Not-God (7 page)

By now it was nearing midnight, and Dr. Bob’s thirst to give had overwhelmed his craving for alcohol. He invited Bill to return home with himself and his wife. So began three weeks of intensive Oxford Group living. Bill Wilson found himself in awe of Dr. Bob’s “spiritual knowledge” and cherished the guidance of Anne Smith as each morning her pleasant voice read and interpreted the Christian Scriptures and Oxford Group devotional books. All Bob and Anne knew was that since Bill had moved in, the doctor had neither had a drink nor wanted one.
⁷³

Early in June, Dr. Smith raised a question. It was time for the annual medical convention, to be held that year in Atlantic City. Bob had been in the custom of attending and had hoped to do so this year, but Anne feared the separation from her and Bill, and so — in a way — did he. What did Bill think? On the one hand, Bill Wilson rarely answered questions directly, especially when it involved managing other people’s lives. On the other hand, his opinion hardly ever lay deeply veiled under whatever added fact or further question he proposed for consideration. “Well, we have to learn to live in a world filled with alcohol. When do you think you might be ready to start practicing?”
⁷⁴

So Dr. Bob journeyed to Atlantic City, and nothing was heard of him for several days. Then one morning his office nurse called. She had picked up the doctor at the railroad station at four that morning: he was drunk. Anne and Bill fetched Bob home and put him to bed, learning in the process that he was scheduled to perform a vital operation three days later. Around the clock his wife and new friend sat up with Dr. Bob, tapering him off in order to minimize the effects of withdrawal. On the morning of the scheduled surgery, Bob awoke — shaking. “Bill,” he said, “I’m going to go through with it.” Wilson thought he was referring to the operation, but Smith waved him off. “No,” he explained, “I mean this thing we’ve been talking about.”
⁷⁵

Anne and Bill drove Bob to the hospital, Wilson handing the surgeon a bottle of beer as he alighted — to help steady his nerves and hand so that he could hold the scalpel. Leaving the doctor to do what he felt he had to do, they returned to the Smith home on Ardmore Avenue, and they waited. Many scenarios played in their minds, few of them happy. Noon passed, and the afternoon wore on: still no word from Dr. Bob. Had he been able to perform the surgery at all? If he had attempted it, what had happened? Had it perhaps been a success, and in a burst of celebratory relief, had Bob gone out and really tied one on? That last seemed their
best
hope. Finally, late in the afternoon, the telephone jangled. Was it Bob? Or the hospital? Or even the police? Perhaps only those who have lived with and loved an alcoholic can know the depths of intermingled hope and fear that conditioned the habitual response with which Anne Smith moved to answer the unnerving ring.
⁷⁶

It was Bob. The operation had gone well and had been completed quickly. Feeling the awful strain lifted, recalling what he had learned from his conversations with Bill, the doctor had left the hospital determined to begin living what he had absorbed from his acquaintance with the Oxford Group over the past two and one-half years. Visiting first his creditors and then others whom he had harmed by his behavior, Dr. Bob Smith had made his rounds: confessing to each what he knew of the honest reality of his condition, his illness; then promising and beginning to plan a practical program of restitution in each case.
⁷⁷

The date was the tenth of June. The outlined “Landmarks in A.A. History” recorded its full significance laconically: “1935, June 10: Dr. Bob has his last drink. Alcoholics Anonymous founded.”
⁷⁸

The four “founding moments” in the history of the idea and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous were: Dr. Carl Gustav Jung’s 1931 conversation with Rowland H.; Ebby T.’s late November 1934 visit with Bill Wilson; Wilson’s “spiritual experience” and discovery of William James in Towns Hospital in mid-December 1934; and the interaction between Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith through May and June 1935 which climaxed in the final and enshrined “founding moment” just recorded. Before examining what happened
to
this idea
in
this fellowship, how both evolved and were developed, how both matured and were spread, it is appropriate to examine more closely, carefully, and analytically the idea itself.

The fellowship — the organization — of Alcoholics Anonymous has consistently proclaimed the roots of its program to be twofold. A.A. saw itself as drawn from and bridging “medicine” and “religion,” a claim of some historical soundness and larger strategic utility. Yet “medicine” and “religion” were extremely comprehensive terms, made specific in the light of history.
⁷⁹

The sources of A.A.’s core idea were complexly mingled in the four founding moments examined. Dr. Jung, for example, had spoken explicitly of “religious or spiritual experience” and “conversion,” yet the
term
“deflation at depth” was drawn more from him than from William James. The James contribution was to reinforce and to clarify the
necessity
of spiritual experience/conversion, and especially to teach that its routes — and its roots — could be various.
⁸⁰

Similarly, a large reason for the Jungian stress on the necessity of conversion lay in the Zurich psychiatrist’s understanding of the medical hopelessness of the condition of alcoholism. Yet Wilson proximately received this concept from Dr. Silkworth, conjoined with “the disease concept of alcoholism.” That Wilson in his wariness of medical professionals avoided the term
disease;
that the idea of alcoholism as a disease had a long history; that the Silkworth specifics of “physical allergy” and “mental obsession” were generally rejected by later biochemical and psychiatric researchers: these points were irrelevant.
⁸¹

These were “outside issues.” The core idea of Alcoholics Anonymous was primarily the concept of the
hopelessness
of the condition of alcoholism. That most people in mid-twentieth century America found this hopelessness most understandable couched in terms of “disease,” “illness,” or “malady” derived from the historical context and revealed more about the culture than about Alcoholics Anonymous.
⁸²

The second aspect of the core A.A. idea was that
deflation
arose from this perception of hopelessness. In the developing argot of Alcoholics Anonymous, a language that moved always from the possibly mysterious to the sheerly vivid, the term
deflation
was replaced by
hitting bottom
.

Conversion
, the third facet of the core A.A. idea, was a term avoided. Yet the profound reality of the concept was inescapable: “bottom” clearly implied that there was something else “higher.” Most obviously, the conversion experience in Alcoholics Anonymous was from drinking to dryness. It was a turning from the condition of active alcoholism to a total life-style termed “sobriety.” Most profoundly, it was a conversion from destructively total self-centeredness to the fourth aspect of the core idea: constructive, creative, and
fully human interaction
with others.

Alcoholics Anonymous thus offered a concept of the
alcoholic
rather than an understanding of
alcoholism
. The very title of its textbook, especially in its first misspelled form,
Alcoholic’s Anonymous
, bore witness that direct concern was with the alcoholic rather than with alcoholism.
⁸³

And what was this core concept of the alcoholic? “Selfishness — self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.… The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot.…” The need to escape the private prison of the narrow self is one of the themes that undergirds and finds expression in all the great religions of mankind. That human life has meaning, ultimate meaning, only as lived for others — or for an-Other — seems one way of understanding the deep unity as well as the profound variety of the human experience termed “religious.” Fundamental to all human existence seems the quest for self-transcendence.
⁸⁴

This idea was surely contained in the thought of Carl Jung and of William James, mediated to William Griffith Wilson and so to Alcoholics Anonymous by Ebby T., who was living it out in his visit to Bill. Verbally, Ebby brought the message of felt-deflation and the need for conversion; but just by being there, his very presence carrying this message proclaimed the further message that one must
do
— and do-for-others — in order to
be
sober. At the moment when Wilson realized that the meaning underlying his new unease, the source of what was driving him to examine the Oxford Group even cynically, was that “one alcoholic had been talking to another,” the A.A. core idea began latent existence.
⁸⁵

To this idea, the elements of which were abundantly present to both of them, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith added a style, the proximate source of which was the April 1935 conversation between Wilson and Dr. Silkworth. Silkworth had told Wilson to stop talking about “absolutes” and his “spiritual experience” and instead “to deflate these people first, … give them the medical business, and give it to them hard.” Through circumstances, Bill Wilson next approached with his message a medical man, and rather than preach medicine to a doctor, he further polished the Silkworth-suggested style. Wilson
told
hopelessness rather than preached conversion, and he
told
by using his own story, his own experience, the literal facts of his own life, rather than by offering abstract theory or even scientific facts.

Sitting in that side parlor of the Seiberling gatehouse on the evening of 12 May 1935, Bill presented to Dr. Bob four aspects of one core idea. Utterly hopeless, totally deflated, requiring conversion, and needing others, the drinking alcoholic was quite obviously not perfect, not absolute,
not God
.

Hardly a profound or original idea, but it was
how
Bill Wilson announced it that gave this message sufficient impetus to reach the alcohol-soaked head and heart of Dr. Bob Smith — albeit after a month’s delay. Wilson said, in effect,
by his very presence:
“You, a drinking alcoholic, are not God, as I, a drinking alcoholic was not God. And I am not God even now, as a sober alcoholic. I still need others, but
now
I need them because I have something to give. Precisely
because
I accept my alcoholism, my weakness, my limitation, I have found that I have something to give — something to give
from
that very limitation. Thus I am also
not-God:
I am
someone
; I am one who finds that the invitation to wholeness, the opportunity for it, arises from the very weakness of my limitation. And for the alcoholic, Bob, that is the meaning of sobriety — and of life.”

+
   The Oxford Group will be examined in detail in Chapter Two. It was a non-denominational, theologically conservative, evangelically styled attempt to recapture the impetus and spirit of what its members understood to be primitive Christianity. Begun as “The First Century Christian Fellowship” in 1908, its popularity under the name “Oxford Group” peaked in the late twenties and early thirties; after 1938 it was known as “Moral Re-Armament.” Despite occasional confusing mis-use of the terms, the Oxford Group is to be distinguished from the “Oxford Movement”: the latter was a late nineteenth-century, strongly liturgical movement within Anglo-Catholicism (the Anglican or Episcopalian Church) towards Roman Catholicism. The most prominent name associated with the Oxford
Movement
is that of John Henry Newman (1801-1890). A greater difference is difficult to imagine than that between Newman’s thought on “the development of doctrine” and the dedication of Frank Buchman, who founded the Oxford Group, to recapturing “First Century Christianity.”

+
   In Bill’s earliest telling of his own story
(A A
, p. 9), the alcoholic author offered an even more vivid description of his feelings about religion on the occasion ot that first visit from Ebby T.

+
   Wilson’s most explicit treatment of his wariness over using the term “disease” occurred in
NCCA
, p. 20: “We have never called alcoholism a disease because, technically speaking, it is not a disease entity. For example, there is no such thing as heart disease. Instead there are many separate heart ailments, or combinations of them. It is something like that with alcoholism. Therefore we did not wish to get in wrong with the medical profession by pronouncing alcoholism a disease entity. Therefore we always called it an illness, or a malady — a far safer term for us to use.”

+
   “fellowship/program”: members of A.A. consistently and vehemently resist references to “organization” or “doctrine;” speaking of the membership or any external structure, they prefer the term, “fellowship;” referring to the ideas held, taught, or suggested by A.A. literature, they prefer the term, “program.” This usage — and this distinction — is preserved throughout this study.

+
   “Guidance” was to the Oxford Group a technical term. It referred to God’s direction of one’s life, and was usually explicitly sought in moments of silence after prayer. It was not necessarily understood as a “voice,” although this was the usual understanding. The one who received “guidance” was usually certain that it was from God, but abuses of this understanding led the Oxford Group from the early 1930s to encourage “checking guidance”: “sharing” with Group members the “guidance” received so that they could advise (under the influence of their own “guidance”) whether or not the “guidance” seemed truly from God. In the mid- to late thirties, the Group moved toward establishing as the criterion for true “guidance” conformity with its “Four Absolutes” — absolute unselfishness, absolute honesty, absolute purity, and absolute love.

JUNE 1935-NOVEMBER 1937