Changing from the past

At meetings we talk about how negative we can become, as a result of going back and dwelling on the past. All well and good, as long as it’s not my past I’m dwelling on. We will not regret the past or wish to close the door on it.

However, there is a past I find useful. That’s the history of this program and the people who made up that history. Bill W., Dr. Bob, Ebby T., Lois, and all the old timers, who were involved in the founding of AA, including Dr. Silkworth and Dr. Carl Jung. I particularly think about these people, because I think their lives and their deeds carry over into this day.

Probably the one I think about a lot is Ebby T. The man, who Bill always referred to as his sponsor. The man, who carried the message to Bill, which planted the seed that began to grow in Bill. From that AA took roots. Bill got sober, passed it on to Dr. Bob and we all know the rest. But Ebby T, never did have much sobriety. He struggled in and out of the program. Most of the rest of his life was spent drinking. He would get sober for a few days, a few months, and even a few years. Finally, in a family home in upstate New York, where Bill had placed him, he got sober and spent his final years sober until he died.

Bill never gave up on Ebby. After all he and AA owed so much to the man, who brought Bill the idea of a God of Bill’s understanding to him. He also spent time with Bill in the hospital, where Bill got sober, working with him on what would later became the 12 Steps. In those few early days, Ebby took Bill through his inventory and probably the 5th Step, including what we know as the 6th and 7th. I think of how valuable Ebby was to Bill and the rest of us.

Those early old timers, just like Bill, began working those “steps”, from the Oxford Movement, almost from the first day they began to get sober. There was no waiting around. Something in Bill recognized the fact that their sobriety and their lives depended on doing just that. After all, those early candidates Bill was in contact with were extreme cases of alcoholism. We read Dr. Bob’s story and know that he worked the 8th and 9th Steps the first day of his being sober. I shudder to think on how long it took me to get to that stage. But Bill in his own extreme case somehow knew that a complete change in personality had to be achieved if he and the rest he met early on were to stay sober.

It’s not the same today. Most of us, I believe, from my own experience and the experiences of those I have known through the years, never really realize just how bad off we all were. It only comes to someone like me years down the road.

I remember the example of one old timer, who told us that when Dr. Bob had sneaked him into a hospital, because alcoholics like him weren’t all that welcome in most hospitals, how Dr. Bob came to him the next day and confronted him with the idea of God. He asked him if he believed in God and the old timer said he guessed so. Dr. Bob told him there was no guessing about it. Either he did or he didn’t. The old timer then said he did. Dr. Bob told him to get out of his bed and get on his knees, because they were going to pray to God together. And he did. That was the start of his sobriety.

Today I now realize just why all the old timers I knew were so hard on us. They knew from their own experiences and those that came in early on what I didn’t. Just how critical that spiritual awakening, which would bring about change, was to people like me. They knew that the same man would drink again. The new man I was to become wouldn’t.

Going back and looking at AA’s past and the men who knew we had to change or die an alcoholic death, I thought about Bill and Ebby. The mystery of why Bill got it, but Ebby didn’t. Later Bill was to say that the men and women, who never really got this program, but kept coming back and trying, extended their lives, as a result of their periods of abstinence. He had, it seemed, great compassion for those who failed to make it all the way into sobriety and probably, as shown with his hope in Ebby, that maybe someday they would.

I was thinking about this today and being grateful to all those old timers and my sponsor, who like Ebby, opened the door for me to change from the man I was to the sober man I am today.