13. Wisdom from AA's Bill Wilson worth pondering

By Tom O'Connell

The wisdom produced by AA's co-founder Bill Wilson is worth pondering. He was by no means perfect, but he was real. Nor was he addiction-free. His compulsive cigarette smoking eventually killed him. Also, he was plagued by deep depressions, both before and after sobriety. Yet he did not permit his afflictions to deaden his wisdom. So I enjoy revisiting his written words, of which there are many.

He knew much about the subject of pain and wrote, "Years ago I used to commiserate with all people who suffered. Now I commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who do not understand the purpose and ultimate utility of pain."

Realizing that pain was useful and not evil, Wilson linked pain with spiritual progress, as has been done throughout the centuries by those advanced spirits who are more concerned with the soul than the body.

"Someone once remarked that pain is the touchstone of spiritual progress," he wrote. "How heartily we AA's can agree with him, for we know that the pains of alcoholism had to come before sobriety, and emotional turmoil before serenity."

I don't believe it's an idle coincidence that in AA's 11th Step, which urges people to pray and meditate their way to a higher level of conscious contact with God, the words of St. Francis of Assisi are featured: "Lord, make me a channel of your peace..."

Wilson writes that although this saint "was not an alcoholic he did, like us, go through the emotional wringer." And he "came out the other side of that painful experience." Francis had large doses of painful experience, and lived through great physical agonies before he died. But Francis turned the pain around and used it to bring himself closer to God. This is what the Twelve Steps do for those who are willing to yield their inflated egos in favor of humility, and who then adopt the slogan, "No pain, no gain."

Alcoholics are troubled people. And even in recovery they experience deep emotional, and sometimes physical, pain. Wilson has this to say about it: "Selfishness--self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles." And he states that this selfishness that leads to trouble stems from "a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity."

If that's the case, and if the goal of sobriety is "emotional balance," as Wilson emphasized repeatedly, is it enough for an alcoholic to just stop drinking? Of course not, because the old destructive mental and emotional habits will continue unabated.

Have you lived with a person who has reluctantly given up a bad habit? They're impossible! The trick is to move to another level of responsibility that brings a transformation, a change of character, a change of direction.

"We had to quit playing God. It didn't work," Wilson wrote. So what was the alternative? The recovering person needed to agree that "hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our director....He is the Father, and we are His children." And that's it? "Most good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom."

From this, would you agree that the solution to alcoholism is spiritual, even though there are physical, mental, emotional and social implications? The founders of AA knew this. They had tried every other solution, and only the spiritual one worked for them.

If Wilson and his pals were alive today they would still insist that there's more to recovering from alcoholism than dealing with some gene that's gone haywire. And they would question the idea that alcoholism can be cured by finding new pills to sidetrack the destructive habits arising from parts of the anatomy that tend to enjoy primitive things.

It's an amazing shift when alcoholics decide to stop a lifestyle in which they have chosen anesthesia to avoid the pain of personal growth. And one amazing part of the journey is the new willingness to endure pain instead of running from it.

As Wilson points out, with his own positive spin, "We of AA obey spiritual principles, at first because we must, then because we ought to, and ultimately because we love the kind of life such obedience brings."

Then he caps his words of inspiration with this statement: "Great suffering and great love are AA's disciplinarians; we need no others." Enough said, for now.

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