And So From My Heart I Say
It does not seem many years ago since we invited some of our gentleman-drunk friends to come and stay at Calvary House; and when there was a “second floor” to old Calvary Mission, down in the Gas House District, where some of the men who knew better days and were ‘standing’ in the new-found way of life were living together in a kind of starkly simple spiritual community. We made a lot of mistakes in those old days. Some of the boys helped the others, as we hoped they would; but some helped them downwards instead of upwards. Yet these early experiments had their contribution to make to the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous. At least they showed some of the ways not to do it. Bill often says he saw something in these men which showed him there was a law in operation here, If a few men could find sobriety through what William James called “a firmer hold on religious realties,” then many might. He went to work to discover what those laws were, and to set about ways of making them available to more people. Bill is a smart fellow, but I shall always believe there was something way beyond Bill working in the amazing shrewdness with which he gained his insight into alcoholics, into eternal spiritual laws, and into the ways in which one can bring men and women into touch with God without raising needless religious prejudices and creating unnecessary spiritual divisions. He was good enough to send me one of the early prospectuses of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. I knew then he had a potent idea. But whether that idea would take root in the ground of the actual and grow, or whether it would die as a good idea depended on many factors. As I write, I am on my vacation, very plant-conscious: it takes awhile for a flower or a tree to strike root–you are not sure what is going to happen. Then one day you see the new leaves begin–and thereafter it is a straight course to the time of flower or fruit. Again, while the need is so sheer and therefore the openness so obvious, and while the patient good sense with which Bill went to work was a tribute to him and his associates, there still was Something bigger than they at work in the whole performance. There is a difference between thought and dynamics. You can have the right idea, but what will really put it over? Especially, you can have the right idea about what persons in various kinds of need ought to do–but what will get them to do it? There you are in the mysterious realm of human dynamics. The idea must grow warm, first in your own mind, then in the minds of others. Faith exercises its mighty part, with its belief that the unlikely or even impossible can take place. Love mediates faith to others, by caring what happens to them, by patience, by persistence, by humour, especially as regards oneself. By contact with the Author of all life, we receive these gifts that include the right idea and also the dynamics of its transmission. I am reading a great book by Paul Tillich. In it he speaks of there being such a thing as a “kairos”, a “fullness of time”, which he says, “according to the New Testament use of the word, describes the moment in which the eternal breaks into the temporal, and the temporal is prepared to receive it.” I verily believe that A.A. represents a genuine “kairos”, a coming into time of the Eternal with the right message for one kind of human need. When I get into one of those companies of men and women, so lovable, so honest about themselves, so modest in their claims yet so sure of their actual experience, I feel that I am experiencing something much more like the gatherings of the early church than are many church services and meetings. Paying lip-service to God is one thing–experiencing the power of God to give a whole new outlook on life, to know victory instead of defeat, and adventure instead of despair, is quite another. And so from my heart I say, and say often, God bless A.A.! I think it one of the greatest, most heartening things happening today on the surface of this tried and troubled planet. And I believe we have not seen the beginnings of what it can do, not alone for alcoholics, but for all men who need a change of heart and first begin to get it as they see it in others.
– Contributed by Vic L., Decisions Group/PIO, Winter Springs FL