Transcript of talk given by Bill W.

Guest House, Lake Orion, Mich., 1968

Well, I like the informal discussion type of approach. It seems to me that on an occasion like this that questions have something of infinitely more value than a lecture or a story. But Ripp (referring to Austin Ripley) suggested that I make some remarks here tonight, and I’m only too glad to do that.

Coming down on the plane, I got speculating with myself about the early days of A.A. and about the meaning of them in terms of the grace of God. I did read somewhere that if a grain of wheat which has been stored for centuries in a dry place is exposed to the right soil and the right climate and to enough light from above it will manifest life and it will unfold and it will grow. But this presupposes the right soil, the right climate and, above all, enough light. Well, I think it’s that way with A.A. I remember, years back, when we first began to get publicity, and the first very large occasion was a feature piece done in the Saturday Evening Post which all at once produced about six thousand members for us. This was in ’41, and by then a number of the medics had become close friends, some of them psychiatrists. And these fellows allowed their names to be used (a rather audacious step in those days, I assure you) their names were used in the Post article.

I make this point because, when later asked to testify on another occasion, they refused to do it, and these were the circumstances: the first gal that got sober in A.A. is one known to many of you as Marty, still very much a going concern in the educational field. Marty was a most difficult case. God knows were all complex, but Marty was really a champ. She had been under the care of a Dr. Foster Kennedy, a man of very wide repute at that time, worldwide renown, a neurologist. And he watched Marty as she planted in the new soil. He watched her receive this light. Well, he was tremendously impressed. He came to some meetings and soon he said to me, "Bill, would it be possible to have two or three of the psychiatrists in institutions who have seen recoveries of very grim cases, people that you say are friends of yours and who have testified for you in the Post piece, couldn’t we get a group of this sort to come to the Academy of Medicine and explain what they have seen?" Well, we thought this was just great, because in those days there were few friends, indeed. So shoring by these people, by reason of Dr. Kennedy, well, what could be better? So, one by one, we went to them, and we said "would they come to the Academy" and we supposed they would. After all, some of the Kennedy glory could brush off, and, you know, they were friends anyhow, and they’d proved it, so why not? And not a one would do it! And, when pressed for their reasons for not doing it, each one of them separately said the same thing. In effect, each said, "Look, Bill. You folks have added up in one column more of the resources which have been separately applied to alcoholics than anyone else. For example: you have this kinship in suffering; you have possibilities of communication that others don’t have; you have a crude form of self-examination or analysis and of catharsis; you have a great new outgoing interest; you reduce guilt by restitution and you have this great compelling interest in helping others. And then there is the religious factor. And then there is this factor of hopelessness, so far as the resources of the individual are concerned, of this malady. Now this is a formidable list of forces, but we still can’t come to the Academy." "Well, why not?" "Well," said they, "We see in A.A., sometimes in weeks, in a few months, shifts in motivation that even the sums of these forces couldn’t begin to account for, because we all too well understand the difficulties of this subtle compulsion. And the sum of them won’t add up to the speed of these transformations in these very grim cases. So, for us, there is an unknown factor at work in A.A. And, among ourselves, being scientists we call it the "X" factor. We believe you people call it the grace of God. And who shall go to the Academy to explain the grace of God to that body? No one can. And we simply won’t."

So, I think it is just as futile for any of us to presume to explain this matter of grace around which our entire galaxy of principles and activities gathers and clusters. We can’t do that, but we can examine this matter of the soil and this matter of climate and this matter of illumination for which, for some reason or other, we have made ourselves ready. Clearly, God’s grace is in and through all. "So," it might be said, "why haven’t alcoholics sobered many times more often through grace than they have? It’s available. Why hasn’t religion been more successful, numerically at least? Why hasn’t medicine been more successful? How is it that laymen seem to be doing this thing?" So I would like to tell a story depicting, at least it seems to me, what the soil is and what the climate is and what the light is, these things of which we have been placed in treasured possession.

There is no doubt that in an ordinary time A.A. began in the office of a psychiatrist, and we might be mindful of this when we criticize people in this profession. Of course, for most of us, the origin is two thousand years old, for some of us perhaps older. But I am speaking of the situation in an immediate sense: how was it precipitated? This too is a matter of conjecture, but here’s how it seems to me.

There was a certain business man of great attainment. He’s cut down by the grog, he runs the gamut of treatments in this country, and this would be about 1932 when he was just about at the end of his tether. So, he went abroad and became a patient of Dr. Carl Jung. And, as you all know, Jung was one of the founding fathers of the "art" (I prefer that instead of science") of psychiatry. And Jung, Adler and Freud were the three founding fathers, but, of these, only Jung seemed to think that man is something more than two dollar’s worth of chemicals, a bundle of instincts and an uncertain intellect. Jung thought that man had something beyond this, that man has soul. So our traveler had found a truly great human being, great, indeed, as events spell out. He placed himself under that dear man’s tutelage for a whole year, becoming more and more confident that the hidden springs of this baleful compulsion to drink were being understood and removed and cast away. He began to feel more free. There was no drinking while he was under treatment. At the end of a year, he left Carl Jung and in one month he was tight. And the bender was terrific. So, in finite despair, he came back to Carl Jung and said, "Is there anything now for me? You were my court of last resort." And this great man said, "Roland, I thought for a time after you came that you might be one of those rare cases in which my art has been helpful. Otherwise I should not have encouraged you to stay. But, alas, I am obliged to conclude that you are not, and that there is nothing that I have to offer you. My art has failed you. "I need not say that, coming from a man of his eminence, this was a statement of beautiful humility. And the whole destiny of A.A., you and me and all of us, has since hung on that sentence. So then Hazard found that agony was added to despair, and he cried out, "But is there nothing else?" And this was the answer he got: "Roland, time out of mind, alcoholics have recovered here and there, now and then, through religious experiences, spiritual experiences let us say, or very truly through conversion (a naughty word for us A.A.s; we don’t use it for obvious reasons). But," said the doctor," this benign lightning seldom strikes, and no one can say where or when it will, or for the resuscitation of whom. So I simply would advise you to place yourself in a religious atmosphere, remembering the hopelessness of your doing anything about it on your own remaining resources alone, and cooperating with your associates and casting yourself upon whatever God there may be."

So Roland aligned himself with the Oxford groups of that time, a rather evangelical movement, rather aggressive (very east to criticize it). It was nondenominational, however, and it used simple common denominators of religions, simple moral principles. It called upon its members to admit that they could not solve the life problem on their own. It called upon them for self-examination. It called upon them for restitution. It called upon them for a kind of giving in the Franciscan manner, the kind of giving that demands no return in money, power, prestige and the like, the losing of one’s self in the lives of others. Such was the nature of the crowd with which he became associated. Unaccountably, to him, the obsession to drink left. And for some years he had no more trouble. At the time in the groups there were a few alcoholics sober. There is one now at Ann Arbor who goes back to that time, an old friend who never became an A.A. Sobered up in the Oxford Groups.

So Roland returned to America. And the groups here in those days were headed by an Episcopal clergyman called Sam Shoemaker. And in his congregation and among the other groups were two or three other alcoholics that, for the nonce, were staying dry. Hazard had a summer place near Bennington, Vermont, and these friends, one of them the son of a local judge and himself an alcoholic, described the plight of a man who had been a school-time chum of mine, Ebby Thatcher. And Ebby had been deteriorating horribly. They were summer folks in the town above Manchester. Anyway, Ebby had run his car into the side of the farmer’s house, pushed the wall of the kitchen in, the door could still be opened to the car, Ebby stuck his head out and, to the poor woman cowering in the corner who hadn’t been hit, he said, "Hey, what about a cup of coffee?" Well, the town fathers had had it. They were going to commit Ebby for alcoholic insanity, so the judge’s son and Hazard picked up the man who was to become my sponsor.

Meanwhile, I had gone the route with which you are all familiar. I had sobered up the summer before, scared to death by the verdict of my doctor, Dr. Silkworth, the one we have since named "the little doctor who loved drunks," and must have then because in his lifetime he dealt with some forty thousand of them as a hack doctor in a drying out place. He had a idea that this thing was an illness having several components: a spiritual illness, a moral illness and also a physical illness. And perhaps over simplifying, he was apt to describe an alcoholic as a person condemned by a compulsion to drink against his own interests, to drink in spite of his perfect willingness to stop, and that this drinking was coupled to an increasing sensitivity of the body which, if the drinking went on, guaranteed his insanity and, one day , his death. So this sort of a sentence had been spoken to Lois at long last by my doctor, Dr, Silkworth. So you see the soil was under preparation. We were beginning to learn a little more about climate. Ebby and my other friend Roland had received a considerable amount of light.

Well, I got drunk in about two months, even in spite of this sentence that I would have to be locked up or go nuts, maybe within a year. And then my friend Ebby, who had been brought to New York from Vermont, who had unaccountably sobered up for the time being in the Oxford Groups, came to visit me for I too was in great despair. Despair is the primary ingredient, indeed, of this soil. In the medical jargon we might call it "deflation at depth." Some deflation, huh? So, Ebby came to see me. And he pitched at me this list of moral (you might say) cliches. Nothing new about that. I was in favor of honesty. I was in favor of helping other people. I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing: I was not in favor of God, for I had received one of these magnificent modeled modern schooling, scientific schooling, that assured that by a series of stages, picking up increments from somewhere as they went along, I could be traced back to a single piece of ooze in prehistoric seas. And this was my faith. And science was my God. So along comes Ebby, and along comes Jung, for whom I had respect, and here was my doctor: Science can’t do it; medicine can’t do it; psychology can’t do it. Religion? Sometimes. That was his story. But how could I buy religion? So I felt trapped. IN other words, I was gripped in the trap which we everyday construct for the drunk who approaches us saying, "Well, I think the group life must be great. Helping other people? I’m for it. But I couldn’t get the spiritual angle (as our jargon has it). "Now, as you know, this gentleman is the newcomer, like me, is caught in this trap. When you and I talk to another alcoholic, and we identify ourselves as having been denizens of this strange world, and, having emerged, and we describe this malady in the terms of our god, Science, and THAT god pronounces the sentence of hopelessness upon us, the sentence, we are deflated at depth. And when we learn that now we have to accept our personal hopelessness, there still isn’t any hope because we cannot go for the God business.