51. How AA began; a bit of spiritual history

By Tom O'Connell

It's the Holiday Season in 1934. But instead of experiencing comfort and joy, a successful Wall Street stockbroker named Bill Wilson is in the hospital once again, trying to overcome his chronic tendency to get drunk.                        

At the very time when he is rising to the heights of professional respectability and worldly success he is caught in a devastating physical and emotional plunge. His alcoholism is repeatedly rendering him powerless over his own behavior.

Bill Wilson is a desperate man. He is physically, mentally and spiritually ill. He is exhausted and confused. He is at the end of his rope, and is suicidal.

Dr. Silkworth at Towns Hospital once again tries to reach him about alcoholism being a legitimate illness, not a lack of willpower or a moral defect. But time after time that year, Wilson has been at Towns Hospital, and time after time he has relapsed into alcoholism following his discharge...now matter how persuasive the doctor has been.

This time he has been drinking steadily for a month, and is feeling deeply depressed and rebellious. He wants the sobriety his alcoholic friend Ebby has found through the Christian Oxford movement, but he is skeptical about receiving the kind of spiritual awakening his pal has experienced. Actually, he questions the very existence of God.

Slipping deeper into melancholy, he is filled with guilt and remorse. Now there seems to be nothing ahead of him but death or madness. He has reached a point of extreme deflation of the ego. He feels empty, alone, despondent. Finally he surrenders and shouts, "I'll do anything, anything at all!" In spite of his lack of faith and hope, he cries out, "If there be a God, let Him show Himself!"

The next event is electrifying, as he later reports. "Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light; I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy--I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, in the mind's eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right though me. Then came the blazing thought 'You are a free man.'"

A great peace steals over him, and he is conscious of a Presence. "I lay on the shores of a new world. 'This,' I thought, 'must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.'"

After this experience, he never again doubts the existence of God. And he never takes another drink. He is no longer a drunkard.

He commits himself to helping other drunks and goes on a crusade, with little success. Then, a few months later, he meets Dr. Bob Smith in Akron, helps Bob find sobriety, and on June 10, 1935, they pledge to work together to help other alcoholics. Now the miraculous 20th Century spiritual recovery movement known as Alcoholics Anonymous has begun.

Although AA began small, the power of mutual love kept attracting new members. And the movement spread throughout the U.S. and into other parts of the world. Now there are millions of AA members helping each other, and the example of AA has led to a virtually endless succession of 12 Step mutual help groups.

However, AA didn't invent the concept of healing oneself by helping others. The concept is as old as the human race, and is at the heart of Christianity and most other religions. Still, AA's power of example based on unconditional love has stimulated the formation of thousands of 12 Step recovery groups, and led to the formation of countless other groups that have no connection with AA at all.

All of these groups are dedicated to the healing found in mutual help, and now the power of such groups has been accepted by modern medicine as an important healing tool.

It's interesting to think that the birth of this important spiritual movement was stimulated by one man's spiritual awakening during the Holiday Season of 1934, and the movement's  forward momentum was enhanced when two drunks got together on June 10, 1935, and shared the gift of sobriety.

The formation of AA reminds me of a saying spread by the Christophers: "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness."

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