The X Factor and the Grace of Higher Power – 1967 – Bill W.

Well I like the informal discussion type of approach. It seemed to me that on occasion like this questions are something of infinitely more value than a lecture or a story, but Rip suggested that I make some remarks here tonight and I'm only too glad to do that. And coming down on the plane, I got speculating with myself about the early days of AA and about the meaning of them in terms of the grace of God. I've read somewhere that if a grain of wheat, which has been stored for centuries in a dry place, is exposed to the right soil, and the right climate, and to enough light from above. It will manifest life, and it will unfold, and it will grow. But this presupposes the right soil, the right climate, and above all, enough light. Well, I think it's that way with AA. I remember years back when we first began to get publicity. And the first very large occasion was a feature piece done in the Saturday Evening Post, which all at once produced us about 6,000 members. This was in 41, and by then, a number of medics had become close friends, some of them psychiatrists. And these fellows allowed their names to be used, a rather audacious step in those days, I assure you. Their names were used in the Post article. I make this point because when later asked to testify on another occasion, they refused to do it. And these were the circumstances. The first gal that got sober in AA is one known to many of you as Marty, still very much of a growing concern in the education field. Marty was the most difficult case. God knows we're all complex, but Marty was really a champ. And she had been under the care of a Dr. Foster Kennedy, a man of very wide repute in that time, worldwide renown, a neurologist. And he watched Marty as she was planted in the new soil. Well, he watched her receive this light. Well, he was tremendously impressed. He came to some meetings and soon he said to me, Bill, would it be possible to have two or three of the psychiatrists in institutions who have seen recoveries of very grim cases, people that you say are friends with yours and who have testified for you in the post-pace. Couldn't we get a group of this sort to come to the Academy of Medicine and explain what they have seen. Well, we thought this was just great because in those days there were a few friends indeed. So showing by these people by reason of Dr. Kennedy, well, what could be better? So one by one we went to them and we said, would they come to the academy? And we supposed they would. After all, some of the Kennedy glory could brush off them. You know, they were friends anyhow, and they'd proved it, so why not? And not a one would do it. And when pressed for their reasons for not doing it, each one of them separately said the same thing. In effect, each said, look, Bill, you folks have added up in one column more of the resources which has been separately applied to alcoholics than anyone else. For example, you have this kinship and suffering. you have possibilities of communication that others don't have you have a crude form of self-examination or analysis and of catharsis you have a great new outgoing interest you reduce guilt by restitution and you have this great compelling interest in helping others. And then there is a religious factor, and then there isthis factor of the hopelessness, so far as the resources of the individual are concerned, of this malady. Now, this is a formidable list of forces, but we still can't come to the academy. Well, why not? Well, said they, we see in AA sometimes in weeks, in a few months, shifts in motivation even the sum of these forces couldn't begin to account for because we all too well understand the difficulties of this problem, this subtle compulsion. And the sum won't add up to the speed of these transformations in these very grim cases. So for us, there is an unknown factor at work in AA, and among ourselves, being scientists, we call it the X Factor. We believe you people call it The Grace of God. who shall go to the academy to explain the grace of God to that body? No one can, and we simply aren't going. So I think it is just as futile as ever for any of us to presume to explain this matter of grace around which our entire galaxy of principles and activities gathers and clusters. We can't do that, but we can examine this matter absorbed and this matter applied and this matter of illumination which for some reason or other we have made ourselves ready clearly God's grace is in control so it might be said why Why haven't alcoholics sobered, many times more often, through grace than they have? It's available. Why hasn't religion been more successful, numerically at least? Why hasn' t medicine been more succesful? How is it that laymen seem to be doing this thing? So I would like to tell a story depicting, at least as it seems to me, what the soil is, what the climate is, and what the light is, these things of which we have been placed in such treasured possession. There is no doubt that in an ordinary sense of time, They began in the office of a psychiatrist. And we might be mindful of this when we criticize people in this profession. Of course, for most of us, the origin is 2,000 years old. For some of us perhaps older. but I'm speaking of the situation in an immediate sense. How was it precipitated? This too is a matter of conjecture but here's how it seems to me. There was a certain businessman of great attainment he's cut down by the grog he runs the gamut of treatments in this country and this would be in the year about 1932 when he was just about at the end of his tether so he went abroad and became a patient of Dr. Carl Jung and as all of you know Jung was one of the founding fathers of the art, I prefer that instead of science, of psychiatry. And you, Adler, Freud, were the three founding fathers. But of these, only you seem to think that man is something more than two dollars' worth of chemicals a bundle of instincts, and an uncertain intellect. Jung saw man had something beyond this that man has solved. So, our traveler had found a truly great human being, great indeed as events fell out. He placed himself under that dear man's tutelage for a whole year. more and more confident that the hidden springs of this baleful compulsion to drink were being understood and removed and cast away, he began to feel more free. There was no drinking while he was under treatment. At the end of a year, he left Carl Jung and in one month he was tight. And the bender was terrific. So, in infinite despair, he came back to Carl Jung and said, Is there anything now for me? You were my court of last resort. And this great man said, Roland, I thought for a time after you first came that you might be one of those rare cases in which my art has been helpful. Otherwise, I should not have encouraged you to stay. But alas, I am obliged to conclude that you are not, and that there is nothing that I have to offer you. Now, my art has failed you. I need not say that coming from a man of his eminence, this was a statement of beautiful humility. And the whole destiny of A.A., you and me, and all of us, has since hung on that sentence. So then Hazard found that agony was added to this figure. And he cried out, but is there nothing else? And this was the answer he got. Rowan, time out of mind, alcoholics have recovered here and there, now and then, through religious experiences, spiritual experiences, let us say, or very truly through conversion. A naughty word for us A's. We don't use it for obvious reasons. But, said the doctor, this benign lightning seldom strikes. And no one can say where or when it will, or for the resuscitation of whom. So I simply would advise you to place yourself in a religious atmosphere, remembering the hopelessness of your doing anything about it on your own remaining resources alone and cooperating with your associates and casting yourself upon whatever God their name be. So Rowan aligned himself with the Oxford groups of that time, a rather evangelical movement, rather aggressive, very easy it is to criticize. It was non-denominational however, and it used simple common denominators of religions. Simple moral principles. It called upon its members to admit that they could not solve the life problem on their own. it called upon them for self-examination it called upon them for restitution it called upon them for a kind of giving in the Franciscan manner the kind of giving that demands no return in money power, prestige, and the like. The losing of oneself in the lives of others. Such was the nature of the crowd with which he became associated. Unaccountably to him, the obsession to drink left. And for some years, he had no more trouble. At the time in the groups there were a few alcoholics sober. There is one now at Ann Arbor that goes back to that time. An old friend who never became an AA. Sobered up in the oxygen booths. So Roland returned to America, and the groups here in those days were headed by an Episcopal clergyman called Sam Schumacher. And in his congregation and among the groups were two or three other alcoholics that for the nonce were stained glass. And Hazard had a summer place near Bank in Vermont, and these friends, one of them son of the local judge, and himself an alcoholic, described the plight of a boy who was a school time chum among. Ebby Thatcher and Ebby had been deteriorating horribly. There were summer folks in the town above Manchester. Ebby had run his car into the side of a farmer's house, pushed the wall of the kitchen in. The door would still be open to the car Abbie stuck his head out and to the poor woman cowering in the corner who hadn't been hit, he said, hey, what about a cup of coffee? Well, the town fathers had had it. They were going to commit Abbie for alcoholic insanity. So the judge's son, Hazard, picked up the man who was to become my sponsor. Meanwhile, I had gone the route with which you're all familiar. I had sobered up the summer before, scared to death by the verdict of my doctor, Dr. Silkwood, the one we have since named the little doctor who loved drugs and he mustered them because in his lifetime he dealt with some 40,000 of them as a hack doctor in a drying out place. And he had an idea that this thing was an illness, having several components. A spiritual illness, a moral illness, and also a physical illness. perhaps oversimplifying, he was apt to describe an alcoholic as a person condemned by a compulsion to drink against his own interests, to drink in spite of his perfect willingness to stop and that this drinking was coupled to an increasing sensitivity to the body which if the drinking went on guaranteed his insanity and one day his death. So this sort of a sentence had been spoken to Lois at long last by my doctor, Dr. Silverford. So, you see, the saw was under preparation. we were beginning to learn a little more about climate. Abby and my other friend Roland had received a considerable amount of light. Well, I got drunk in about two months even in spite of this sentence that I would have to be locked up or go nuts, maybe within a year. And then my friend Ebby, who had been brought to New York and Vermont, who had unaccountably sobered up for the time being in the Oxford Group, came to visit me when I too was in great despair. despair is a primary ingredient, indeed, of this thought. In the medical jargon, we might call it deflation at death, some deflation, huh? So, Ebi came to see me. And he pitched at me this list of moral, you might say, clichés, nothing so new about that. I was in favor of honesty, I was in favor helping other people, I was in favour of practically everything he had to say except one thing, I was not in favor for God. For I had received one of these magnificent modeled modern schoolings, scientific schoolings that assured me that by a series of stages picking up informants from somewhere as they went along I could be traced back to a single piece of ooze in prehistoric seas. And this Science was my faith, and science was my gut. So along comes Abby, and along comes you, for whom I had respect, and here was my doctor. can't do it. Medicine can't do it, psychology can't do it religion sometimes that was the story but how could I buy religion so I felt trapped in other words I was gripped in the trap which we everyday construct for the drunk who approaches us, saying, well, I think the group lives must be great, helping other people on board, but I couldn't get the spiritual angle as our jargon says. Now, as you know, this gentleman is a newcomer, like me, is being caught in this trap. When you and I talk to another alcoholic and we identify ourselves as having been denizens of this strange world and having emerged, and we describe this melody in the terms of our God's science, and that God pronounces a sense of hopelessness upon us, a sentence. We are deflated at depth. And then we learn that now we have accepted our personal hopelessness. There still isn't any hope because we cannot go to the God-bidden. And this was the awful dilemma into which I was cast by my friend Ebby, bringing on the one side all of this bad news, but on the other side the spectacle of his own release. And that was the word he used. He didn't say he was on the waterway. obsession had just left him, as soon as he became willing to try on the basis of these principles. And indeed, as he seemed to become willing to appeal to whatever god there might and this was reducing the theological requirements an awful lot. Well, I went on drinking about three weeks and in no waking hour could I forget the face of my friend a spectacle of release as I looked out through a haze of gin into his face as he pitched this synthesis at me. I looked out through a haze of gin into his face as he pitched this synthesis at me. So I thought, well, I'd better go up to the hospital and get sobered up. A conversion experience is not for me. I'm an obstinate Vermonter. Besides, I can't buy it. People say to me, have faith, and I believe I'd have faith if I could have it, but I can. But anyhow, I'll go and get dried up. So I went to the hospital. I must have had a little optimism because I came in with a bag of beer. I tried to share it on the subway up. I was waving a bottle. There little Dr. Silkworth came out, and I yelled at him this time, Doc, I got it. He said, I'm afraid you have, Bill. You better get upstairs and go to bed. And he looked very sad. For he loved me. So I went upstairs and went to bed. I was there a while ahead of the DTs, so in about three days I was all in the clear. But the more sober I got, the more awful the despair, the depression. So I think it was the morning of the third or the fourth day that my friend Abbie showed up in the doorway and my feeling was ambivalent at once so I said well this is the time he's go to pour on the evangelist and on the other hand I was saying well he should be looking for a job why is he up there at 11 o'clock in the morning see me he does practice what he preaches so Ebby knew my prejudices, and so he waited for me to ask him again for that neat little formula through which he had achieved relief. And dutifully he went through it. You got honest with yourself, with another person in confidence you made restitution. You helped others and you prayed to God as you understood it. I think he might have even used that phrase. And without much more ado, he was gone. No pressure. And again I couldn't have trucked to God. And again the despair deepened until the last of this prideful absence seat momentarily was apparently crushed out. And then like a child crying out in the dark, I said if there is a father, if there isn't God, will he show himself? And the place lit up in a great glare of wondrous white light And then I began to have images in the mind's eye, so to speak. And one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain, and a great clean wind was blowing. And this blowing at first went around, and then it seemed to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled, and I found myself exclaiming, I am a free man, so this is the God of the preacher. And little by little the ecstasy subsided, and I found myself in a new world of consciousness. And one of the early reflections in this world of great peace which stole over me was that all is well with God. I am a part of his cosmos at play. Even evil in his hands can be transmitted into good. So I had been deflated at depths by a fellow sophomore who used the scientific verdict to deflate me, who used his ability to communicate me through our kinship of common suffering, And who made the example of a person who practiced what he preached? So then, for me, here indeed was the soft. Here was the fun. And God knows the light is great. Now, I venture this assertion of AA has a spiritual awakening or experience of exactly this character. Certainly it is not for me to differ with theologians, but let me say I prefer to think there is no essential difference between what happened to me and what happens to each sound A.A., excepting the time limit. Going back to those psychiatrists who said we can't understand this tremendous shift in motivation despite all your resources. Well, in my case, the shifts but the fruits have been the same and one of the most terrible compulsions and obsessions known has been expelled from us almost wholesale through this happy synthesis of medicine religion and our own experience in suffering, in recovery, and sharing the grace of this one with the next. So, fellas, there's my speech. I know there'll be some questions, Bill. So if you have any final issues, Well, you've got the chance. What's the matter with him? I don't know. We'll just figure it out. There must be something you might want to know about whether Bill has touched on it or not. Will, is that light relative in the sense of what illumination must be? Not every one of us has gone through the experience of ecstasy or any light shining or, you know. Okay. Maybe, you now, this is a curbstone opinion. But here's how I look at it. You go to AA meetings and somebody gets up. And this happens time after time, and he says, Now, folks, I ain't got the spiritual angle yet. I'm making the group my higher power. They're sober, and I wasn't. So I got a higher power, but I ainít got the spiritual angle the way you fellas did. And as for Bill's thing, well, he looks sane in other respects, but, you know. uh now this guy will get up there and tell a story of losing this compulsion and if it's being cleared out of them and it's being remoted motivated in many other ways just like those psychiatrists said in a matter of months or six months or a year. Now, just take one of those fellows and try to imagine all of those shifts in motivation taking place within six months or within six minutes instead of six months. I think had this happened to that fellow, he too would have had ecstasy. So I think it's a time element I personally see no great advantage in these tremendous experiences, save in my case only one. It did give me an instant conviction of the presence of God, which has never left me from that moment, in spite of the worst I can do, and it's often been damn bad, and no matter what the pressure. And I feel that that extra dividend may have made the difference whether I would have persisted with AA in the early years or not. actually it has some liabilities, and I've seen it in others who have had these experiences in the A.A., and there are quite a lot. And this is the tendency, and i think you feel of give us some excuse for it too, of beginning to think that because we have these tremendous illuminations, that we are something special. so you begin to develop a kind of a paranoia alongside of a perfectly valid experience and this is just what happened to me I damn near botched up the whole world by coming out of this working furiously with drugs and before anybody had been sobered up I got so far off base as to loudly declare one time to an audience by no means spellbound that I was going to sober up all the goddamn drunks in the world. Now, that is pure paranoia, if you will. So, don't long for the illumination I think you're asked to have the experience that's appropriate well some people do and oh my god if I could only have one like Bill now actually this is maybe said very sincerely because this may be guys slipping around but he may be slipping around on account of the fact that he's a little skitsy and needs some of them vitamin B3 so now we're put on Hawkins.