up.”
I heard labored steps on the stairs. Then, balanced precariously on his cane, he came into the room, carrying a battered black hat that was shapeless as a cabbage leaf and plastered with sleet. He lowered himself into my solitary chair, and when he opened his overcoat I saw his clerical collar. He brushed back a shock of white hair and looked at me through the most remarkable pair of eyes I have ever seen. We talked about a lot of things, and my spirits kept on rising, and presently I began to realize that this man radiated a grace that filled the room with a sense of presence. I felt this with great intensity; it was a moving and mysterious experience. In years since I have seen much of this great friend, and whether I was in joy or in pain he always brought to me the same sense of grace and the presence of God. My case is no exception. Many who meet Father Ed experience this touch of the eternal. It is no wonder that he was able to fill all of us there in the Kiel Auditorium with his inimitable spirit on that wonderful Sunday morning.
There came next to the lectern a figure that not many A.A.’s had seen before, the Episcopal clergyman Sam Shoemaker. It was from him that Dr. Bob and I in the beginning had absorbed most of the principles that were afterward embodied in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, steps that express the heart of A.A.’s way of life. Dr. Silkworth gave us the needed knowledge of our illness, but Sam Shoemaker had given us the concrete knowledge of what we could do about it. One showed us the mysteries of the lock that held us in prison; the other passed on the spiritual keys by which we were liberated.
Dr. Sam looked scarcely a day older than he had almost twenty-one years earlier when I first met him and his dynamic group at Calvary’s parish house in New York. As he began to speak, his impact fell upon us there in the Kiel Auditorium just as it had upon Lois and me years before. As always, he called a spade a spade, and his blazing eagerness, earnestness, and crystal clarity drove home his message point by point. With all his vigor and power of speech, Sam nevertheless kept himself right down to our size. Here was a man quite as willing to talk about his sins as about anybody else’s. He made himself a witness of God’s power and love just as any A.A. might have done.
Sam’s appearance before us was further evidence that many a channel had been used by Providence to create Alcoholics Anonymous. And none had been more vitally needed than the one opened through Sam Shoemaker and his Oxford Group associates of a generation before. The basic principles which the Oxford Groupers had taught were ancient and universal ones, the common property of mankind. Certain of the former O.G. attitudes and applications had proved un-suited to A.A.’s purpose, and Sam’s own conviction about these lesser aspects of the Oxford Groups had later changed and become more like our A.A. views of today. But the important thing is this: the early A.A. got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else. He will always be found in our annals as the one whose inspired example and teaching did most to show us how to create the spiritual climate in which we alcoholics may survive and then proceed to grow. A.A. owes a debt of timeless gratitude for all that God sent us through Sam and his friends in the days of A.A.’s infancy.
As we approached our last session, a number of great questions still remained in the collective mind of the Convention. What would happen when A.A.’s originators and old-timers had gone? Would A.A. continue to grow and prosper? Could we go on functioning as a whole, no matter what perils the future brought? Had A.A. really come to the age of full responsibility? Could members and groups world-wide now safely assume complete control and guidance of A.A.’s principal affairs? Would A.A. now be able to take over from the old-timers, from Dr. Bob and from Bill? If so, by what agency, and just how?
For a long time these questions had been asked anxiously, and for over five years solutions for these problems had been eagerly sought, especially by old A.A. hands, people like myself who must soon relinquish their twenty years’ guardianship of A.A. and turn over their trust to the vast family now fully reared. The time had come for the answers.
High in the great hall of the Kiel Auditorium there hung a banner on which everyone could see the new symbol for Alcoholics Anonymous, the triangle within the circle. On the stage far beneath the banner, at four o’clock on Sunday, our society was to be declared come of age. Its elected Service Conference, taking over the guardianship of our Traditions and the custody of our World Services, would then become the successor to the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. The thousands of us were united in one spirit and in a great expectation as we sat waiting for the opening of this last meeting. What we thought and felt is hard to tell, hard especially for one person. It would help if someone could speak for all of us, and perhaps in a way this is possible.…
Each day at the Convention I had spoken with many A.A.’s, folks of every description and persuasion: plainsmen and mountain people, city dwellers and townsmen, workmen and businessmen, schoolteachers and professors, clergymen and doctors, ad men and journalists, artists and builders, clerks and bankers, socialites and skid-rowers, career girls and housewives, people from other lands speaking in strange accents and tongues, Catholics and Protestants and Jews and men and women of no religion.
Of many of these people I asked the same questions: “What do you think of this Convention?” and “What do you think of A.A.’s future?” Each of course reacted according to his or her own viewpoint, but I was astonished when I sensed the unanimity of feeling and opinion that ran through all. I felt and still feel this so strongly that I believe it may be permissible here to introduce a spokesman for the whole Convention itself, a sort of composite character who nevertheless may truly portray what practically everybody at St. Louis really saw, really heard, and really felt. Let’s call our anonymous spokesman Mr. Grassroots. He hails from Centerville, U.S.A., and this is what he has to say:
“I went to the Kiel,” says Mr. Grassroots, “ahead of time for that last meeting. While I was waiting I thought of all that had happened to me in three days. I come from the small town of Centerville. I was born and raised there, did my drinking and got into my trouble there, and was about ready to throw in the sponge when A.A. came to town. Several years back a traveling chap tossed us the idea, and since then about a dozen of us alkies in Centerville have grabbed the life-line.
“The groups in my state are pretty small and scattered, and so we do not see much of each other. We’ve never had a state get-together. Our Centerville group has been just about all of A.A. for me. Good A.A., too. Of course we’ve had the Big Book and some pamphlets and the Grapevine, and now and then a traveler told us something about A.A. in other places. It was fine to know that other people like us were getting their chance, too. But our main interest was in each other and in the Centerville drunks that had not yet sobered up. The rest of A.A. seemed a long way off. There did not seem to be much that we could do about it anyhow, even if we wanted to. This was how it was with me before St. Louis.
“This Convention has been a terrific experience. I ran into hundreds of A.A.’s and their families charging around in the hotels. Then I saw thousands in the big Auditorium. I am sort of shy, but I got over that. I got mixed in with people who were having the time of their lives, people who came from five hundred, a thousand, maybe five thousand miles away—from places I’d only read about in the papers. Pretty soon I was telling them about A.A. in Centerville, rattling on as happy as anybody.
“These people were not strangers to me at all; it seems as if I had known and trusted and loved them all my life. I had felt that way about my A.A. group at home, but now I felt the same way about every A.A. and all of A.A. I can’t tell you what this meant. To me it was big. This was real brotherhood. These were my people, my kin and my kind. I belonged to them and they belonged to me. Every barrier, every thought of race, creed, or nationality dropped out of my mind. This tremendous thing happened to me in only a few hours.
“I took in every meeting I could. I heard those doctors tell how much their profession was for us. I went to an Al-Anon meeting and realized for the first time that A.A.
