Not-God (11 page)

Over the fourth day, his visitors began also to listen; and when they finally heard Bob’s story, it was told in the vocabulary they had subtly taught him. Finally on his fifth day in the hospital, his visitors having learned that Bob’s background indicated an openness to Christian Science, his friend Paul returned to indoctrinate his new charge in “the spiritual side.” According to Bob E.’s memory, “I was susceptible … and so he really laid it on thick. He got it over to me that drinking was simply a secondary proposition and was a form of release from whatever self-pity, resentment, imaginary weakness, so forth, and of course, he brought out the chemical reaction — the explanation that Dr. Smith gave from the medical standpoint — that all tied in.”
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Bob E.’s last act before leaving the hospital was straight out of Oxford Group practice: he “made a surrender.” On his knees at his bedside, Dr. Smith standing over him, Bob “shared completely — [it has] to be done with another person. Pray and share out loud. The act of surrender.… You couldn’t attend a meeting unless you had gone through that. You couldn’t just go to a meeting — you had to go through the program of surrender.”
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Not all in Akron had been ready to make such a dramatic surrender — at least at first. A favorite story of the period concerned a nameless drunk who unwittingly bestowed upon the yet unnamed fellowship one of its temporary Akron nicknames, “the take-it-or-leave-it program.” This worthy, having crawled back to Dr. Bob after what most of the others serenely assumed was one last binge, muttered to his first visitors during his second hospital stay: “Jeez — when you guys say ‘Take it or leave it,’ you mean it!” This experience and others similar to it, Bob E. and other Akronites later testified, contributed for many years to come to the greater rigidity of A. A. groups stemming from Akron.
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But Bob E. readily “made surrender.” Out of the hospital, still without employment as were most of the early Akron alcoholics, he fell readily and eagerly into his “new vocation of staying sober.” One term which he had heard first from Dr. Smith and thereafter often from his visitors, Bob E. found himself beginning to live — “Christian fellowship.” Daily, he and the other newly sober alcoholics met informally in each other’s homes — or at least in the homes of those of their number fortunate enough still to have them. Freshly redeemed from their active alcoholism, few among these early alcoholics knew any real friends from “the old days.” Families and employers in general remained mistrustful. The time recently devoted to drinking and oblivion hung heavily on their hands, and so they sought out each other. The first aim of this “sharing” may have been information about or experience with new prospects, but they soon found themselves sharing more deeply. Utilizing their well-known stories as the background for discussing their current hopes and fears, their joys and resentments, they began slowly and unconsciously to perfect their new vocabulary, and with it the new conceptual categories with which they were learning to understand life.”
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On Saturdays they gathered informally at the home of “Mother G.” — an Oxford Group matron whose son, sobered up by Wilson and Smith in 1935 and at age thirty-two their youngest member, seemed particularly unstable in his sobriety. The newly sober alcoholics stopped by to see Anne Smith even more frequently. Her warmth and overflowing motherliness readily embraced them all — perhaps the more so because her only son had that year left home for college. For whatever concerns they brought to her kitchen, Anne had no direct answers but she always found a relevant passage of the Bible to read with them. She herself was ‘“the sheltered place for people in trouble, a rod, a comforter,” in her daughter-in-law’s memory. Dr. Bob’s sympathetic spouse especially favored readings about “love.” When her large hands were too busy to hold the Bible or when the outpouring of disheartenment and confusion seemed to fluster even her for a moment, “Miss Annie” fell back on a simple Scriptural quotation that always seemed to her listeners to come more from her heart and eyes than from her lips and mouth: “God is Love.” How it worked, her visitors did not know, but hearing those words from that woman always brought calm — and confidence that they would not drink that day.
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The formal “meetings” continued to be held each Wednesday evening at the large Westfield home of T. Henry and Clarace Williams, the alcoholics at times making up almost half the group as the year 1937 drew to a close. The sober alcoholics referred to themselves as “the alcoholic squadron of the Oxford Group.” Whether the emphasis lay on the unity of the connecting word
of
or on the distinction implied by the two terms did not yet concern them. The expression furnished an important group identity. It was “the meeting” to which new prospects could be brought after they had “made surrender” (or even at times to “make surrender” in a small basement room before the meeting began); it was “the meeting” to which, by late 1937, a few Cleveland alcoholics whom Dr. Bob had sobered up began to return each week. It would appear in hindsight that most of their waking lives was a continuous A.A. meeting; in the perspective of history, their Wednesday night gatherings seem mainly an educational respite in their new crash-course socialization. But, of course, these awarenesses were not present to them at the time. The Akron alcoholics were conscious of owing much — indeed,
all
— to the Oxford Group; they relished their identification as its “alcoholic squadron.” Thus, in November 1937, when Bill Wilson returned to Akron with news of the New Yorkers’ departure from Oxford Group auspices, any tendency to pride in independence was blunted by concern over the withdrawal’s implications.
⁵⁷

Wilson had come primarily to share this news, but with instinctive prudence he minified the significance of the separation. Focusing rather on the tidings that in the past six months some measure of success had begun to crown his efforts in New York, he concentrated attention on the meaning and implications of increasing numbers — something of which the Akronites were especially proud. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith paused privately for a moment’s joint evaluation of two recent phenomena, the New Yorkers’ independence and the Akronites’ rapid growth.
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Most whom they had approached had neither stopped drinking nor shown any other interest in their ideas, yet there also had been some startling successes. Now, there was a hard-core group of over twenty very grim, last gasp cases who had by then been sober for almost two years. Counting all noses, Wilson and Smith realized that between the New York City and the Akron groups, over forty formerly destructive drinkers were now staying bone-dry a day at a time.
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The shared feeling of Wilson and Smith as they came to this realization was again that of being suffused in a brilliant flash of warming light. “Suddenly it burst upon us, — ‘Something new has come into the world’ — a new life and a science where there was none before. The question was: How do we transmit this experience?”
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Three possibilities were discussed, first by Bill and Bob, then among all the Akron alcoholics. Paid workers could serve as “missionaries;” there would be the construction and operation of a chain of hospitals specializing in the treatment of alcoholism — important both because most general hospitals were unwilling to offer any care to alcoholics and as the source of revenue to support the “missionaries;” and, above all, they needed to set down their experience and methods on paper as a guard against the garble and distortion deemed inevitable as soon as publicity came.
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Dr. Bob Smith, Wilson recorded, liked the idea of a book but was frankly dubious about paid missionaries and profit-making hospitals. Still, together they presented all three ideas to eighteen members of the Akron group. Supported by Dr. Bob, Bill strongly argued the
pros
of the proposed endeavors — and he did have to argue strongly. The initial overwhelming reaction of the group was to reject all three ideas: paying workers would diminish the effectiveness of their message; hospitals would appear to be, if not turn into, a “racket;” and Christ’s apostles themselves, the Akronites anachronistically pointed out, had had no need of printed matter. But Wilson and Smith argued on. Finally, over the strenuous objections of a large minority, the Akronites hesitantly consented to go along with all three ideas.
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Thus, in November 1937, awareness of the larger implications of being not-God clearly did not yet permeate the still unnamed fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. To accept that the alcoholic, drinking or sober, was not God — that he was imperfect, flawed, less than absolute — had not been difficult. Such acceptance lay implicit in the avowal, “I am an alcoholic.” But to accept further that the alcoholic, even joyously sober, was not-God — that one’s very limitation issued in wholeness, that it implied affirmation more than denial, that the alcoholic could find strength albeit rooted in weakness, that being a sober alcoholic was a positive identity as well as a negative label: this required a deeper faith, a more profound insight. Thus the context was set for the contributions of the next two years. In both New York and Akron, events were soon to demonstrate that the highs and lows of sobriety could be as perilous to serenity as the ups and downs of alcoholic intoxication — that the acceptance of being “not-God” had to do with more than alcohol.

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   “Pigeon” was the term used among members of A.A., especially in New York, to refer to prospects for their program. Its origin is lost in obscurity, but according to Lois Wilson, its use derived from A.A.’s earliest days and it was consistently understood as connoting affectionate care rather than as in any way derogatory. In Akron and Cleveland, it early became customary to refer to new prospects as “babies,” understood with the same connotation.

+
   The emphasis on Alcoholics Anonymous as a “life-changing” program, although reflected strongly in
AA
and
12&12
, was especially stressed in Akron, Cleveland, and groups deriving from these two centers of A.A. activity.

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   Of interest is the final question that the historian of the Oxford Group, Walter Houston Clark, asked of his material — and his answer to it: “whether the benefits of the Group may be enjoyed without its drawbacks.” He continued: “Perhaps the best known modern illustration is the work done by Alcoholics Anonymous, where life-changing of a very effective nature is accomplished by methods fundamentally very similar to those of the Oxford Group. Both movements have accomplished results through religious emphases that have been possible by no other method. At its beginning, Alcoholics Anonymous owed something to the Group. Yet because of a more humble state of mind, a willingness to experiment and work with others, and strict avoidance of the objectionable type of publicity indulged in by the Oxford Group, A.A. has been publicly endorsed by leading medical men and most religious denominations including the Catholic. Alcoholics Anonymous has learned lessons from the Group, has appropriated what has seemed good and has discarded or reversed what has not been to its purpose.”

NOVEMBER 1937-OCTOBER 1939

When Dr. Bob Smith had first attained sobriety and had embraced Bill Wilson’s largely unformed ideas in June 1935, A.A.’s co-founders did not advert to their implicit debts to the influences of Carl Jung, William James, Dr. William Silkworth, and the Oxford Group. By November 1937, however, Wilson and Smith felt that they had a “program,” and so they were able to think more explicitly about the ideas they had drawn from these diverse sources.
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These ideas remained understandings of
persons/
alcoholics rather than of any
thing/
alcoholism. The concept fundamental to Alcoholics Anonymous continued to be the pragmatic one of the
alcoholic
rather than any speculative reaching at some direct comprehension of
alcoholism
. Their tentative understanding of alcoholism as “an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer” obviously described the alcoholic rather than analyzed the malady. The core perception of the drinking alcoholic’s problem as “selfishness” likewise remained unchanged. Indeed, its further grasp at depth and the spelling out that followed from that grasp furnished the vehicle for Wilson and Smith to deepen their thinking about a “program.” Within months, Bill, seeking to set forth in writing what they had agreed about “How It Works,” baldly summed up his and Dr. Bob’s understanding of the alcoholic’s dire condition: “Selfishness — self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.… First of all we had to quit playing God.… The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so.”
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“Though he usually doesn’t think so.” If there be an example of intentional understatement in self-confessed extremist Bill Wilson’s extensive writings, it lies concealed in that “usually.” Especially in the unsuccessful phase of their efforts with drinking alcoholics, Bill and Bob had early and clearly isolated the obstacle inhibiting those who failed to grasp their ideas and so to attain sobriety —
denial
, denial fundamentally of being “an alcoholic.” This denial, Wilson and Smith had learned from their failures as well as from their successes, tended to be expressed in especially two contrary insistences: the “claim to be able to drink like other people;” and the “exceptional thinking” that insisted that even though the problem-drinker’s outward experience seemed to place him in the alcoholic camp, he was somehow “different” — an exception. The problem lay in the implications of “being different.” Did
identity
flow from the ways one was like other people, or the ways in which one was unlike them? And to just which “other people” did one look in achieving identity, whether by likeness or unlikeness?
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