Authors: Ernest Kurtz
Not-God (44 page)
Implicitly, Wilson was distinguishing between self-centeredness and self-esteem. The key to the answer, insofar as “answer” could be given to “paradox,” lay not so much in the bare concept of
growth
, but in that emphasis’s necessary implication of continuing essential imperfection: there is
always
danger of becoming “truly lost.”
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The fellowship’s continuing experience verified what its earliest consciousness had taught: “we alcoholics are all or nothing people;” “the drive for glory, … [having] to be perfect, outstanding,” remained the most treacherous trait of even the sober alcoholic’s “neurotic disease.” The suggestion of the A.A. program, then, as well as its promise, was “spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection”: “We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.” This promise with its implicit admonition came at the conclusion of the Big Book’s listing of the “Twelve Steps suggested as a program of recovery.” And appropriately so: consistently and indeed inevitably, given the nature of their “disease,” anonymous alcoholics wrote to Wilson “Dear Bill” letters lamenting their inability to practice the A.A. program “perfectly.” As consistently and inevitably, given the nature of his insight, the co-founder fired back tempering responses.
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The nature and style of these replies further clarify A.A.’s resolution of the paradox inherent in the only absolute of “not-God” being absolute acceptance of self as not God and so not absolute. The very possibility of “progress” taught continuing imperfection, and caution against implying otherwise inspired Wilson’s every response.
Many found the quandary incorporated into the very heart of the fellowship’s presentation of itself in its textbook,
Alcoholics Anonymous
. The very first word of the key Fifth Chapter of the Big Book — the chapter titled “How It Works,” the first part of which was read at the beginning of many meetings — encapsulated the problem: “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.” Often someone raised the question: “In light of the ‘thoroughly,’ why the ‘Rarely’?” The query was of course frequently carried to Wilson’s desk. In time, his answer became standardized but nevertheless revealing:
Concerning your comment about the use of the word “rarely” in Chapter Five of the Big Book. My recollection is that we did give this a considerable thought at the time of writing. I think the main reason for the use of the word “rarely” was to avoid anything that would look like a claim of a 100% result.
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To a member who had complained that since “a decision is a decision,” meetings that explored the Steps need not re-hash the first three, Wilson suggested a different understanding of “decision” — “Most A.A.’s, I think, feel that decisions have to be repeatedly taken for the reason that we are apt to fall down on the original ones.” Another sober alcoholic offered a similar criticism concerning “surrender”: it was either present or not, so why keep talking about it, especially to sober A.A.s? Launching from his favorite images of “Pilgrim’s Progress” and “our Father’s many mansions,” Bill responded by summarizing his philosophical and psychological understandings in two brief sentences: “Such is the nature of the human being that I doubt
any
100% conformity or surrender is possible — the
only perfection is in God Himself. All the rest is relative
.”
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Because of Wilson’s charismatic status within their fellowship, many alcoholic members felt driven by their faith in A.A. to demand perfection of its co-founder. As had Dr. Bob in his “Last Major Talk,” Wilson reminded most who complained that although the Twelve Steps could be understood — “in their absolute sense” — as directing towards perfection, they were only
“counsels
of perfection that no one will ever attain — at least in this life.” Bill himself felt that many early failures in Alcoholics Anonymous had been due to his forgetfulness of precisely that fact. “In my early A.A. years I used to demand perfection or bust of myself and even more of those around me.” Accordingly, he resisted vigorously — whether the request for his own perfection came as demand or as counsel.
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Faced with demand, Bill exposed his continuing vulnerability:
That you seem disillusioned with me personally may be a new and painful experience for you. But actually since the beginning of A.A. many members have had like experiences. Most of their pain has been caused, not only by my several shortcomings, but by their own insistence in placing me, a drunk trying to get along like other folks, upon a completely illusory pedestal — a station which no fallible person could possibly occupy.
I’m sure that a little inquiry can convince you that I have never held myself out to anybody, either as a saint nor a superman. I have repeatedly and truthfully said that A.A. is full of people who have made more spiritual progress than I ever have, or can; that in some areas of living I have made some gains, that in others I have stood still, and that in still other ways, I may even have retrograded.
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Evaluating counsel, Wilson was more philosophical:
To me, Jim, your present advice seems to be of the absolute variety. It is actually a counsel of perfection. So far as it goes, that’s all to the good. But perfection is only
one kind
of reality. Perhaps you are overlooking the other kind — the
relative reality
of the world we live in. For any real progress, I think we have to keep a keen eye on both. That is why the Big Book emphasizes spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
… As a practical matter, isn’t it a fact that we can go broke on perfectionism, just about as fast as we can on egotism?
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“Spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection” implied continuing spiritual imperfection. It also meant looking to effort rather than to results. The Third Step of the A.A. program expressed and accepted the Pauline vision that no matter who “watered,” it was God who gave the growth. As Wilson summarized this perception for two distraught correspondents:
This guilt business is a sort of pride in reverse. So you simply accept yourself as you are and try to work for better things. Your success is not to be measured by the results of your effort, it is only measured by trying to do something.
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You shouldn’t be disturbed that you can’t practice A.A. perfectly — who can! If you report progress that’s all you can expect of yourself and all that anyone can expect of you. So don’t worry about that so much —just keep trying.
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“Don’t worry” is surely the most useless and often the most counterproductive advice possible. But to suggest exchanging as the
object
of concern results outside individual control for personal effort appropriate to the responsibility of not-God-ness over the years brought at least some peace to Bill Wilson’s correspondents … and to countless other members of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Thus whatever may be challenged in the abandonment of the quest for explicit absolutes by Alcoholics Anonymous, the significance of that apostasy becomes clear only in the context of Bill Wilson’s — and A.A.’s — awareness of the history of both the fellowship and its program as lived by its individual members. Early on, the term had smacked too much of the Oxford Group and so was relinquished out of concern for “Catholic opinion.” Later, increasing experience with the pitfalls of even sobriety led to the conviction that the alcoholic’s inherent idealism and this trait’s correlative quest for
personal
perfection required essential emphasis on the uniqueness of “God” as absolute.
This
Absolute was of course to be sought: such was the thrust of the conversion that led to salvation. But that this Absolute was Other, that
the
Absolute could never in any way be any aspect of the self: the heart of this message justifies its encapsulation as “not-God.”
Within American history, a last gasp of Evangelical Pietism — of the intuition that salvation was both necessary and available, and therefore of the wholeness of accepted limitation — flourished briefly in the early nineteenth century. It may have been a re-awakening of the Edwardsean insight prompted by primarily political events between the War of 1812 and the Jacksonian triumph of 1828. It may have been the first effervescence of “Freedom’s Ferment” in the insecurely self-confident new nation. It may even have been a hang-over from Cane Ridge, the Second Great Awakening, and frontier Methodism. Its deep source is difficult to determine, because this final flush of the Pietist insight was but a spark, a quickly passing glimmer now almost completely buried in the available evidence.
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For this bare insight was soon swallowed up in the relentless march of that strange anomaly, Evangelical Liberalism, across nineteenth-century American religious thought. An insecurely hopeful nation heard in the message of Evangelical revivalists not the Pietism inspiring awe, but the promise of human perfection; and the announcement of human self-perfectibility began its baneful blight of American theological insight. The perversions of late nineteenth-century — and even later — paranoid, ethnocentric revivalism were monstrosities only remotely: they flowed naturally from their proximate parent, an Evangelical Perfectionism that in its pre-millennial demand for all-at-once-ness had long since forgotten that “human” and “humility” shared the same root.
The doom of all true Pietism has been perfectionism. Perhaps, indeed probably, the Pietist perception — essentially Laius-like — sires its own Oedipal destroyer, but such theorizing need not concern us here. Within familiar Western history from the time of the Radical Reformation, the
fact
is inescapable. William Griffith Wilson and other early A.A. members saw it taking place within the Oxford Group, and so they left those auspices. Alcoholics Anonymous itself has found and continues to embrace this tension within itself. Its spiritualizers in every A.A. generation cry for a return to a largely imaginary pristine purity. Insofar as their pressure helps Alcoholics Anonymous retain its Pietist perception of the wholeness of accepted limitation against those pulling from the other direction and promoting merely human —
individual
— self-salvation, that influence is benign, positive, and preserving. But insofar as their demands become absolute, insofar as they ignore the other side of A.A.’s insight — its dedication to pluralistic tolerance and deep sense of responsibility to broaden rather than to narrow the gate to salvation — to this extent they themselves embark upon the path of destroying Alcoholics Anonymous as herald of not-God-ness.
The early members of Alcoholics Anonymous — whether Akron Oxford Groupers or New York agnostics — rejected “religion” precisely because, to them, religion seemed to claim to have all the answers but clearly had offered no workable solution to their drinking problem. They incorporated this rejection of any claim to even the possibility of knowing any absolute other than that of not-God-ness into the heart of their pragmatic program. Those who would claim to find within Alcoholics Anonymous a new absolute are thus not the most loyal to its insight but the most destructive of it.
So it has apparently always been in the history of religious insight. One reason, although a minor one, why this direct treatment of “absolutes” has been remanded to this Appendix thus appears to bring this study of the history of Alcoholics Anonymous to a final, fitting conclusion.
Over the period of the writer’s research, one especially serious question was repeatedly asked by both old-timers interviewed and others with whom observations were shared. Perhaps this question was at least partially inspired by the brazenness of an attempt to write the “history” of a still vigorously living phenomenon, but it was nevertheless a serious question always seriously asked: “How long will Alcoholics Anonymous last? Might it change so that it will no longer be Alcoholics Anonymous?”
To pretend to be able to answer directly would be to claim the mantle of prophet rather than that of historian; but for all those who so queried, I can now offer explicitly at least the intuition that their very questions as well as this research have suggested. Alcoholics Anonymous shall survive so long as its message remains that of the not-God-ness of the wholeness of accepted limitation; and this itself shall endure so long as A.A.’s spiritualizers and its liberals — its “right” and its “left” — maintain in mutual respect the creative tension that arises from their willingness to participate even with others of so different assumptions and temperaments in the
shared honesty of mutual vulnerability openly acknowledged
.
Alcoholics Anonymous will live, in other words, so long as it
is
“Alcoholics Anonymous”: “an utter simplicity which encases a complete mystery” that no one claims
perfectly
to understand.
FULLNESS OF TIME
1971-1987
OLD BOUNDARIES AND NEW LIMITATIONS
The fifteen years following the death of A.A.’s longer-lived co-founder proved no less eventful than any similar period in the fellowship’s earlier history. For his appearance at the thirty-fifth anniversary gathering of Alcoholics Anonymous in Miami Beach in July 1970, Bill W. was flown from his Bedford Hills home in a specially chartered, medically equipped airplane. His emphysema made it necessary for oxygen to be constantly available. Although he was not yet attended around the clock by nurses, someone stayed with Bill at all times, especially after he began hallucinating shortly after his Miami arrival. In an irony perhaps of special interest to alcoholics, as he himself commented at the time, Bill’s main hallucination was of constantly speaking on the telephone. Despite this new complication, Wilson’s sense of humor remained unimpaired, and his lanky frame seemed frail only when no stranger was present. As always, the company of others invigorated Bill, and this was never more evident than during the Miami Beach gathering.
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