The Experimental Approach to Finding a Higher Power – 1955 – Bill W.

Dear friends, it is needless for me to tell you that one cannot stand before a great gathering of this kind without being filled with the deepest and the finest emotion. All of us know that God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. Through the ages he has worked through divinely inspired men and women who have carried his message far and wide to various segments of the people of this great universe, that they may be inspired and that their problems may be solved. He sent to us among others St. Francis of Assisi, who at one time was obliged to beg for his living, and yet who later lavished his attention and his affection upon the poor, particularly upon the lowly despised lepers of his day. He sent to us David Livingston, a missionary, a man who took God as we understand him into the depths of darkest Africa. He He sent to us George Washington Carver, the noted Negro botanist and scientist, who at one time said, in the peanuts we find food and clothing and shelter and medicine as well. God, why did you make the peanuts? he answered his own question. Ye shall know, and your knowledge shall set you free. He sent us Joan of Arc, the maid of Arlene, heroine of France. Burned at the stake, she died with undaunted fortitude. And nearly five centuries later, she was beatified and subsequently canonized by Pope Benedict XV. He sent us Helen Keller, from whom he took away her eyes, that her soul might see a way to bring faith and hope and courage to all those who have no sight. On this beautiful Sunday morning, filled with sunshine and hope, it is a glorious privilege for all of us to gather together here, hand in hand and heart to heart, and give thanks and adoration to God that he sent us still, that through him he has seen fit to release us from bondage. Just as God gave the world Francis of Assisi Livingston, Carver, Joan of Arc Helen Keller and other great servants of mankind so in his wisdom and in his compassion he gave us Bill and Bill with his vision and his faith his love and his patience and his indomitable courage has shown us a way out of the wilderness. Shall we follow? It is with deep humility and with a sense of thanksgiving which words cannot express that I now turn this meeting over to Bill and with hearts full of love and undying gratitude we rise to salute him. We are assembled together here this morning to thank God, the Father of Light, for all those blessings he has bestowed upon us who have been the children of the night, who were issued from darkness into light among the greatest blessings that we can count are the friends of ag this great auditorium was presented to us for our use by this hot We want to give thanks for all that great work, and I think it is most important that all of us visitors record our love and gratitude for the hospitality that we have received. only at the hands of the people of this city, but of certain people in town. And I refer to our A.A. friends in this town who have done so much to make us feel at home. And I am thinking of some of those who have especially devoted themselves to this. I mention a couple So, I think we ought to have a standing vote of approval, let's say, for a couple of them. Say George and Louise will have done this job. George mentioned Francis of Assisi, and to me he is one of the greatest exemplars of that kind of giving that demands no reward. The giving that has no price tag on it. His is the perfect description of the twelfth step of Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh, if we could only relate ourselves to the world around us and to our families as we relate ourselves to the alcoholic we're trying to help. If the phone rings and somebody says, here's a job for you. Do you mind running over and seeing this suffering couple? At any time of the day or night, we go. And on arrival there, we find that the drunk is very obstinate. He says, I don't want any part of this. My wife got you there. Get the hell out. Do we feel robust? Do we feel rejected? No. Not at all. We give the wife what information we can, what comfort we can. We tell her to go to a family group meeting if there's one around. We show her how she can manage better. And without the least sense of rejection, we come away with a glow in our hearts then we are called to the next house and lo and behold the alcoholic is ready ah, says he you painted a picture of me yes, I am one of you so we take him to a meeting and there he finds a kindred spirit somebody else maybe we hardly see him again in the eagerness of his identification with this new fella he neglects us Arthur Lincoln to AA now saving his wife Do we feel rejected? No. We say, well, how he's getting along, how much 12-step work he does. Maybe he even declares that he doesn't like us. He confesses our sins. Are we affronted? No. We say we can get over that and maybe I have got some sins too. And then we go to the third house. and our friend comes in AA and that is the beginning of a lifelong companionship between this stranger and the one who made the visit well that friendship was the extra dividend of the kind of giving that demands no reward. We offer what we have and what comes back is the extra dividend. This afternoon you will see AA functioning as a worldwide entity with this same kind of giving, kind of giving that demands no personal reward. And yet the extra dividend of it, which so many of us found in this very place, is just beyond measure. But this art of giving is not all. There is something else to the AA life, something that I myself have sorely neglected. In the excitement and joy of this giving, and in receiving its rewards, I have too often forgotten that God has supplied me with these blessings. Therefore, this meeting very properly concerns itself with our relation to God. the giving we receive meat and drink and great sustenance. But what human being can live on meat and drinks alone? Must he not breathe, take in air, if he is to be a going human concern? Well, I like to think of the grace of God as the spiritual air that we breathe, if we will. And prayer and meditation is the means by which we do it. So we are devoting in this meeting, to breathing in the grace of God. How eloquently Jim's story tells us that we cannot live by meat and bread alone. how we must breathe the air of the spirit. In AA, practically all of us know someone with whom we have especially identified. In our jargon, we say, well, we've clicked with that chap. years ago in 1940 not long after the A book came out I was lying upstairs in the little clubhouse old 24th street it was a sleepy bitter night and up came old Tom our janitor who was now on the job and by the way being paid for it. Old Tom knocked at my door, I was lying on the bed suffering from one of my imaginary ulcer attacks and Tom says, Bill he says there's some damn bum from St. Louis down there. Do you want to see him? Oh, I said what not Tom tonight. Well, yes, Tom sent him up. I heard a slow labored step on the stairs and finally a figure appeared in my doorway. And his coat was drawn about him, and it was covered with sleep. And he wore a hat which looked something like a cabbage leaf, also covered with snow. And it was eleven o'clock at night, and he'd come there to see me. And when he threw back his coat, I saw he was a clergyman. He had been the one who had discovered the resemblance between A.A.'s steps and the Ignatian exercises of his Jesuit order. Ah, but far more than that. He proved to be one of the greatest examples of the grace of God that this society knows. And as we sat there and just joyfully chatted about this and that, somehow that room seemed to illuminate. You could feel the presence and almost see the light. Father Ed. Thank you. I forgot to bring my store keys, and so if I am not being understood, if you just wave a handkerchief, I'll try to do something about it. I asked my friend, a very recent vintage Dr. Shoemaker to say a prayer for me and for you during this talk, and he said God is with you. And I think you know what he meant, and it is reassuring. And, I think in the spirit of the 11th step through prayer and meditation, try to improve our conscious contact with God, may I suggest a few thoughts on the three words of our assignment, God, we and understand. And if you will listen with your heart, as I know you'll have during this whole meeting, rather than your ears, I think God will bless us. Man trying to understand God somehow reminds me of a definition of psychiatry, which I just heard a day or two ago. It is the id being examined by the odds. And I think that that could be our breakdown of topics. The is, the primary reservoir are of power. God. Examine could mean understand, and the odd is us. First of all, us. We are three things, I think. Alcoholic, alcoholic anonymous, and agnostic. Alcoholics, which means to me that we have the tremendous drive of fear, which is the beginning of wisdom. We have a tremendous drive or shame, which is the nearest thing to innocence. Sackville Mallon, honorable secretary of all Irish alcoholics of both islands likes to quote some author whose name I forget and all and he says and alcohol does no and alcohol does do more than Milton can to make straight the ways of God to man Alcoholics Anonymous not merely Alcoholics but Alcoholics Anonymous Bill spoke last night of the outside bouncer in Alcoholics Anonymous, John Bollinghart. But I've always felt that there's an inside bouncer who is crueler. And that is a corporate sneer for a phony. And whoever is not a phony. I think that in all groups you have the problem of people of link-side virtue, and that is a drive. Third qualification, I think we are agnostic. I believe there are three groups, qualitatively, in AA. First of all, they are the devout, who didn't seem to be able to apply their old-line religious truths. They were agnostic as to application. Then there are the rusty, the priest who passed the man in the ditch before the good Samaritan helped him a very good priest friend of mine who says I really think that the first thing we shall say when we get to heaven is my God it's all true I think all of us are rusty in some phases of either our substantive or applicational beliefs. And then there are the sincere, 18-carat agnostics who all have difficulty with that spiritual hurdle. The second word is understand. and I think as we move from an obscure and confused idea of God toward a more clear and distinct idea I think we should realize that our idea of god will always be lacking always to that degree unsatisfying because to understand and to comprehend god is to be equal to God. But it will grow. I'm sure that Bill sitting in that chair and Dr. Bob, whose angel is probably sitting on that oddly misplaced empty chair are growing in the knowledge of God. An old German saying is and it applies here Very few of us know how much we have to know in order to know how little we know. And I'm sure Dr. Bob and Bill would certify that. The approach to this understanding, first of all negative, and the first step as we examine ourselves, who was our latest God, is a fine approach to God. It was the approach of Peter the Apostle, Lord to whom shall we turn? I think we should realize that there is... I doubt if there's anybody in this hall who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness I don't think we should despise the negative and I know I have a feeling that if I ever should find myself in heaven I think it will be from backing away from hell now there At this point, heaven seems as boring as sobriety does to an alcoholic ten minutes before he quits. However, there are positive approaches, and the 12-step mentions one. I still weep that the senators of the movement have dropped the word experience for awakening. experience is one of the ways that's mentioned by the 12 steps and in the second step another way belief now experience can be two kinds sudden, passive insights like Bill's experience like the grapevine story of that Christmas Eve in Chicago those are all in the valid counter of Saul having that sudden, passive insight as he was struck from his horse on the road to Damascus. There are other types, probably dearer to God since they are commoner, And those are the routine, active observations of what? I am sober today. I am sore today. This meeting this morning, this convention this week, And as experience distills and condenses, it becomes suffering. The other night, Bernard Smith, chairman of the AAs, trustees, I get that hierarchy all mixed up, said something which to me was so good that I took it down. He said, the tragedy of our life is how deep must be our suffering before we learn the simple truths by which we can live. Sometime before Whitaker Chambers became a well-known character, in his sister publication, he was on time then, he wrote in Life an article called The Devil. And quoting Satan, Whittaker Chambers says this, here's Satan talking. And yet it is at this very point that man, that monstrous midget, still has the edge on the devil. He suffers. Not one man, however base, quite lacks the capacity for this specific suffering which is the seal of his divine commission. The second approach, which is mentioned in the second step, came to believe. I've known some of my Catholic friends who at that step said, well, I believe already, so I don't have to do any keeming. And in a great burst of kindness, they kept drinking to let the Protestants catch up with them. Belief is capitalizing on the experience of others, you see. Blessed are the lazy for they shall find their shortcuts. What others? Your sponsor. the AA experience of two decades on two continents. Newman says that the essence of belief is to look outside ourselves. Dr. Thiebaud seems to think that psychiatrically, the great problem is the turning of our affection from self outwardly. Faith is hard. as hard and as easy as sobriety and has been called the greatest of our undeveloped resources. What experience should we seek? What beliefs should we accept in our quest for God? The third word then would be God. Bill Early wrote a letter, I have it. in which he said, as far as how the alcoholic shall work out his dependence on God is none of A.A.'s business. Whether it's in this church or whether it's in a church or not in a church, whether it' s in that church or this church is none of A.'s business. In fact, he implied, I don't think it's any of the alcoholic, of the member's business. It's God's business, and the AA's business is charted in the 11 steps. Seek through meditation and prayer to find God's will and to seek the courage to follow it out. And not in the spirit of propaganda and abusing this opportunity, but rather to share what I have found to be God's Will Now, I'd like to offer some thoughts. I do believe that the problem which half of this room has had in attaining sobriety, I have had in attending belief and faith. Where do you start? Well, I believe there's something to be said about starting at the nearest manifestation of God. Where is God nearest to me? Does the fish soar to find the ocean? Does the eagle plunge to find air? that, we ask of the stars in motion, if they have rumor of thee out there, not where the wheeling systems darken and our benumbed conceiving thorns, the drift of angel pinions, would we hearken, beats at our own clay shuttered doors. Somewhere out in the swirling universe, light years beyond the reach of our strongest telescope, Halley's Comet is making its round. Some of us saw it in 1910. Some of you in this room will see it in 1986. Those are called the perihelions, the peri-helion. There's a point at which they are closest, Halley's is closest. And obviously to study Halley is common now is a waste of time. It must be done at 1910 or it must be down in 1986 when it's closest. Where is God's perihelion? Where is God's nearest? When is God nearest? Is God nearest? Life magazine, in this recent article on the great religions and the great leaders, mentioned of course all the significant beliefs available. Systematic belief. Moses, Muhammad, Buddha, none of them claimed divinity. None of them ever claimed that, for routine purposes, that God is visible on earth, save one. and that is the man who said he who seeth me seeth the father that's blasphemy a lie or the truth he said I am the father I'm one before Abraham was I am and even to escape crucifixion he wouldn't hedge on the accuser's indictment, who felt that he was guilty of blasphemy. And his answer was to the claim thou hast said it. Dostoevsky says that faith in the divinity of Christ is the Christian faith, pure and simple. And down the ages, that has been the central belief of his followers. Of all the light series of religions, the Christianity claims to present God at the closest perihelion. We know AA's 12 steps of man toward God. Now, may I suggest in God's twelve steps toward man, as Christianity appeals to me. The first step is described by St. John, the Incarnation. The Word was God and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. And he turned his life and his will over the care of man as he understood him. The second step, nine months later, closer to us in the circumstances of it, is the birth, the nativity. Third step, the next 30 years, the anonymous hidden life. Closer because it is so much like our own. the fourth step then three years of the public life closer to us because it met our cravings our aspirations his teaching, his example our Lord's Prayer the fifth step his emphasis in that public life was to people like ourselves sinners, winebibbers poor, skid row panhandlers. The six steps, the fifth step, I guess the sixth, bodily suffering, including thirst on cows. The sixth, the next step, soul suffering in Gethsemane. That's coming close. How well the alcoholics know and how well he knew humiliation and fear and loneliness and discouragement and futility. Finally, death, another step closer to us. And I think the pieta, where a dying God rests in the lap of a human mother, is as far down as divinity can come and probably the greatest height that humanity can reach. and down the ages he comes closer to us as head of a sort of a Christian's anonymous a mystical body laced together by his teachings whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me I can fill up what is walking in the sufferings of Christ I was in prison then you visited me I was sick I was hungry and you gave me to eat The next step, tenth, the Christian church which I believe is Christ here today. I think a great many sincere people feel, and they're in the room, they say, I like Christianity, but I... This is the inside one. Please turn your cassette over and continue to play on the other side. Thank you. But I don't like churchy elements. And I can understand that. I understand it's better than you do because I'm involved in churchianity and it bothers me too. But, actually, I think that sounds a little bit like, I do love good drinking water but I hate plumbing, see? Now, who likes plumbing, you see? And you have people who won't take AA, see. They like sobriety, but so-and-so they ain't. And then the 11th step are several great big inch pipes, lines, or sacraments of God's help. And the 12th step to me is the great pipeline or sacrament of communion. The world that was God became flesh and becomes our food, as close to us as the fruit juice and the toast and the coffee we had an hour ago. Oh, we know the story of alcoholics' fight from God and movement towards Him. Lord, give me sobriety, but not yet. Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief. I don't think there's an AA in this room who isn't worrying about one of those steps. And praise God, Lord let me make that step, but not yet. And I think the picture of A.A.'s quest for God, but especially God's loving chase for the A.D.A., was never put more beautifully than in what I think is one of the greatest lyrics and odes in the English language. written by a narcotic. And I think alcohol is a narcotics, so he might be able to make it. It's a poem called The Hound of Heaven that likens God to a hunting dog. Let me just pull off a few of the lines and I'll sit down. I fled him down the night and down the days. I fled them down the arches of the years. I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind, and in the midst of tears I hid from him. And under running laughter, up distant hopes I sped, and shot precipitated a down titantic gloom of torrents of fears from those strong feet that followed out. But, and here's his description of God, with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed and majestic instancy, they beat. And of Lord's feet, more instant than the feet, all things betray thee who betrayeth me. And I'll skip. Not shelter thee who will not shelter me. Lo, not content thee who contenteth not me. In the ranch, lusty hood of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours and pulled my life upon me. Grimed with smears, I stand amidst the dust of the mounded years. My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. My days have cracked and gone up in smoke, Have puffed and burst as sun starts on a stream. Now the long chase comes at last the end. That voice is around me like a sounding sea, bursting sea. And the voice says in conclusion, And is thy earth so hard, shattered in shards and shards? Lo, all things fly thee, but thou flieth me. strange, piteous, futile thing. Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I, God says, seeing none but me make much of naught, and human love means human meriting. How hast thou merited of all man's clay, clotted clay, the dingiest cloth? Alas, thou knowest not. How little worthy of any love thou art! Whom wilt thou find to love, ignoble thee? Save me, save only me. And this I find to soweth. All which I took from thee I did but take, not for thy harm, But just that thou might seek it in my arms, all which thy child's mistakes and his has lost, I have stored for thee at home. rise, clasp my hand and come. And the alcoholic or the non-alcoholic answers, hope by me that footfall is my gloom after all. Shade out his hands, outstretched corruptingly. And God's answer, all fondest, blindest, weakest. I am he whom thou seekest. Thou drovest love from thee who drovest me. Thank you. Dear friends, is it not as I have told you, there grows a man that we'd all like to be be liked. Now sitting just beyond him is another man that we'd all like to be like. I thought as I listened, how many thousands of hours have some of us in this room, including me, Spent in deriding the men of religion, and yet is it not true that they have taught us all we know are things spiritual? Isn't it true that compared with their examples, we're only a little way along the road? So, we have in AA a saying that principles ought to come before personalities. Well, it is through Sam that most of our principles have come. That is, he has been the connecting link for them. It is what Ebi learned from Sam and what Ebe told me that makes up the linkage between Sam, a man of religion, and ourselves. How well I remember that first day I caught sight of Sam. It was a Sunday service in his church. I was still rather gun-shy and diffident about churches. I can still see him standing there before the lectern, And Sam's utter honesty, his tremendous forthrightness, his almost terrible sincerity struck me deep. I shall never forget it. I introduce to you one of the great channels, one of great streams of influence that have gathered themselves together into what is now A.A., Sam Schumer. Whenever Bill gives me a chance to talk to AA's, he says things about me to other people in my hearing, which if I said them about him in the hearing of other people, he would say was bad for him. The rest of us come off on egotism just as much as any alcoholic does, and it's just as bad for us, I'm afraid to be flattered. I got well flattered the other day when I first got here. A gal that I had never met before said to me, Are you an alcoholic? And I said no. And she said, Well, you talk like one. Now, just to get this record straight, I have always felt that Bill gave me a great deal more credit for having anything to do with getting this amazing outfit started than I really should have been given. But Bill's protections are very deep, and as we have noticed in many of the meetings where he has spoken to us, his memories are very sharp. and so I just carefully accept these allegations of his because one of the most joyous things in my whole very joyous life has been the association that I've had with the people in AA. And I am deeply grateful for the privilege of being here with you for this tremendous occasion. Last autumn, at his 20th anniversary dinner, I first heard Bill give the story of the various strands which woven together have made the strong cable of AA. We all know by now that the first things that got into his mind as offering any real hope was talking with some men in whom there was the beginnings of a real religious experience. One of them is here now. They had begun to find this through the old Oxford Group in its earlier, and I think better days, and much of its work centered at that time in my old parish, Calvary on Gramercy Park in New York. I take it that began to be clear quite early in the movement's life that Dr. Young's simple declaration that science had no answer, and Dr. Silkworth's incalculable health from a medical angle, and William James' great wisdom in the varieties of religious experience still left the need for a spiritual factor that would create a kind of synthesis and offer a kind of positive dynamic. The problem was how to translate the spiritual experience into universal terms without letting it evaporate into mere ideals and generalities. And so immediately after step one, which concerned the unmanageableness of life, came step two. We came to believe in a power greater than ourselves that could restore us to sanity. The basis of that belief was not theoretical, it was evidential. Right before us were people in whose lives was the beginning of a spiritual transformation. You could question the interpretation of the experience, but you couldn't question the experience itself. In the third and fourth chapter of Acts is the story of the healing of a lame man by Peter and John. A lot of Ecclesiastics wanted to know how this came about. And the apostles told them that it was through the name of Christ that this man was healed. And it says, Now you can fight a theory about an experience, but you've got to acknowledge the experience itself. He has been, I think, supremely wise in emphasizing the reality of the experience and in acknowledging that it came from a higher power than human and leave the interpretation part pretty much at that. It would, I believe, have been easy and must have been something of a temptation to go into the theological business. Here the evidence was. It was evidence of spiritual power. All right, then let's define the power. But that would have run against several possible difficulties. If they had said more, some people would have wanted them to say a great deal more and define God in the way acceptable and convenient to themselves. It would already have taken two or three groups like this, defending from one another, to wreck their whole business. Or there were people with an unhappy association with religion. A dead church, or a dull apartment. Or some church-going people whose work weekday lives did not support their Sunday profession. And that would have added another factor to the overcomers if we didn't have enough already. Also, there are the agnostics and the atheists who either say they don't know anything at all about these ultimate realities in the universe or possibly that they just believe in God altogether. I would like to quote for those who believe themselves still to be without faith in God a wonderful word from the Roman Catholic Spanish philosopher Onomono who said those who deny God deny him because of their despair at not finding him. For an outfit like this to become dogmatic would have been fatal, I think. so they stopped through the inescapable experiences and turned people told people to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God as we understood him and that left the theory and the theology as Father Ed has just been saying to us important as they are to the churches to which people belong and if they belonged to no church and could hold no consistent theory then they had to give themselves to the God that they saw in other people. That's not a bad way to set in motion the beginnings, I think, of a spiritual experience. Maybe that's what we all do at the part where religion changes over for us from a mere tradition to a living power. Now, I believe in the psychological soundness of all this. Don't think that applies to alcoholics alone. I think that applies to everybody who is seeking genuine spiritual faith and experience. When one has done the best he can with intellectual reasoning, there yet comes a time for decision and for action. It may be a relatively simple decision, such as to enter fully into the experiment. I think the approach is much more like science than it is like philosophy. We don't so much try to reason it out in abstract logic. We choose a hypothesis, we act as if it were true and see whether it is. And if it's not, we discard it, and if it is, we are free to call the experiment a success. You can sit about in a vacuum, whether that be the privacy of your own room or an academic classroom, or indeed a pulpit and discuss the truth of a theory forever and it may do you no good. It's when you let truth go into action It's when you hurt your life after your held conception of truth that things start to happen. If it's genuine truth, it will, I believe, accomplish things on the plane of actual living. If God is what Christ said He is, He is more eager to help us than we are to be helped. He does not test us on man's freedom, and we can reject him and deny him and ignore him as long as we like. But when we open the door on a spiritual search, with our whole lives thrown into it, we shall find Him always there, ready to receive our feeblest approaches, Our most selfish and childish prayers Our always entirely unworthy selves And get out of business with us The experimental approach seems to me to be of the essence Of our finding the help of a higher power We first lean on another human being who seems to be finding the answer And then we lean on the higher power that stands behind him William James, in the famous passage in the Varieties of Religious Experience says this, The crisis of self-surrender is the throwing of our conscious selves on the mercy of powers which whatever they may be are more ideal than we are actually and make for our redemption. Self-surrendering has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning point of the religious life. That was almost a turning point in my thinking that time. Self-surrender has been always must be regarded as the vital turning point of the religious life. He goes on to say, one may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender. Now then of course becomes a heart of all real religions. Most of us come to God in in the first instance from a need. If you want to say so, we come selfishly. But I would like to point out that before we can possibly be of any use to anybody else, we must find the beginnings of our answer for ourselves, so that this may represent a necessary step in progress. The great hero incried today on the part of some people about those who seek benefits from God. I would like to know where in heaven's name a bewildered and deceiving person is going to go for the help he desperately needs if he doesn't go to God for it. Of course he's concerned about himself. He can't help it. He ought to be. He must be, if he is ever going to be made useful to other people. But later on, he must also grow up and stop just using God and begin to ask God to use him. Stop asking God to what he wants, and begin to try to find out what it is that God wants. Many a person tells you they've given up faith. They prayed for something they wanted and it didn't come, and neither there's no God or else He hasn't got any interest in them. What child is numb? How can anybody expect God to listen to their half-baked prayers None of us stand up to him. He'd have the word in the worst chaos than it is now in five minutes. Prayer is not telling God what we want. It's putting ourselves at his disposal so that he can tell us what he wants. Prayer is no longer a prayer. It's not trying to get God to change his will. It's trying to find out what his will is. To align ourselves or realign ourselves with his purpose for the world and for us. That's why it's so important for us to listen as well as talk when we pray. Why it's good to begin these meetings with silence. Now oftentimes, we come feverishly and willfully. And we've just got to quiet down before God can do anything for us. While our own voices are clamorous and demanding, there isn't any praise for the voice of God. when we let that willfulness cool out of us that's the thing most of us non-alcoholics get drunk on just willfulness just wanting life on our own terms and it is neurotic if any neuroticism in our world everybody that's away from God and trying to do his own will in defiance of God I say till our own clamorous demanding voices quiet down we can't hear the voice of God when we let that willfulness cool out of us God can get his will across to us as much as we need to see directly ahead of us and Andy said in his will is our peace not a lot of people don't like the weakness that is implied in that word surrender and I was deeply thankful to hear Dr. Tebow use that word and the medical doctor the other day also. These people like to think that they are strong characters who can take care of their own destinies. That is always sick teacher's thinking. Everybody in this world is some kind of a weakling. And if he thinks he is not, then pride is his weakness and that's the greatest weakness of all. People may think that they have overcome or never been overcome by the overtly disreputable sins, but who has avoided selfishness and self-centeredness and the love of adulation and the law of power and pride? I think that man is fortunate whose problems are such a kind as to get him into trouble so he's got to do something about them. Wouldn't it? Temper and pride and laziness and scornfulness and irritability and indifference to human trouble and that god-awful littleness, which is the worst thing about most of us in a day when everybody's meant to be bigger. Wouldn't those things drive us into difficulty? Or they're just as bad if anything could ever get you into difficulty. Nobody is strong, and the people who think they are strong are all themselves deceived. We act as if character and reasonably good behavior were the end of all existence. The real questions in life which underlie these matters of behavior are definitely of a religious nature. And they have only the religious answer, an answer that comes from God. Where did I come from? And what am I supposed to be doing here? And where do I go when I die? Those are questions that unanswered leave us really without direction, without without moorings, and actually without values. But science hasn't got any answer to those things. And philosophy only has the answers of good human guesses. Religious faith is the one temple in man's darkness, in the mystery of life. If Christ came down from heaven to represent God and seek for him, we have got an answer. The lesser revelations to prophets and seers are of the same nature but not of the authority as Father Ed has been suggesting to us. But all truly wise men begin with the acknowledgement of their finiteness, their darkness and their need. When we get through to God, by whatever name we call him, or rather when we let him get through through us, then we begin finding light and the answer. Now I think the great need of our time is for that worldwide spiritual awakening. There are many signs that it is upon us. Western man is gradually getting it through his head that he owes the greatest of all blessings, human blessing, the blessing of liberty to God and religion. When Benjamin Franchin was in Paris at the end of the 18th century, he took his son around one day to call on Voltaire. And as they were leaving, he asked Voltair to give the boy a blessing. Well, I can think of better people than Voltaire to ask for a blessing, but that's what he did. And Voltair put out his old boring hands on that boy's head and he said, God and liberty my son, remember those words. Those words are cognates. They are correlatives. There is an indistinguishable connection between the two things. And I think the gradual perception of that fact, as well as our personal insecurity, lies behind the greatly increased interest in religion that characterizes our time. Now, I believe there are four universal factors in all genuine spiritual awakening. And those four factors are conversion and prayer and fellowship and witness. By conversion, I mean the place where a person turns toward God. Where he begins to walk to be honest about himself in the light of his religion. I don't mean perfection, I mean the search for it and the stark positive. That thought is within the reach of us all, and that's the beginning. You know what a lot of religious people are like? They're like a lot OF people sitting around a railroad station thinking they're on a train. Everybody's talking about travel, and you hear the names of stations, and they've got tickets around them, and the smell of baggage, and there's a great kind of a stir. And if you sit there long enough, you almost think you're on the train. But you're not. Now, you start to get converted at the point where you get on the train and get pulled out of the station. When you get pulled up, you don't walk up. When I leave for Pittsburgh this afternoon, I won't be in Pittsburgh right away, but I'll be darn soon out of St. Louis. Now, I think it's important when you get on the train, nothing means you've got to go downstairs and there. Nothing means you're going to go downstairs and then you've just got to get up a little step and get in there. Now the second thing is prayer. And prayer, either private or group or public, is the place where we get in touch with God and God's power. God's Power is always there as there is always potential electricity in a wire that plugs into the socket that's in touch But you don't get the power because you close the circuit by turning the switch. There in ways to me are theoretically quite unfathomable, but all is open to us actually turns on the switch, opens up the power by closing the circuit. We don't so much... I've got a great need, David, that others have an answer in worship talks, jogging, and fellowship with one another. The church is not a museum, it's a hospital! That's why we all belong to it and why we should. Two old faggots went into the church one day and they got in just in time to hear the minister say We've let them down the things we ought to have done And we've done the things that we ought not to have And he nudged his towel and said, we're in the right place, alright? Get over the idea that because you go to church, you're good. You go to church to try to get in touch with God and let God redeem you, yet incidentally you're trying to get good by the grace of God not through all these tests. And then witness comes by life and by words. I think there are a lot of self-righteous people in the world who think they're being a tremendously good influence, but they're But this is much like everybody else in the world. There's not much edge, there's not much difference. You have plenty of spiritual experience has begun that changes us deeply on the inside. The chief characteristic of which I think is not that it makes us better but that it make us more humble and more conscious that we're not being good at all. Then I think people begin to get angry and they wonder what happened to us and they begin asking questions Then the time to open up by the witness of Word. We don't preach to other people, we don't talk down to them, God knows we don't pass through our source of answers, but we share the beginnings of a victory that we know. Every real believer shares in 12-step works. Every real believer wants to get his belief across to other people, and he will take the trouble to try to learn how to do it by light and by word. Now the paradox between those four points and your twelve steps are obvious to anybody. To me, A.V. is one of the great signs of spiritual awakening in our time. It is experimental and experiential nature, not dogmatic. But none can doubt that God is what has made AA today, what inspires it, what keeps it going, what is that perfectly intangible but absolutely unmistakable spirit that we have probably given again since we've been here in St. Louis. I'm thankful that the church has so widely associated itself with AA because I think AA people need the church for personal stabilization and growth, but also because I think the church needs AA as a continuous spur to greater aliveness and expectation in power. They are meant to complement and supplement each other. I believe that AA will go on serving men and women as long as it may be needed, is to keep open to God for inspiration, open to one another for fellowship, and open to people outside for service. I think he has been wise to confine his organized activities to alcoholics. But I hope and I believe that we may yet see a wide effect of AA on medicine, on psychiatry, on correction, on education, on the ever-present problem of human nature and what we shall do about it, and not least on the Church. Indirectly I believe that AA has derived its inspiration and its impetus, from the insights and the beliefs of the Church. Now perhaps the time has come for the Church to be rewritten and revitalized by the insights and practices found in AA. I don't know any theories of human endeavor in which the twelve steps are not applicable and helpful. I believe AA may yet have a much wider effects upon the world of our day, and contribute greatly to the spiritual reasoning which I believe is on the way, but which has come none too soon. For the world of our time is not sitting free. And so, on this occasion, when he turns a historic corner, when the leadership will soon fall upon a wider company than in the past, let give thanks to God for his goodness to us, for the way he has guided and prospered and used and enriched and developed this wonderful force in our time, and for all the promise that he holds out for uncounted thousands and perhaps millions in the future. God bless you forever. It is a commonplace of A.A. to say that our rivers do not drive back. by man-made. They lead by example. Surely we have been led this morning by magnificent examples, examples without which this society might never have been. And I think it is altogether is fitting. If it's my concluding part of this session, if I would read to you the prayer of one of the saints whose example is so near and so dear to us all. I say that because because he talks of pure love as we understand pure love. Lord, make me a channel of thy peace, that where there is hatred I may bring love, that where There is wrong I may Bring the spirit of forgiveness, That where there is discord I may bring harmony, that where there is error I may be true, that whether in doubt I may bring faith, that's where there's despair I may bring hope. That where are there are shadows I may bring thy light, that were there is sadness I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to the understood, to love then to be loved. For it is by giving that one receives. It is by self-forgiving that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven, and it is by dying that one awakes to eternal life. Thanks for watching!