Big Book
Chapter 6 Into Action (pg 75)
When we decide who is to hear our story, we waste not time. We have a
written inventory and we are prepared for a long talk. We explain to
our partner what we are about to do and why we have to do it. He should
realize that we are engaged upon a life-and-death errand. Most people
approached in this way will be glad to help; they will be honored by our
confidence.
We pocket our pride and go to it, illuminating
every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past. Once we have
taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted. We can look the
world in the eye. We can be alone at perfect peace and ease. Our fears
fall from us. We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator. We may have
had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have a spiritual
experience. The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will
often come strongly. We feel we are on the Broad Highway, walking hand
in hand with the Spirit of the Universe.
Returning home we
find a place where we can be quiet for an hour, carefully reviewing what
we have done. We thank God from the bottom of our heart that we know
Him better. Taking this book down from our shelf we turn to the page
which contains the twelve steps. Carefully reading the first five
proposals we ask if we have omitted anything, for we are building an
arch through which we shall walk a free man at last. Is our work solid
so far? Are the stones properly in place? Have we skimped on the cement
put into the foundation? Have we tried to make mortar without sand?
************************************
How Alcoholics
Anonymous Got Started
In 1931 an American
business executive, Rowland Hazard, after trying all the possibilities of
medicine and psychiatry in the United States, sought treatment for alcoholism
with the famous psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung in Switzerland.
After a year of
treatment, Rowland H. the alcoholic felt confident that his compulsion to drink
had been removed. However, he found himself drunk shortly after leaving the
care of Dr. Jung.
Back again in Switzerland
Rowland H the, dejected and depressed, was told by Dr Jung, that his case was
nearly hopeless (as with other alcoholics he had treated) and that his only
hope (might be) a spiritual conversion with a religious group of his choice.
On his return to the
United States , Rowland got in contact with the Oxford Group and soon sobered
up.
The Oxford Group was an
Evangelical Christian Fellowship founded by American Christian missionary Dr.
Franklin Buchman. Buchman was a Lutheran minister who had a conversion
experience in 1908 in a Chapel in Keswick , England . As a result of that
experience, he founded a movement called A First Century Christian Fellowship
in 1921, which had become known as the Oxford Group by 1931.
The Oxford Group’s
concepts were, total surrender of un-manageability of the problem,
self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects (public confession),
restitution for harm done, and working with others.
The Oxford Group was not confined
to members of alcoholics only; a mixed bag of ‘troubled souls’ were also
welcomed.
A chance meeting with
Ebby Thacher, another chronic alcoholic who was about to be admitted to a
Lunatic Asylum; Rowland H passed on the message Dr. Jung gave him: that most
alcoholics were non-receptive to psychiatry and medicine; that their only
possible hope was a spiritual conversion with a religious group of their
choice. So now we have one alcoholic trying to help another alcoholic stay
sober. Rowland H introduced Ebby T to the Oxford Group at Calvary Rescue
Mission.
In keeping with Oxford
Group teaching that a new convert must pass on the message to other suffering
and troubled souls to preserve his own conversion experience, Ebby contacted
his old friend Bill Wilson, who he knew had a drinking problem.
When Ebby visited Bill Wilson at
his New York apartment, it was sometime in November 1934. Sitting at his
kitchen table, Bill offered him a drink. ‘No thanks’ said Ebby , ‘I stopped
drinking’. ‘I stopped drinking’ coming from Ebby seemed the strangest thing
Bill had heard. Glancing over at Ebby, Bill knew that this was no “on the
water-wagon stop.” Ebby was clear-eyed, focused and serene.
“What’s got into you”? Bill asked.
Ebby told him "he had got religion," Bill’s heart sank. Until then,
Bill had struggled with the existence of God. Much later of his meeting with
Ebby, he wrote: "My friend suggested what then seemed a novel idea. He
said, 'Why don't you choose your own conception of God?' That statement hit me
hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and
shivered many years.”
Ebby then went on to share about
his meeting with Rowland H, how hopeless in most cases psychiatry and medicine
was in the opinion of Dr. Jung. Next Ebby enumerated the principles he had
learned from the Oxford Group. Though he thought that the good people of the
Group were sometimes too aggressive, he couldn’t find fault with most of their
basic teachings. In substance, the basic principles an alcoholic desiring to
stop drinking should follow are:
1. He admitted that he is powerless
to manage his own life.
2. He became honest with himself as
never before; made an “examination of conscience.”
3. He made a rigorous confession of
his personal defects and thus quit living alone with his problems.
4. He surveyed his distorted
relations with other people, visiting them to make what amends he could.
5. He resolved to devote himself to
helping others in need, without the usual demand for personal prestige or
material gain.
6. By meditation , he sought God’s
direction for his life and the help to practice these principals of conduct at
all times.
Ebby explained how, practicing
these simple precepts, his drinking had unaccountably stopped. Fear and
isolation had left him, and he received a considerable peace of mind. Once
again, one alcoholic confiding in another alcoholic; the spark that was to
become Alcoholics Anonymous had been struck. When Ebby left, Bill continued to
drink.
The next morning Bill Wilson
arrived at Calvary Rescue Mission in a drunken state looking for Ebby. Once
there, he attended his first Oxford Group meeting, where he answered the call
to come to the altar and, along with other penitents, gave his life to Christ.
Bill excitedly told his wife Lois about his spiritual progress, yet the next
day he drank again and a few days later readmitted himself to Towns Hospital
for the fourth and last time.
Bill Wilson was an
alcoholic who had seen a promising career on Wall Street ruined by his
drinking. He also failed to graduate from law school because he was too drunk
to pick up his diploma. His drinking damaged his marriage, and he was
hospitalized for alcoholism at Towns Hospital four times in 1933-1934 under the
care of Dr. William Silkworth.
On Bill Wilson's first
stay at Towns Hospital , Dr. Silkworth explained to him his theory that
alcoholism is an illness rather than a moral failure or failure of willpower.
Silkworth believed that alcoholics were suffering from a mental obsession,
combined with an allergy that made compulsive drinking inevitable, and to break
the cycle one had to completely abstain from alcohol use. Wilson was elated to
find that he suffered from an illness, and he managed to stay off alcohol for a
month before he resumed drinking again.
While at Towns Hospital for the
forth and last time after his friend Ebby had visited him, Bill experienced his
"Hot Flash" spiritual conversion. While lying in bed depressed
and despairing, Bill cried out: "I'll do anything! Anything at all to
receive what my friend Ebby has! If there be a God, let Him show Himself!"
He then had the sensation of a bright light, a feeling of ecstasy, and a new
serenity. Bill described his experience to Dr. Silkworth, who told him that
this could be a transformation, an emotional upheaval or a spiritual
experience.
Upon his release from the hospital
on December 18, 1934, Bill Wilson moved from the Calvary Rescue Mission to the
Oxford meetings at Calvary House. There Wilson socialized after the meetings
with other ex-drinking Oxford Group members and became interested in learning
how to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. It was during this time that
Bill Wilson went on a crusadeto save alcoholics. Sources for his prospects were
the Calvary Rescue Mission and Towns Hospital . Something like a religious
crank he was obsessed with the idea that everybody must have a “spiritual
experience” like he had. Of all the alcoholics Bill Wilson tried to help, not
one stayed sober.
It was Dr. Silkworth who pointed
out to Bill, he said: “Stop preaching to them. Just tell them what happened to
you. Give them the medical facts, the mental obsession, combined with an
allergy that made compulsive drinking inevitable.
Five months after
his spiritual experience, Bill W went on a business trip to Akron -- away from
home. The business venture failed. He found himself dejected and depressed
standing in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. At one end of the lobby the hotel
bar was opened. At the other end there was a telephone booth.
Suddenly the urge
for a drink came upon him. He panicked! The feeling of panic assured him he
still had some sanity left. He remembered that while trying to help other
alcoholics ‘he’ remained sober. So he took action. He phoned a number of church
ministries in that area asking to meet and speak with another drunk. As
puzzling as this must have seemed to the ones answering his calls, Bill W
finally struck gold. A call to Episcopal minister Rev. Walter Tunks, got him in
contact with an Oxford Group member Henrietta
Seiberling, a non-alcoholic, whose group had been trying for two years to help
a desperate alcoholic named Dr. Bob Smith.
Dr. Bob started drinking
early in life. While he was a student, Dr. Bob started drinking heavily and almost
failed to graduate from medical school because of it. He opened a medical
practice and married, but his drinking put his business and family life in
jeopardy. For seventeen years Dr. Bob’s daily routine was to stay sober until
the afternoon, get drunk, sleep, then take sedatives to calm his morning
jitters. During the prohibition period, 1920—1933 Doctors were permitted to
prescribe liquor for their patients. Dr Bob would pick a name from the phone
book, fill out a prescription, which would get him a pint of whisky. When this
was not feasible, there was always that new member of American society –the
bootlegger! It seems Dr. Bob had two phobias, one was the fear of not sleeping
and the other of running out of liquor. His life was a squirrel-cage existence;
staying sober to earn enough money to get drunk, getting drunk to go to sleep,
using sedatives to quiet the jitters, staying sober, earning money, smuggling
home a bottle, hiding the bottle form his wife, who became an expert at
detecting hiding places.
So Henrietta Seiberling convinced Dr.
Bob to come over to her place and meet Bill. And Dr. Bob insisted the meeting
be limited to fifteen minutes. At five o’clock Sunday evening Dr. Bob and his
wife were at Heneritta’s house. Dr. Bob came face to face with Bill who said “
You must be awfully thirsty -- this won’t take us long.” Dr. Bob was so
impressed with Bill’s knowledge of alcoholism and ability to share from his own
experience, that their discussion lasted six hours. That was on Mothers Day,
May 12th 1935. Dr. Bob did lapse
into drinking again. He went on a binge, but quickly recovered. The day widely
known as the date of Dr. Bob's last drink, June 10, 1935, is celebrated as the
founding date of Alcoholics Anonymous.
A few days later, Dr. Bob had said to Bill:
"If you and I are going to stay sober, we had better get busy." Dr.
Bob called Akron 's City Hospital and told the nurse, a "Mrs. Hall,"
that he and a man from New York had a cure for alcoholism. Did she have an
alcoholic customer on whom they could try it out? She replied, "Well,
Doctor, I suppose you've already tried it yourself?" Then she told him of
a man who had just come in with DT's, had blacked the eyes of two nurses, and
was now strapped down tight. "He's a grand chap when he's sober," she
added. The nurse told Dr. Bob and Bill that Bill Dotson, the patient, had been
a well-known attorney in Akron and a city councilman. But he had been
hospitalized eight times in the last six months. Following each release, he got
drunk even before he got home.
So Dr. Bob and Bill talked to what is now known
as their first "man on the bed." They told him of the serious nature
of his disease, but also offered hope for a recovery. "We told him what we
had done," wrote Bill, "how we got honest with ourselves as never
before, how we had talked our problems out with each other in confidence, how
we tried to make amends for harm done others, how we had then been miraculously
released from the desire to drink as soon as we had humbly asked God, as we
understood him, for guidance and protection. Bill Dotson, the “Man on the Bed,
eventually sobered up, his date of sobriety was the date he entered Akron ’s
City Hospital for his last detox on June 26th1935.
(thanks Ronny H.)
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