it's two o'clock on a Friday afternoon and I've yet to have a cocktail, which for an alcoholic of my variety is a really bizarre and miraculous occurrence. Before I start, I want to thank my spectacular wife, Adele, for everything that she's done and suffered in putting together this. I was, the first time I gave a talk of this nature at a conference, a woman came up to me and she said, I hear you're the guru's guru on AA history, and I said, No, I'm just a strange chap with a clear idea of fun, and it's just a real pleasure to be with some fellow sufferers here.
So why don't we go ahead, and this particular talk is about the Oxford Group, what it was, what it became, and a couple of the meditation practices. And the most important thing is you have to figure out where you're going to start the story. Bill said that we could start the story any place. We could go all the way back to Noah if we wanted to start telling the story of AA. What I do is I start with Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group. This is from a pamphlet called What Is the Oxford Group?
and it was written by a layman with a notebook. And it says, You cannot belong to the Oxford Group. It has no membership lists, subscriptions, badges, rules, or definite location. It is a name for a group of people who, from every rank, profession, and trade in many countries, have surrendered their lives to God and who are endeavoring to lead a spiritual quality of life under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? And it goes on. The Oxford Group is not a religion. It has no hierarchy, no temples, no endowments. Its workers have no salary, no plans but God's plan. Every country is their country, every man their brother. They are holy crusaders in modern dress, wearing spiritual armor. Their aim is a new world order for Christ the King. This is a picture of Frank Buchman sitting in the chapel at Keswick, England.
Frank was born in Pennsylvania. He studied to become and was ordained as a Lutheran minister. One of his classmates accused him of being ambitious, and so he went down and worked in a slum. He opened a hostel for young men that were living on the street. They fed them, they gave them a place to wash, lay down, did a little Bible study so they could kind of get their life going, maybe get a little job, a place to start.
It became wildly successful. It became so successful that they were feeding so many young men that after a while the board of directors said, We have to make some changes here. And the first place we'll cut this is we'll cut the food that you're giving to the boys. And Frank thought that this was an awful, awful thing, and so he quit, because these guys were obviously wrong, and he knew what was right.
And he was so upset by the experience that he left and he went to England and to Europe for a year, and he spent a year going around Europe preaching and talking with different people and doing some stuff, and… While he was there, he didn't have any professional fulfillment at all. There wasn't anybody that he talked to that he was able to bring to Christ. One more, please. And so he ends up in Keswick.
He's not doing real well. He's listening to a woman from the Salvation Army preach on the cross of Christ. And while he's sitting in the pew, he has this image of the cross collapsing into an I. And what he came to understand for himself was is that his problems were of his own making, and that the reason that he was in the state that he was in was that he didn't have a clear channel that he could transmit a Christian message from. And so that evening, he went home and he wrote six letters of apology to the people that he hated justly.
He wrote them letters saying, very simply, I have held ill will against you.
[00:05:00]
Will you please forgive me, Frank? And then he wrote a little poem underneath it. So that's where I like to start our story, is in that chapel in Keswick. Frank then came back to the United States, and after doing some work, he ended up over at Penn State University. He was recommended to run the Young Men's Christian Association at Penn State University, which was a little backwater college that had a real serious liquor problem.
And he showed up there, and there were only about 20, 25 people who were in the YMCA. There weren't a lot of people going to Bible study. And he looked at this campus of a few thousand people, and he goes, How the heck am I going to have any effect on this group? How am I going to attract people? And he took a look at the folks that were there, and one of the people was a man by the name of Blair Buck, who was a Southern gentleman, was from a really good family, a lot of money, very charismatic, who thought of himself as a Buddhist. The other was a dean of students that considered himself to be an agnostic, and the third person was a gentleman by the name of William Gilliland.
And William Gilliland had the liquor concession for the campus. And what Frank decided is that if he could get these three guys to change, these three people to go ahead and become active Christians, that what might happen then is that a lot of people would be affected. So he started to pray on it, and he struck up a conversation with Blair Buck, and he and Blair started to talk. And Blair was talking about his Buddhism, but it really wasn't helping him to help other people.
And as Frank and Blair talked, Frank said that the only way that you could really get to know whether or not a religious practice was vital is, is it helpful to others? So one day he and Blair are talking, and he says to Blair, Why don't we try praying for somebody else? Let's make an experiment. You don't have to believe anything, but what I want you to do, let's make an experiment. Why don't we pray for somebody else?
You pick. And they decided to pick the Gillilands. And Bill Gilliland was affectionately known around the campus as Bill Pickle, because everybody got pickled around this guy, and he would bring the booze to the dorm rooms and all that stuff. Bill was a very interesting fellow. When he first heard of this guy, Frank Buchman, who'd come down to make this goody-goody move on the campus, he said, I'd rather stick a knife in Frank than breathe the same air.
This got back to Frank. So he and Blair started to pray for the Pickles, and they're walking down the street one day, and who comes across their path but Bill. And Frank goes, My God, I'm either going to get stuck with a knife, I'm going to get in a fight, and I'm not a fighter, or I'm going to lose face to this guy that I'm trying to encourage. So he walked up. He said he was praying a bunch. He walked up and he put his hand on Bill's shoulder and he said, Bill, we've been praying for you. And the fight went out of Bill Pickle's face, and they started to talk. And over the next few weeks and months, they developed a genuine friendship, and Bill gave his life to Christ one day, and his obsession to drink left.
And you can imagine the effect that it had on the campus because the connection has gone over to the other side. I mean, it's prohibition. This is serious stuff. There were people walking up to him left and right trying to force booze down his throat, but he'd had this experience. He'd had this experience, and the genesis of the experience that he had, the proof, the full measure of it, was that he sat down and he made amends to his family for the way that he'd treated them and the things that he'd put them through.
So they came up with this thing, again, let me clean myself up. So Bill Pickle never drank again. He went all over the world talking about the power of and redemptive power of Christ.
[00:10:01]
With Frank, he spoke to the League of Nations. Everybody loved him because he told real down-home stories. My favorite one is, it's New Year's Eve. Frank has been asked to bring a little group over to the Fords to do a little New Year's Eve service in the chapel. And so everybody's there, they're getting all solemn. It's just coming on the new year, and they're all looking to Frank, and Frank says, Bill, why don't you tell these folks about how you pray? And so Bill comes out into the group and he says, Well, guys, you know how when you play craps, you got to get down on your knees?
Well, this is the same kind of game. You got to get down first, and if you get in that posture, you can really start to do this. I just love that story. Anyway, this is one of the first shots of the group at Penn State of the young men. What they called this was personal work. When people had problems, they'd come by and start to talk, and they'd have a change. They called it an interview. And what happened is, is it went from three to here's about 25 to 30 to 500 to pretty soon, by the end of the time at Penn State, there's thousands of guys that are going to Bible study.
And folks from all over the world are stopping by to see what it is that Frank's doing. Interesting thing was is that most young men, you know, one of the great, one of the things that I've found is, is that one of the reasons why I believe that alcoholism is a disease is we all seem to get sick in very much the same way. And when you hear enough fifth steps, the problem's all the same. I mean, we're alcoholic males.
There's only so many problems we can have. We're just not that creative. And it's the same. One of the things that Sam Shoemaker always said is that the greatest sin is thinking that I'm different, that my problem is different than anybody else on the planet. He learned that from Frank. Well, all these guys basically have the same problem, right? It's, you know, drinking, it's gambling, it's girls, or it's what they called impurity.
And they would speak honestly about this. And so one of the things that started was this drumbeat about these guys are, they're talking about sex, they're having dark parties and gatherings where they're telling ribald stories to each other. And the other thing is, is that Frank was very, very adamant about the fact that homosexuality was a sin. And the people who were in power there were all through, you know, as we all know, there are all kinds of folks that have different things that they want and need to protect. And so things got very uncomfortable for Frank at Penn State, and he was invited to leave. Where Frank went is he went to China, and he was down in China and started to…
Teach these steps that he was developing, these personal, this thing for doing personal work. He talked about the five C's and the four absolutes. He figured that if, on Penn State's campus, what worked was true, which is if a few people have a vital spiritual experience and then what they do is they carry it to others, that it'll help a bunch. So what it was that Frank did is he started to go around to the missionary communities around the world talking about this technique, and he met all kinds of folks.
In 1915, he was in India and met Gandhi before Gandhi was a major political figure. There's an old encyclopedia that used to be in a lot of homes in the 30s, 40s, 50s called the Lincoln Library, and this is their definition of what the Oxford Group was. They called it a semi-religious but informal movement founded by Frank Buchman while an undergraduate at Oxford University in 1921. The name was first applied by the press of South Africa in 1928.
The professed purpose of the movement is to solve personal, national, and international problems by bringing men and women everywhere back to basic principles of Christian faith, enhancing all of their primary loyalties. Without benefit of organization, members Without benefit of organization, membership subscriptions, or definite creed, the movement rapidly gained adherents
[00:15:03]
in nearly all countries of the world, particularly in the middle and upper classes, and was accorded recognition by the heads of many governments. Adopting the slogan of moral rearmament in 1938, the leaders of the movement sought by spread of its principles to stem the rising tide of international hostilities. One of the interesting things that I've found as I've studied this particular movement is that any time that men and women get together and practice this whole thing of quiet time and looking for guidance, that they're all led to do certain things.
They're all led to fight certain fights. And every historian has his prejudice, so I want to get mine up front. And mine is that this story of this movement of people started out with just a very few people doing what we call our 11th step, praying and meditating on a regular basis. And wonderful, wonderful things happen, like the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous and a lot of other things that I'll speak to.
And all that I'm trying to do is encourage anybody to not agree with the 11th step, but to actually do it. What was it that these people believed? They had what they called the five C's, the four absolutes. They absolutely were certain that First Corinthians had the key to how to go about living and enjoying a life. Quiet time. And Sharon. A woman one time that Frank was working with said to him, Frank, if you expect me to go along with this stuff and to become an active believer, actually transmit this, you're going to have to do something to make it simple enough for me to be able to remember. So Frank went back to his room that night, and when he got up in the morning and did his meditation, what he came up with were these five C's.
These are the keys to how one does personal work. Number one is that the person that you're talking to has to have confidence that you had a problem and that you have changed. And the way you do that is you confess that problem to someone. You let them know that you're not just a good guy, but that you've suffered from the same problem that this person suffers from. Then they have to agree that they've got a problem.
They've got this problem of sin, and so they have to be convicted of the need to do something. And then they have to ask for help, conversion. And then the fifth one is continuance, or passing this on to others. I'll answer questions a bit later. And for those of you that are taking notes, what I'm going to do is I'll make these notes available. I'll make a copy of these slides available tomorrow. They'll have them over in the thing, so you can have them if you want, please.
The other thing that was vital to the group is what they called the four absolutes. Now, this was a distillation of—in fact, Mark's brought… The book by Wright about God's plan and man's work. And also it was Dr. Moody and Dr. Speer both said that if you took the Sermon on the Mount and you distilled it down, the things that Christ was talking about was love, honesty, purity of intent, and unselfishness.
Just a second. What they said is, is that everyone who has any kind of question on how one should conduct one's life can answer it really easy by whether it's honest or false, it's true or false, whether it's how it's going to affect the other person, whether it's pure or not, and whether it's loving or not. And so those four standards, those four absolutes could be used. And back in Ohio, they're still recommended as things for folks to use in AA meetings.
What Frank believed was is that since Jesus worked with twelve guys, that the best way to carry a message was to send out teams of people. And the way that they do that is that they'd find folks
[00:20:04]
that had certain affiliations and they'd send them out. This is a businessman's team that worked out of New York, and in it were people like the Reverend Samuel Shoemaker, Roland Hazard with the misspelled name, James Newton, Russell Bud Firestone, Shep Cornell, Cleve Hicks. The Kitchen, T. Henry Williams, our friend Bill Wilson, John Ryder, Charles Clapp Jr., Garrett Steerly, and Parks Shipley. All these folks were real active either out of Calvary Church or had contact with Sam and the folks when they'd come through town.
This is Jim Newton. Jim Newton is really fun for me. Much like I call Bill Pickle Alcoholic Number One, because if Pickle doesn't change, then does the work at Penn State happen? Do the steps get developed? Does the thing carry forward? His recovery from alcoholism was central to the movement, and that's one of the reasons why they weren't particularly impressed with us. They'd been helping drunks get sober for years.
It's no big deal. Anyway, this is Jim Newton. For those of you who are not familiar with the story, Jim had a few problems in his life. He was a little gambler and kind of a con artist, and he showed up at an Oxford Group meeting at the Toytown Tavern in New York, had a personal interview with Frank Buchman. Frank recommended that he go talk to his friend Sam Shoemaker, who we'll talk about later. Sam was the rector in those days down at Calvary Chapel in New York, a very, very vibrant Oxford Group center.
He goes down, has a little talk with Sam, who was known for his ability to bring people to Christ. Jim has a change. Gets off playing cards on the trains, goes down, gets in the family business in Florida. And while he's there, they're trying to put a real estate development between the Ford estate and the Edison estate so people can afford to come down and live between the two biggest players in the country.
Jim's trying to promote the place, and while he does this, he starts up a relationship with Mrs. Edison and asks her advice on some things and becomes friends with Tom Edison. He wrote a book called Uncommon Friends where he talked about his friends Charles Lindbergh, Alex Carell, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison. Just a few hitters, just a few people that have done something. And he talks about their spiritual lives.
Anyway, Jim's down there, and Mrs. Edison asks him to help put on Tom's birthday party. Every year, one of the big things, if you go back and look at the Panavision newsreels, one of the big events that would happen is that all the industrials, everybody'd show up at Edison's house for his birthday party, and it was a big—to get a ticket to this, to be invited, was really a big deal. The press was all there, and the climax of the thing is, you know, Well, what's going to change everybody's life this year, Mr.
Edison? And he'd mumble a couple of words. Anyway, Jim was so good at handling people that Mr. Firestone said, Why don't you come to work for me? I'll make you my personal assistant, give you a good job. Come to Akron. And so Jim goes to Akron, Ohio, birthplace of my fabulous wife. I sleep as close to the miracle as I can. In fact, it's really funny. Her great uncle, is that right? Great-grandfather, excuse me, had the booze concession and food concession in the Mayflower Hotel during the '30s.
So he almost poured that drink. So Newton comes up to Akron, where he hooks up and starts to work and becomes real good friends with Bud Firestone. Bud Firestone's Harvey's son. Everybody loves Bud. But Bud's got this little problem. He's one of those guys, when he drinks, his personality changes big time. And so what happens is he's one of the ones that you read, like you open the paper on Sunday morning and go, Let's look in the crime stoppers.
Let's see what Bud was doing for fun this last week, right? They've sent him everywhere. They've done everything they can for him. They're sending him out to another sanitarium, you know, to dry out once again. And Jim has an idea.
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He says, Let me go with him. I'll go find out what's happening, what they're trying to do with the guy. And, you know, then maybe if he starts to drink or something, or wants to drink, I'll be able to be more helpful. So give me a few days off. So he goes up for the 30-day treatment to a spin dry someplace in the hills of New York. They do all the classic things, you know. They've got to make their own beds. They've got to do their own laundry, get physical exercise, all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, calm down. This works so well that when they leave the sanitarium, the arrangement is that Jim will hold the bottle while Bud's drinking. Now Jim's rather upset. He's gotten 30 days off from his boss. And he doesn't know what he's going to tell the old man when they show up and, you know, Bud's boiled as an owl. What's he going to tell Harvey? So they're on the train home, and he remembers that his buddy that helped him so much, he knows that Sam Shoemaker is down in Denver at an Episcopal bishops' conference with an Oxford Group team.
So they go down to Denver, hook up with Sam. They get on the train. Sam joins them for a while, going back towards New York. And in a couple hours of hanging out with Sam in a private car, Bud gives his life to Jesus and his obsession to drink leaves. Everybody's so amazed at this. They take him back to New York for a little while, and Jim goes home. In December of that year, Harvey goes with the family doctor to visit his son.
And you know how when really bad alcoholics get sober, how the pain goes out of their face? They said they didn't even recognize the kid when they saw him. The doctor called it a medical miracle that the guy's no longer drinking. The son and the dad take a walk. They have some conversations. He comes home, takes his place in the family business, starts treating his wife right. Everybody's thrilled.
Harvey is so impressed with this, he says, Tell you what, I'll write the check. I'll get some of the guys. We'll invite these Oxford Group people to come here to Akron to have a house party. One of the ways that the Oxford Group transmitted their message was they called it a house party. Anybody ever been to an AA convention? Okay, same deal. They take over a big hotel, got banquet rooms going, different speakers on different subjects.
You know, they got a couple big one with the big speakers, and people would get together and they'd talk about their problems. They had women meetings for women, men for men. They had groups that were talking about their gambling, their sexual addiction, their compulsive overeating. They're all getting together and talking about the same basic problems. And then on Sunday, the team goes out and is in the pulpits of all the different churches.
The head, when this is a—when they came to Akron, the head at that time of the Akron Ministerial Association happened to be an Episcopal minister who was familiar with Sam Shoemaker, a guy by the name of Walter Tonks, who later on becomes really central to us. But he's the person who greeted the group and arranged for the different pulpits for people to go to. And what they'd do is they'd have all these different people, people who were coal miners, English ladies, people who worked as serving people, go to different churches, and during the sermon they'd get up and tell their stories, what it used to be like, what happened, and what they're like now.
So here's a little picture of Roland Hazard. I threw this in there just because it's the only picture I've ever seen of him. This is his obituary. Jerry's probably got one for me, and I—thanks, buddy. But, and one of the fun things that we just got, a friend of mine interviewed the— The caretaker's son of the Hazard Ranch in New Mexico, and he taped it, and I gave it to the folks here at Encore, and they're gonna clean it up and everything.
But it talks about how Roland, at the estate at the lodge, had dug a cave underneath the bedroom for the liquor to be stashed, and how on at least three occasions during the mid-'30s, how Roland had to be taken back to New York from New Mexico. Back to New York from New Mexico, where he's living the way that he wanted to live, to get a little well again.
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So anyway, it's an interesting thing. This is my favorite picture of the doc, Dr. Bob hanging out at his car. When the Oxford Group and AA split, one of the things that T. Henry said was, You take care of the drunken men, and we'll take care of the drunken world. And Frank Buchman, when people used to ask him what he thought about AA, he used to say, Well, that's fine, but I'm not interested in drunken men. I have drunken nations that we need to work with.
So, in 1936, things are cranking up pretty good in Europe. There's a lot of problems going on in Germany. You know, Hitler's on the rise. And one of the things that the Oxford Group did is it gave people a way to deal with what Bill calls the post-war trauma, you know, or what we call post-war. I mean, these guys in the First World War saw things happen to human beings that were so awful that everybody agreed there are certain things we're not going to do to each other anymore. And this is a picture of an Oxford Group meeting in Royal Albert Hall.
I mean, by the mid-'30s, all over the world, there's lots and lots of people that are getting together, practicing these principles and working together. One of the things that folks, you'll hear people say is, Well, Buchman was a fascist, or Buchman loved the Nazis, or the like. This comes from one interview that happened in August of 1925 with the New York World-Telegram. Frank had just gotten back from— England, and he was given a big talk to a bunch of reporters, and they were done.
And then this guy came late, and he asked if he could have an interview. And so Frank was talking to the guy while he's going along. And one of the things he talked about was that he thanked God that Hitler had stopped the Communist march across Europe. And then he said, But think what the world would be like if a man like Hitler changed. Now this again is '36. You know, Hitler hasn't really shown his real stripes yet to a lot of folks, and he's still a political force.
One of the things that people always criticized Buchman against was that he would not condemn any man, ever, no matter what was said about him personally, because he believed that everyone, everyone could change. In 1938, Frank's thinking that he's getting pressure to change the name of the group. And so what they do is they call it Moral Re-Armament. And this is what he said the mission of is: that we must bridge seemingly impossible and humanly hopeless situation. We must have justice whereby each sees not only his own difficulties, but the difficulties of others also.
We must find that answer that is above party, that is above class, that is above faction, that is above nations. And this is one of the reasons why a lot of people really seriously disliked him. Reinhold Niebuhr, for one, because he could not be brought to toe for anyone, for any group. Because he believed that first and foremost, it was the direction of the Holy Spirit that was to be running things. Here's a great picture of Sam Shoemaker, Bunny Austin, who was a big deal.
He was a Davis Cup tennis champion from England. And Sam Shoemaker, when they came to Los Angeles in 1939 to initiate what they called the Call to the Nations. What it was that they were trying to do is they've got people, thousands of people all over the world, probably millions by this time, that are trying to adhere to the principles, that are trying to go for guidance. And what they want to do is they want to mobilize the spiritual energy to stop the war. These guys saw what just happened 25 years ago, and they're trying to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
And this is what they're guided to do. So they come to the Hollywood Bowl. They get about 35,000 people to show up. Please again. This is a fun shot. They've got the four shards of light going up for each of the absolutes. And so what they did is they said, Look, we are going to do everything we
[00:35:02]
can to mobilize people in the world to find out a way that they can become, and they can demand of their governments that they become honest, that they become unselfish, that they become loving, and they become pure in their actions. Little thing from the LA Times. Later that year, the goal that they came up with was 100 million people listening. What we're going to do is we're going to get the entire planet at the same time, not the same moment, but, you know, as it rolled through the time zones, that there would be radio broadcasts by different prominent people talking about being quiet and trying to pray and meditate about what God's will would be with regards to what's coming down. That what everybody knew was happening was that the world was going to be engulfed with war.
Here's a parade at the International Expo in San Francisco. Now, not only was the work going on in the United States, this is Denmark. This is Kronborg Castle. One of the things that Frank was trying to do, they sent a group of six people to Denmark. Within two and a half years, they were able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people. What happened was, in Denmark in those days, the Lutheran Church was the church, but there were two wings. There was a conservative and a liberal.
And these Oxford Group people show up and they start talking about the Four Absolutes and first-century Christianity, and they get the guys on both sides to work the steps. They admitted their wrong, came together, and this really awful blood feud that was about 50 years going ended. And what the results of that was is that the whole country started having lots and lots of meetings, lots of these little small groups, so that when Hitler rolled in, there was already a spiritual resistance.
There was a way that people were working together that they were able to survive the occupation. This is Hitler's little, you know, it's so funny that people talk about Buchman being a fascist or, you know, when you read the things that Hitler said, this thing on Christianity is amazing. He was talking about moral rearmament. People set us down as the enemies of the spirit, but in a much deeper sense than the conceited bourgeois dolts ever thought of.
What should I care for the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual spirit and personal moral responsibility? I oppose it in icy clarity with the saving doctrine of the nothingness and total insignificance of the individual and his continued existence only in the visible morality of the blood of the race. I am liberating man from the demands of spiritual freedom and personal independence, which only a few can bear. German Christianity is a distortion.
One is either German or Christian. One of the great things that happens is, as the message of this work goes, folks, it becomes an ideology to resist communism, to resist fascism. And what Frank said in '43 is, we have communism and fascism, two world forces. Where do they come from? From materialism, which is the mother of all isms. It is the spirit of Antichrist which breeds corruption, anarchy, and revolution.
It undermines our home, sets class against class. It divides the nation. Materialism is democracy's greatest enemy. Everybody was trying to figure out what this guy's agenda was. He was investigated by everybody. And one of the reasons he was investigated by the Selective Services is that during the war, they sent teams into factories that were having labor trouble that were producing war materials. And they wanted these team leaders to not be drafted. And so the Selective Service had to investigate him, and they didn't get the exemption that they wanted. But anyway, this is from the report that came.
It said, MRA draws fire equally of Nazis and Communists of the extreme right and the
[00:40:02]
extreme left, of aggressive atheists and narrow ecclesiastics. It has been charged by radicals with being militaristic and by warmongers with being pacifistic. Certain elements in labor denounced it as anti-union, certain elements in management as pro-union. In Britain, the report went on, MRA was accused by some of being a brilliantly clever front for fascism. In Germany and Japan of being a super-intelligent arm of the American and British secret service. One day a section of the press would announce that MRA was defunct, and the next that it numbered nearly the entire membership of the British Cabinet and at the time of Munich was responsible for engineering Hitler's attack upon Russia.
Nothing, concludes this analysis, but a potentially vast moral and spiritual reformation of global proportions could possibly be honored by antagonisms so venomous and contradictory in character and so worldwide in scope. This is a copy of the— The Gestapo report that was on the Oxford Group, that they called it a true enemy of the state. The Gestapo report said that the group preaches revolution against the state and quite evidently has become its Christian opponent.
But no other Christian movement sees Christianity as being supranational and independent of all racial barriers. It tries to make all men brothers. We all remember the disgusting un-Germanic Oxford demonstrations held in our country just a few years ago. Frank Buchman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize before the war for his efforts to try and stop it. And after the Second World War, he was again nominated and decorated by over eleven nations for his work in trying to rebuild the world.
And one of the things that Moral Re-Armament did is it established a center in Caux, Switzerland, where it got people together under the radar of the press. It brought—the first big meeting that they had after the end of the Second World War, all these heads of state and representatives showed up that they'd been working with before the war, and there wasn't anybody from Germany. And Frank said, Where are the Germans?
We cannot rebuild without the Germans. And he worked very closely in doing things intellectually and spiritually akin to the Marshall Plan. And he brought folks together where they could talk, and the conference center, Coe Switzerland, it still today is going. And one of the things is, is that everybody that's there has to work in the kitchen. Doesn't matter who you are. You can be the highest government official or the lowest student.
He also did a lot of work in Japan. A group of Japanese people came to Mackinac Island. They were given training in the four absolutes and the five C's. They went back, and these were people that were part of the Diet, the representative government. And in 1948, they were first allowed to leave and go to different countries. And for the first time ever in the history of the world, men got up in front of governments of other nations and apologized for what it was that they did to them.
And that's why the folks in the Philippines were able to start to establish some small relationship, very slowly, you know, economically, with the Japanese. The same thing happened in Korea and in China, where they went and showed up and did this. And this is the crux of what it is that moral rearmament is doing today. Buchman, when he was in India in '48, when he got together with the Mahatma again, the Mahatma had always seen him when he was in London, and Buchman would return the favor, said to a little joint press conference that they had together that moral rearmament was the single most important thing ever to come out of the West. One of the.
One of the things that happens when people are guided is that they almost always go against racism.
[00:45:03]
And one of the things that Moral Rearmament worked very, very hard on was in trying to bring racial harmony in the United States. They put together a play called The Crowning Experience, which is the story of a woman who was born the daughter of a slave owner who later founded a college, the first Negro college, Mary Helen Bethune. Anyway, when the problems at Little Rock, the guns are out, they're trying to integrate the school, you've got people hating each other on both sides.
What happened is, is MRA sent teams in. They sent in this play. One of the ways they got the message out was plays. And they showed it to the people in the National Guard. They showed it to Governor Faubus's side. And then they also showed it to the people of the NAACP. They did it in the black community. And what happened is, is that Mrs. L. C. Bates, that courageous person who was the one that you always see in the newsreels walking the children up the stairs, you know, not backing down to the guns or the governor, she went up to Mackinac and spent some time there examining her own life and her own hate.
And she came and got together with Governor Faubus later on that year. CBS called this the most important meeting that happened in 1959. This single most important event, that these people were able to actually sit down and meet. They did things like put that play on. They never had blacks and whites in it in the same level. Things that now seem very… Very easy, or why wasn't it done before? But nobody had taken the lead, and they did this in towns all throughout the South.
Yeah, here's just a picture of Frank before he dies. And again, the most remarkable man I never heard of. I studied post-war European history. I mean, I took a whole year of it in college. I never heard about this guy. I never heard about the things that they do. But you talk to the people who, you know, a lot of them are still alive. One of the great joys of my life recently has been going and actually speaking to these folks that are still alive and hearing about what it is that they've done.
It's like I'm meeting a wing of my family that I never met. If you're more interested in this book, On the Tail of the Comet by Garth Lean, it's a real thick book. But if you're a strange chap with a queer idea of fun, I found it absolutely fascinating.
[00:50:00]
And I think—oh, this is a thing on CAUX. If you want, look at caux.org. It's absolutely fascinating. The conferences that they had this summer were really tremendous about, you know, developing relationships in a post-spiritual age. They had a lot of meetings with people, Islamic leaders and different government leaders from places around the world, trying again to develop those personal relationships.
And then here's a—they changed since nowadays. Can you imagine trying to get anybody interested in morally rearming in the United States in this era? So they changed the name to, please, Initiatives for Change. And this is their current mission statement: Reconciliation between peoples through healing the wounds of history, strengthening the moral and spiritual dimensions of democracy, encouraging principled leadership in business and professional life, creating a culture of care by countering the climate of blame and selfishness, building a sense of community and hope in cities across the world, and forging networks among people from different cultures and faiths.
So that's the section on the Oxford Group, and let's take a little break. And if you want, I've got a wonderful thing on Hank Parker's suggestions to Bill Wilson about what really ought to be in the Big Book when Bill was starting to write it. So why don't we take a break for a few minutes. Do you need one? I don't, but— Can I have a Coke, baby? Great job. Thank you. Wonderful. Great to see you. Great to see you too. Yeah. No, where's the little blue bag?
Oh. Terrific. It's okay? Wonderful. Good. Wonderful. I do that. I have a timeline thing where I can make it a more story, but I just— because… I'm going to put this on a CD-ROM. Great. Yeah. I, um, I saw one of the copies, one of those… Uh-huh. Um, oh, actually, you know what? I'm gonna put… How much is this? Oh, you know what?