convinced me that as a drinker I had been a piker and that almost no alcoholic disaster was too tough for A.A. to help. At other meetings I saw that A.A. had been facing and solving a lot of problems I never knew we had; problems in the big cities and all over the world. I saw that we still had plenty wrong with us as a fellowship, but I was sure that our present troubles would iron out as well as the others had.
“On Friday night I heard how A.A. started—how many people, nonalcoholic friends as well as ourselves, had been required to do the job—at how many points we could have run off the road for a complete smashup, yet how we had never yet over skidded a curve or failed to take the right turn. The hand of a higher Power had been on the wheel all the time.
“On Saturday night I felt like getting worried all over again as Bill told us how he and Dr. Bob had wondered all the way from 1939 to 1945 if A.A. was going to hang together after all, what with the troubles of members, groups, and new beginnings in foreign countries. I got a jolt when I heard that the A.A. book and the New York Headquarters had once been the source of the most hair-raising squabbles of all. Maybe this kind of thing could get going again someday. But I calmed down when it was made clear that all this old-time grief and uproar had actually been very good for us and that without this experience A.A.’s Twelve Traditions could never have been written. And I felt still better when I heard that by 1950 most of those woes were things of the past and that the Twelve Traditions had been adopted unanimously at the International Convention in Cleveland in 1950 when Dr. Bob made his final appearance and spoke so confidently of his faith in A.A.’s future.
“On Sunday morning—the last day of the Convention—I found those Twelve Traditions still on my mind. Each of them I saw is an exercise in humility that can guard us in everyday A.A. affairs and protect us from ourselves. If A.A. were really guided by the Twelve Traditions, we could not possibly be split apart by politics, religion, money, or by any old-timers who might take a notion to be big shots. With none of us throwing our weight around in public, nobody could possibly exploit A.A. for personal advantage, that is sure. For the first time I saw A.A.’s anonymity for what it really is. It isn’t just something to save us from alcoholic shame and stigma; its deeper purpose is actually to keep those fool egos of ours from running hog wild after money and public fame at A.A.’s expense. It really means personal and group sacrifice for the benefit of all A.A. Right then I resolved to learn our Twelve Traditions by heart, just as I had learned the Twelve Steps. If every A.A. did the same thing and really soaked up these principles we drunks could hang together forever.
“I watched as the big hall of the Kiel Auditorium filled up. Thousands of my new-found friends were pouring in for the final windup. I caught sight of Father Ed as he eased himself into a seat across the aisle. He was a wonderful reminder of our morning session on the spiritual part of the program. In that session something happened to me I’ll never forget.
“I had always carried a certain amount of prejudice against churches and clergymen and their concepts of God. Like many A.A.’s, my ideas about God were still mighty vague.
“But as these two spoke, it had loomed up on me that most of A.A’s spiritual principles had come to us through clergymen. Without clergymen, A.A. could never have started in the first place. While I had been nursing my grudges against religion, Father Ed and Dr. Sam had been going all out for us. This was a brand-new revelation. Suddenly I realized that it was high time I began to love them, even as they had loved me and the rest of my kind.
“When I knew that I could now do this, I commenced to feel warm clear through. The conviction spread in me that love is a mighty personal thing. Then came the feeling that maybe my Creator really did know me and love me. So I could now begin to love Him, too. This was one of the best things that happened to me at St. Louis, and there must have been a lot of others there who had the same experience.
“Our last meeting finally began, and it opened with a silence that was charged with confident hope and faith. We knew that ours was a fellowship of the Spirit and that the grace of God was there.”
Although these are only words put into the mouth of our created character Mr. Grassroots, they do represent much of the spirit and the truth that lived in the heart of many an A.A. as the St. Louis Convention moved toward its culmination.
From the Kiel stage I looked out upon the sea of faces gathered there, and I was powerfully stirred by the wonder of all that had happened in the incredible twenty years now coming to a climax. Had this meeting place been a hundred times larger, it still could not have held all of A.A.’s members and their families and friends.
Who could render an account of all the miseries that had once been ours, and who could estimate the release and joy that these last years had brought to us? Who could possibly tell the vast consequences of what God’s work through A.A. had already set in motion? And who could penetrate the deeper mystery of our wholesale deliverance from slavery, a bondage to a most hopeless and fatal obsession which for centuries had possessed the minds and bodies of men and women like ourselves?
It may be possible to find explanations of spiritual experiences such as ours, but I have often tried to explain my own and have succeeded only in giving the story of it. I know the feeling it gave me and the results it has brought, but I realize I will never fully understand its deeper why and how.
We A.A.’s had tried out a radical and old-time formula, one rather out of fashion nowadays, and it had worked. “We admitted that we were powerless—that our lives had become unmanageable” and “we made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to God as we understood Him.” Every one of us who could make and fairly well maintain this humbling admission and sweeping decision had found relief from obsession and had begun to grow into a totally and wonderfully different mental, physical, and spiritual existence.
The thought of Dr. Foster Kennedy crossed my mind. Years ago this noted physician had asked if one of A.A.’s early friends of psychiatry would come to the New York Academy of Medicine to explain A.A. to its neurological section. Since several doctors publicly had endorsed us, some in the Saturday Evening Post article of 1941, I thought there would be no difficulty about this. But every one of these medical friends of ours rejected the unusual opportunity.
In substance, this was what they said: “In A.A. we see an unusual number of social and psychological forces working together on the alcoholic problem. Yet fully allowing for this new advantage, we still cannot explain the speed of the results. A.A. does in weeks or months what should take years. Not only does drinking stop abruptly but great changes in the alcoholic’s motivation follow in a few weeks or months. There is something at work in A.A. which we do not understand. We call this ‘the X factor.’ You people call it God. You can’t explain God and neither can we—especially at the New York Academy of Medicine.”
Such is the paradox of A.A. regeneration: strength arising out of complete defeat and weakness, the loss of one’s old life as a condition for finding a new one. But we of A.A. do not have to understand this paradox; we have only to be grateful for it.
My mother was there on the auditorium stage, she who had brought me into life fifty-nine years before and who had waited a long anxious time for a happy fulfillment to my failure-ridden years. Beside her was my wife Lois, the one who held steadfast when hope had gone, who had attended my second birth, and who in full partnership had shared with me the pains and joys of our exciting life for the past twenty years.
And there sat my sponsor Ebby, who had first brought the word that lifted me out of the alcoholic pit.13With the whole convention I rejoiced that he could be with us. And I thought of many nonalcoholic friends of the very early days. Without them there could have been no A.A. at all. They had set us wonderful examples of unselfish devotion. They were the prototypes of thousands of men and women of good will who have since helped make our society what it is.
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