Today I have to go to and lead a meeting from the BB. Bill’s Story. I’m not always in favor of leading meetings, but his story has always intrigued me for a number of reasons.
One of those is that he tells us about how he was engaged by an alcoholic friend of his, who had gotten sober and brought his story of how he did it to him. What Bill doesn’t do is to tell us who this man was and how he got the help he needed. The fact was that Bill knew the two men who were involved. They went back a lot of years. All three of them were alcoholics.
As a matter of fact Bill and how AA began is in the next chapter, There Is A Solution. It’s at the end of that chapter, when a young man is being told by the Swiss psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, that his only hope of surviving his alcoholism is to be locked up and put under guard. The young man asks Dr. Jung isn’t there any hope? Dr. Jung then lays out what is eventually to be the basis of the AA program. The solution. He tells him that if he goes out and finds a spiritual experience that it would save him and he could get sober.
The young man, a friend of Bill’s and the other man, whose name is Rowland Hazard, does have that experience and joins the Oxford Group. Then the other friend, Ebby Thatcher, is hauled into court and in trouble, when Rowland hears about it and shows up and has Ebby placed in his care. Rowland tells him what happened to him and takes him to the Oxford Movement and helps him to get sober. And that’s when Ebby hears about Bill’s problem and goes to him with the same message he got from Rowland.
Bill in his story goes on to tell how he found his Higher Power through this man. How he himself got sober in the hospital, because (and he doesn’t explain it in his story) he did have a spiritual experience himself. And while in the hospital, with the help of his friend Ebby, he works the Six Steps of the Oxford Group. And he leaves the hospital sober, never to drink ever again.
The fact is that Bill and his wife Lois, who also knew the other two men, join the Oxford Group and begin to help alcoholics and take them with them into the group. Meanwhile Bill, who does mention the alcoholics in the “mid west” (Ohio, Akron and Cleveland), doesn’t go into his Twelfth Stepping Dr. Bob. And Dr. Bob also joins the Oxford Group and brings the men he is helping into it.
And here is where AA comes into being. Bill and Lois are asked to leave the Oxford Group by its leader, because he sees alcoholics messing it up. Meanwhile in Ohio, the Catholic Bishops tell their Irish Catholics in Cleveland that they can’t go to the Oxford Movement because it’s a different religion. And that leads to the alcoholics in Ohio to pull away from the Group.
So here they all are in New York and Ohio and a decision is made to go out on their own. That leads to several very critical decisions. The first is put what is going on with them down on paper. Eventually the BB. And here is where the doors are opened to every alcoholic. The first is to rewrite the Oxford Groups Six Steps. The early members come up with Twelve Steps. Then the biggest change of all comes. After heated arguments they decide to change the Second Step from “God” and put in the idea of a “Power greater than ourselves”. The Third is changed to “the God of our understanding”. The Seventh has “on our knees” and “God” removed. And of course in the Twelfth we’re back to the words in the Third.
What this did was allow alcoholics of all kinds of beliefs or disbelief’s to come in and get sober. The concept of religion is gone. It’s now a definitely spiritual program. The spiritual experience, which Rowland was directed to seek, is now termed a “spiritual awakening”, which comes now as the result of putting these Steps into action in our lives. And it works.
Even those who have no belief in any kind of divinity, have their own individual awakening.
It is whatever makes sense to all of us as individuals.
Looking over these thoughts I can see why Bill did what he did. He would have had to double the size of his story. However all of this intrigues me. I definitely, like so many, have researched his story and that of the program. By the way Rowland never joined AA. He stayed with the Oxford Group. Stayed sober until he died. Bill later will write a letter to Dr. Jung telling him this very thing.
Anyway, I celebrated my anniversary today, and that combined with the prospect of the meeting tonight made me sit down and meditate on all of this. It is so important to me. It pretty much tells me how I was able to get sober and stay that way for all of this time. It makes me grateful. I owe so much to Bill and all those early members, the old timers I knew back then. In fact the truth is that it’s just a day at a time for all of us. And, yes, it is beyond my wildest dreams. Who would have thought back when I was drinking and drunk that I would be sitting here today thinking about all of this? How much I owe my Higher Power. Like I said I am grateful.