The Agnostic’s Dilemma: Moving Beyond Dogma to a Practical Higher Power — Bob S.

All right, folks. Think those folks are over there. For the Lord's and me, and I hope for many of you, These hours together at this time of the year are among our most treasured experiences. This is especially true for the anniversary children, and Lois is one because she was there at the beginning. She's still with us. And we want to express a gratitude that is really inexpressible for all of these magnificent arrangements, for this privilege once a year of getting the pulse of our society, the chance has seen a substantial cross-section of what Mary called the Beloved Community. This is a very great privilege, a marvelous satisfaction. Thank you, thank all concerned, and thank God. Lawrence would like to share this giving of thanks to you with me. Thank you, Dad. Good evening, everybody. and thanks a million for all your love that I can feel up here. And all the things that you have done by carrying the message of AA for all these years. this afternoon at the reception I was taken unaware that I was going to have to say anything and I told what I was going to repeat here and what I had expected I would say here just a little anecdote but some 17 years ago I spoke at the dinner here, or in a nearby hotel. And I said that it was 17 years that Bill had drank during our married life. And that then, there had been 17 years of sobriety so that the score was even and now we had started on a brand new road. Now it's another 17 years. And I can't express my gratitude and wonder at these last pittering slaps of the years. And I thank you all so much. Just as anonymity is the foundation of our position, so is the spiritual awakening, the spiritual experience, the foundation for recovery in AA and progress in life which has a new dimension. I would like to talk about the spiritual experience, and as a backdrop against which we may view it, I would like to tell you a succession of short stories. The first one coming to mind is a recent one. It had to do with a Japanese delegation coming over, I expect, on the occasion of the Congress in Washington, who wished to visit the office and pose the great dilemma that was facing AAs and would-be AAs in Japan. And the dilemma was what to do about the godless. And they pointed out that the steps say, God as we understood him. And they had put a brand new, entirely original construction on that place. They said, we understand that we should believe in the gods that the people believe in at AA General Headquarters, 305 East 45th Street, New York City. Nevertheless, though this has its humorous twist, they were posing a question very old. And theirs was exactly the dilemma that once I faced. I'm not going to detail my story at length, I'm going to touch on those spots that will best illustrate this theme of the awakening of spiritual experience. But you do remember how my sponsor, Ebi, came to me in Brooklyn and how over the kitchen table he told me of his relief from alcoholism through the ministry of the Oxford Group, the people from whom we drew so much. And as he told the story, unfolded the need for honesty, the need to restitution, the need for giving of oneself without reckoning the return, especially those with prestige and money. It was all fine up to this point. But then when he said, I asked God to help me to these things. I found myself wincing, and he won away. His words had struck me deep, not because they were so new but because they had spoken across a kinship of suffering, one which I know he had endured, and one that I could see indeed that he was released from. And release was this. He wasn't on the war race. He wasn' twisting up that spring that inevitably falls only to pitch it back into the drink again. No, he was relieved. you could see, and that a good part of what had happened to him he attributed to the grace of God. Now, I had never been a militant atheist, but I had been raised in scientific tradition, I saw schools, I had come to believe that the universe was a matter of time and space particles that we had evolved somehow from this mysterious background, probably between... because a cosmic ray had bumped into the genes of some of the lower animals, let's say the apes and plenty before this. And this is just in process that finally evolved into a thing. This, in a way, was my religion, my faith in science. I could not deny necessarily the claims of religion. Who would be so arrogant as to know? But nevertheless, religion for me, this hard-hitting Vermonter, well, that was out of the question. Particularly this emotional evangelist, now that being in a great and providential prudence, did not put any aggression on me. He merely said what his experience had been and what the result was. He admitted he was licked, he made a self-survey, he worked with other people, and he prayed to the God of his understanding, which I took to be the God of the physical church. Well, after he left, as you remember, I went on drinking. And then the identical dilemma that the Japanese are facing was on me. By this time, Dr. Stokeworth only months before had told Lloyd that I suffered from a compulsion to destructive drinking with which my will, neither my will nor his resources, could cope with. If there was a physical component to this and if it continued to be aggravated, this so-called allergy I would go mad or worse. Now, I knew what the sentence was. And through another channel Ebby had brought in the same thing. Zia, a friend of his who had been to the same as Dr. Carl Jung who you remember has said my arm has failed it cannot help you your only chance Roland before touching the customer's name is a spiritual awakening you remember that Roland said but I am a man of faith and Jung said but this goes further this goes deeper this means a transforming experience that mysteriously we know now somehow expelled the effect. So here was another god of my science pronouncing a sentence upon me, and I knew I had no recourse to science in my case. So I was caught in a terrible terrible bond. Here, the nature of my illness was relieved, and God knows my whole experience for several years had confirmed this knowledge. So the bind increased, and my drinking increased, But all is the face of my friend across that table. So at last, in desperation, and no hope I'll assure you, I thought I'd better go up to the hospital and get my adult brain cleared up and see if I couldn't take another look. And so I did go up there. And I wasn't in too bad shape. And Dr. Silkworth put me to bed. And as the liquor wore off and the sedation was gone, the bind on me increased and increased. My God, I'm destined for more deterioration, insanity and death, hell-bent. And now they seem to be saying to me, the Oxford groupers in Ebbing, only God can lay you out. And how can I believe in God? So the upshot was deeper and deeper, and finally agonizing the point. And then my friend came, repeated his formula, went away, and I took one more tremendous nosedive and cried out in no hope at all. Just cried out. find out. If there is a God, will he show himself? And you've heard me tell the story so many times. There was this great light. There were this tremendous indescribable exclamation. There was the exclamation, exclamation by me. I'm a free man, so this is the God creatures. Then the great peace settled on me, and I felt I was in a new world, or certainly had a very different view of the old one, a universe in which all was somehow right, all was meaningful, that I belonged, that I had a place for. And then came the wonder, why at once, that I'd had this experience, but so few seemed to have it. Yes, I knew that drunks had got religion and all through the factories had sobered up. So then in came my sponsor with a book in his hand of great moments to us today, and this was William James on Varieties of Religious Expressions. And I began to devour this book, and the tenor of it was that those granted these transforming gifts of faith were generally people who had reached some impact in some controlling area of life so as to render them inoperative as human beings. They were the people who couldn't get over it or around it or under it. It was these experiences that set on a base of hope. Now, then, at dinner after dinner I have come and recited this story. And I think I have been deeply amiss in not making it abundantly clear that however spectacular, however sweet, however unbelievable to many this experience of mine was, that it was in essence, no different than that which any AA acquires. That he may acquire such a transforming experience by first deflation and not suffering to rub out all rationalization. The attendance upon AA has a higher power to life, and the putting of all theological considerations and arguments on the back of itself. You and I have sat in meetings time after time. We have heard guys and gals in AA get up and recite what was indeed a miracle of transformation. And then they say to us, but gee, this is a wonderful fellowship. This is saving my life. This is saving my family. This is mine. But I'm awful sorry to say, folks, I ain't got the spiritual angle. Well, you and I looking at the newlyweds, the newlyborns, we nudge ourselves one next to the other and we whisper, holy smoke, he's just reaching with it. He just hasn't put a tag on it. I'm very mindful of this because early on there was an episode down in the old 24th Street Club must have been in year two or three about outpolling an army. Oh, maybe a little later. And we had one of these no-spiritual-angle boys who had been doing a great, great job at AA. Gee, everybody liked that kid. You know, and he'd get up and say, well, it's great, but I didn't get the spiritual angle. But one night, lo and behold, he got up and announced and said, I got the spiritual angel. I got some higher power. Now I know I'm getting it made. And then he went on to say, you know what my higher power is? He says it's that radiator over there. And when the steam comes in that radiator, the heat comes out and it warms up the place. But any time there's any steam in my radiator, nothing comes out of it but trouble. So this is my higher Power. And this group is my higher power. And that was really my higher power all the time, because when I came along, most of you guys were sober and I was drunk. Sure enough. Well, two or three years later, I remember this same chap saying, You know, I've been reading a book funny written by some psychiatrist on the subject of cosmic consciousness. You know, as I read that book, somehow I realized that I'd got a belt of that stuff and some of it's all golfing. Now, that is beginning at just about the lowest common denominator of the experience. And yet his experience was just as brilliant, just as transforming Now, I think that it would probably help if we looked over the spiritual experience situation. Come on, I see this here for example, Al and Merrick. And finally, I would like to speak for Dr. Bob, as best I may, on that subject. Before launching on that assignment, I'd like to tell another story. Back after the Saturday Post piece, I was approached by Dr. Foster Kennedy, one of the neurologists of world renown back in those days. Dr. Kennedy has had for a long time, treated free, a gal that thousands of us know. Her name is Martha. And as Marty will tell you, and as Dr. Kennedy will tell you, she was one hell of a mess and a most difficult outlaw. Well, he saw her come to her first meeting at our house in Clinton Street, and saving one flip a few months later, just had a drink of his tea. This so-so Dr. Kennedy, he came to me And he said, well, Bill, could I ask you a thing? I noticed in that Saturday Post thing there are a number of physicians who had apparently watched you folks for some time and said very, very good things about A.S. Now, said he, I wish that you could get one or two of those fellas or some of your other medical friends, perhaps, to come to the Academy of Medicine where I will arrange a hearing for them and let it be heard from these doctors what they think about AA and why they think it works. Well, this was great news at this early time And gee, could you imagine a doctor not being glad to go to the academy on the invitation of the great Fox Academy? I couldn't. So I began to canvass these dear medical friends of ours, and not one of them would go near of the place. Not once. And I said, gee, folks, you went into the Saturday Post, you sure stuck your necks out that time, feature article, you broadcast it to the world, you're right behind it. Why won't you go up to the Academy and talk? Well, briefly summarized, the consensus of their answer was this. In effect, they said, look, Bill, you may have got a quaint package composed of attitude, principle, action. You have a kind of accrued capacity. In religion, you might call it a confession. You know, that's kind of an analysis. You take your survey of your so-called character defects. Then you have a program or trying to get down these barriers that you put up between yourself and other people, particularly those you have damaged. You make restitution. This is great. Then you'll have this kind of giving of yours that demands no reward. Well, I could extend this list still further, but that was the idea. But they said this is the thing that to us is inexplicable. God knows of all people having worked without hope. we know the gravity of this obsession to destructive drinking. And if it weren't for the fact that drinking is socially acceptable, it would be rated among the world's number one disorders. This self-destruction by alcohol against the victim's will is interesting. Now then, making dual amounts for all the forces that we can see at work, we still can't account for the results you're getting. What you people of Congress all bring about is a re-motivation and outpour that may expel this obsession to drink in the matter of days, weeks, or even months. The change in direction is something that should have by any calculation taken you years, not weeks, days, or months. Therefore, we see and deeply feel that in this society there is an X-Factor. Some forces operated that we cannot describe. We can only postulate its presence. As surely as there, we can't explain it. So who would we be to go to the Academy of Medicine to explain the inexplicable? I suppose in your language that would be to explain God. Well, lots of other people have made similar observations. Of course, all of us realized sooner or later along our course that this is something more than just a society of people with a good work and a blood brotherhood and kinship and stuff like this. It's more than that. Every speaker has brought this down, and dramatized it. And you'll notice that their transforming experience was so often contingent upon the barracks we get. So now let's see if I can equate some of these other experiences with my own. Here comes Al. Al kind of comes in, I would gather from what he told me, sort of playing on this godbed. But anyway, he was going to have a look. And so he did. Al had much more than a look. He plunged in. Now, it must be that Al found here much more than a society of nice and sometimes not-so-nice people, an understanding crowd with a mission in life. Otherwise, why would he have gone to 22 meetings? Why, still taking his college course, was he going to 10 a week? Was there not, and will he not tell you, of course he will, that here was a Meg. One pole marked God might repel him a little, but the other whole of my love drew him on. And so he began to grow in spiritual stances without solving the theological riddle of which came first, the end or the end. And was his experience just not just a salad this month less spectacular you know the good book has that phrase by their fruit ye shall know you know speaking of that I'll remind you of a young quote the other day I looked out the office door and I said holy smoke what's that one doing in here and there was a gay little doll with a mini skirt about so long and I guess she had love beads on and she came you know to her wedding down the hall and I says gee what's this oh somebody said she's from the young people's group out in L.A. Boy, I said get her in there quick. I really didn't know what to expect. I've been trying so hard to understand you, you know. Well, maybe here will be a great chance. So, in she came and she sat herself down and this young lady was sure full of joy. She said, you know Bill that young people's group is just going great done. She says, I'm the oldest member and I'm 23. And then she handed me out a line of AA well it could make you cry for joy. It could make you know that if the young generation is to like that doll and ask, the future of AA is perfectly safe. And all this time it never occurred to me to ask the gal what she thought about God, or the spiritual life, or any of the old questions. Nor did I try to snore with my exalted spiritual experience. This time it was the other way around. I was taking some lessons for a change. So it has been in listening to F and this gap. And now comes Mary. Gee, that was a hard note. Oh, boy. Well, there were a lot of things Mary didn't say about herself. And what I'm going to say, I don't think she'll take it as praise. She will only say and that these are the gifts of A.A.'s grace to her. But since Merrick came in, as a lawyer still having a practice in Capricorn, a practice dealing extensively with families in trouble, wives and husbands in trouble. kids in trouble, I keep hearing about the lengths to which Mary will go far beyond her responsibility to bring peace and love into these situations. She's tired in this respect, in practicing the 12 steps in all her affairs, and this is amazing. Mary has done a great stint as a 12-step. She came down when our magazine was in trouble some years ago, and she worked on that for years. And then she became a trustee. She says rather mildly, however, that this didn't seem to impress her group at all, so pull her away to question the fruits of Mary's spiritual awakening. You know I'm constantly surrounded by people whose spiritual awakening might be questioned on a strictly theological basis, but one however so effective that they, well, is is just speak loudly for a second. Now, my mind goes back to Dr. Bond. You remember I had gallivanted around New York. I'd forgotten that book by Jimmie James said there were lots of kinds of religious experiences. I got in the habit of thinking there was only one kind, and that was this bright light job I had. I figured if you put it in deep into these drunks that, you know, they're hopeless, you'd fulfill one of James' conditions, today's thing, hopelessness. They'd hit bottom and boom, perhaps even ignited by me, they would go right up in a bright light. Nothing of the sort happened. For six months, drunks had run screaming away from it, while sticking around a little while, couldn't take it, and they got sued. So by the time I got to Akron on this business trip, I was getting a little deflated, as I should have been. And I was further deflated and alarmed when my first temptations to drink came, since the experience. Prior to the experience, my mind was just full of booze, booze was where it was, where the bottles were in the house, if I wasn't too drunk how full they were. And I have found that in the whole six months of my experience after it, I had never even looked on the shelf to see whether there was a bottle there in the house. I had ever thought of it. It was lifted bodily out of me. And that's some miracle and that's something different in my case. Well, so I was coming to the end of my preaching. And there is a person in this room who had a good deal to do with bringing that about. I wish time permitted me to say more in thanks to her friend, but this is a friend of the very early day of A.A., and her understanding, her friendship with Dr. Bob resulted in our our meeting and her influence on a subsequent was enduring the value beyond price i see our old friend henrietta sitting over here won't you stand up So Henry had brought me up to her house, and soon Dr. Bob and Ann were standing in the door. And she sci-fi'd Ann off into the living room and put Bob and me in the little library. And he wasn't going to stay a little while, and we talked for hours. Now this time I had got down to my right side. Now, this time I discovered a man of faith in spite of these things. I discovered the man who had more actual enlightenment, who prayed, who did all sorts of things that I didn't do much of, my experience notwithstanding. Here was a man of faith. Here was the man who had tried everything he knew, but he was still drunk. Now you notice in all the other cases I've tried it, nobody had any faith at all. And most of us got over drinking very quickly, or even the temptation used to. And yet here was Dr. Bond, black face, couldn't stop drinking. Well, I thought I wouldn't give this guy any lessons in faith, so I told him, quoting Dr. Silkworth, what an alcoholic is. And this was probably what made the difference. I just looked in the old AA book, the one Mary never got around to read, and Dr. Bob original as the first story in the story section. And when the preliminaries were done, he gets down to remembering my visit and he said, June 10th, 1935 was my last drink as I write nearly six years have passed, the question which might naturally come into your mind would be, what did Bill do or say that was different from what others had done and said? Now it must be remembered that I had read a great deal and talked to everybody who knew or thought they knew anything about the subject of alcoholism. But this was a man who had experienced many years of Christ for me, who had had nearly all Dr.'s experiences, known the man, but who had been cured by the very means I had been trying to employ. That is to say, in spiritual hope. He gave me information about the subject of alcoholism, which was undoubtedly helpful. Now an italics, the old boy liked to hear. Of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human being with whom I had ever talked who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he thought mindless. When Bob hit the bottom, his face took hold and he had an experience. But this was a gradual, imperceptible time. At another point in this story, he remarked that it was two and a half years after he sobered up before he ceased to want his drink. It was slow coming and, said he, the only insurance I could take out was trying to help of losing my life in their troubles instead of my own. Now we all know, and it should never be forgotten, that what Dr. Bob and that daring nun Mr. brought about in action between 1940 and 1950, in which they ministered to the needs of 5,000 alcoholics. A very large proportion of whom got well. So Dr. Bob did this, although in his case it was indefinite menace to his business. AA is no liability to the average MD, but believe me, it is to a surgeon, and that's what Bob wants. So this kept them on the edge of being both for years, because everybody, when Bob was proposed with surgery, says, gee, we're awful glad that guy is dry, but when 9 o'clock in the morning strikes and he puts a knife on me, he just might be drunk. Moral, he charged nothing for his medical work with these 5,000 cuts. Now then, it took something more than the desire to do a good work for a man to go to this place. It took something more in a spiritual sense to activate a person for ten years up to the time of his death in such fact this we know. And isn't it great that his awakening was of the slow variety, the imperceptible variety. And that it was also fine, and that as a result he and Ignatius lit 5,000 candles in the city of Athens, enough to fill this room twice over in Kenya. And how many descendants must there now be from those who made the grave? A good 60 percent. They can be found in all parts of the world and will multiply what, from generation unto generation. So the Japanese who are unavoidably sidetracked in getting over to the offices are people I still like to see, to give them the assurance If they need not fear evangelism here, they can believe in the God of their understanding. Whether God is he, she, or it, or cosmic force, or great humanity, the only requirement really for beginning the opening of this fourth dimension of experience is the willingness to admit utter deceit, returning to a higher power. The admission is certainly I am not God. When these things are done in the climate of our beloved fellowship, AA becomes possible to practically any of us. And this is the news that I think we have failed to broadcast. you stop to think about it. There are probably thousands upon tens of thousands of alcoholics in the world who could get well tonight and who were kept away by the impression that we are some sort of a cult, that theological demands will be made upon us, that we are do-gooders, that they can't be connected with anything where anybody talks about God. As you see on the record, this is not so. Cannot we better carry this message to the professionals in the field? And I hear them constantly say, from where they sit, well of course A.A. is just great. The biggest thing yet? Come along. But isn't it so bad that none but the religiously susceptible can benefit by it? Well, what about that guy who pointed out the right way? This doesn't sound like a lot of religious susceptibility, does it? Or this young squirt over here who can't charge. Or this hard-nosed dame. Or me, this rock-ribbed Ramon. Nothing was the only one in the whole bunch who had any faith who could be said on that basis to be religious. So, as we go home, let us ponder new and better means of carrying a message to all who suffer our politics. Let us not erect barriers of arrogance, spiritual arrogance being the worst of all. Let it so open, wide doors as I ask. As Mary said, how permissive it really is after you get in. But the people on the outside don't take that. So these candles will be passed We think from hand to hand, and from one generation to the next, for so long as God may need our beloved community. Thank you. good morning everybody we're ready to get our meeting underway and I would like to get started in the usual way by observing a moment of silence thank you Now I'll ask Cora Louise Belford to come forward and lead us in the serenity prayer. Hi everybody, I'm Cora Belford and a very grateful alcoholic, grateful for this weekend and to all of you for being here. And would you join me in saying the serenity prayer shall we all stand God grant me the serentity to accept the things I cannot change courage to change the things i can and wisdom to know the difference amen we have a few announcements as usual and I'd like to make those at this time. Remind, I'd like to remind all of you that there will be no picture taking at these sessions but that panoramic photograph will be available for purchase at the Fontainebleau and also in the lobby of Convention Hall out here. Also please no taping of meetings. All the meetings here and all of those at the hotel, with the exception of the workshop, have been taped, and these tapes are available at the Fontainebleau and here at Convention Hall. The orders can be placed. As you know, free bus service is available to and from Convention Hall here, from the major hotels. Schedules are available the information booth in the Fontainebleau and your convention badge is your admission ticket. There are still souvenir programs and pens available at the Fontainbleau, and best cartoons from The Grapevine, favorite editorials from the Al-Anon Forum. Both of these are also available at the Headquarters Hotel and here at Convention Hall. I've been asked to announce, to request Bill Cottrell from Hamilton, Ontario to please contact Hector at the Hotel Waldman. I believe that I was in error last night when I announced that the reception for the host committee would be from one to three this afternoon. That reception will be from three to five. I'm sorry for having given you the wrong information. Reception for the hosts committee at the Fontainebleau from three to five this afternoon just like to remind you that there is a lost and found department at the information booth of the Fontainbleau and also a message center there. I'm told that there are many messages on the message board there which have not been picked up, so you might just want to check that out. Now it's my pleasure to introduce to you our chairman for this meeting, Dr. Jack. Folks, we have a tremendous thrill. Our prayers have been answered. Bill is here and will be coming home. Oh, oh, oh Dear folks, there is always something new in one's AA life. And what do you think it is with me this morning? It is that I am absolutely speechless. That is almost absolutely speechless! I look out across this crowd, there floats back to me a mighty assurance, and this is a mighty insurance for A. H. Dushman, that indeed it will go on for so long as God wants us. The other thing I would like to set on the record is my tremendous gratitude at being able to be with you in this finest hour of our closing meeting. So I can only say, may God bless and keep you and Alcoholics Anonymous forever. © transcript Emily Beynon Thanks for watching!