Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Anonymous
all of A.A.’s members and their families and friends.
Who could render an account of all the miseries that had once been ours, and who could estimate the release and joy that these last years had brought to us? Who could possibly tell the vast consequences of what God’s work through A.A. had already set in motion? And who could penetrate the deeper mystery of our wholesale deliverance from slavery, a bondage to a most hopeless and fatal obsession which for centuries had possessed the minds and bodies of men and women like ourselves?
It may be possible to find explanations of spiritual experiences such as ours, but I have often tried to explain my own and have succeeded only in giving the story of it. I know the feeling it gave me and the results it has brought, but I realize I will never fully understand its deeper why and how.
We A.A.’s had tried out a radical and old-time formula, one rather out of fashion nowadays, and it had worked. “We admitted that we were powerless—that our lives had become unmanageable” and “we made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to God as we understood Him.” Every one of us who could make and fairly well maintain this humbling admission and sweeping decision had found relief from obsession and had begun to grow into a totally and wonderfully different mental, physical, and spiritual existence.
The thought of Dr. Foster Kennedy crossed my mind. Years ago this noted physician had asked if one of A.A.’s early friends of psychiatry would come to the New York Academy of Medicine to explain A.A. to its neurological section. Since several doctors publicly had endorsed us, some in the Saturday Evening Post article of 1941, I thought there would be no difficulty about this. But every one of these medical friends of ours rejected the unusual opportunity.
In substance, this was what they said: “In A.A. we see an unusual number of social and psychological forces working together on the alcoholic problem. Yet fully allowing for this new advantage, we still cannot explain the speed of the results. A.A. does in weeks or months what should take years. Not only does drinking stop abruptly but great changes in the alcoholic’s motivation follow in a few weeks or months. There is something at work in A.A. which we do not understand. We call this ‘the X factor.’ You people call it God. You can’t explain God and neither can we—especially at the New York Academy of Medicine.”
Such is the paradox of A.A. regeneration: strength arising out of complete defeat and weakness, the loss of one’s old life as a condition for finding a new one. But we of A.A. do not have to understand this paradox; we have only to be grateful for it.
My mother was there on the auditorium stage, she who had brought me into life fifty-nine years before and who had waited a long anxious time for a happy fulfillment to my failure-ridden years. Beside her was my wife Lois, the one who held steadfast when hope had gone, who had attended my second birth, and who in full partnership had shared with me the pains and joys of our exciting life for the past twenty years.
And there sat my sponsor Ebby, who had first brought the word that lifted me out of the alcoholic pit.13With the whole convention I rejoiced that he could be with us. And I thought of many nonalcoholic friends of the very early days. Without them there could have been no A.A. at all. They had set us wonderful examples of unselfish devotion. They were the prototypes of thousands of men and women of good will who have since helped make our society what it is.
One after another I looked at my friends and fellow workers in A.A.’s Headquarters—trustees, directors, staff members—whose dedicated labor had been given for years to perfect the structure that would now be given into the final keeping of our fellowship itself.
Among the crowd in the great Kiel hall I could see many an old-timer. This had been indeed a reunion of the veterans. They had carried the very first torches, and I could feel the deep kinship that will always be something very special among us. I remembered, too, how their ranks had already thinned, and I reflected that in a little more time all of us who had been pioneers of A.A. would belong to its past. Suddenly I was seized with a desire to turn the clock back. I felt a nostalgia for the old days blending strangely with my gratitude for the great day in which I was now living.
Bernard Smith,14our chairman, presently summoned me to speak. I recounted and relived the seventeen-year story of the building of A.A.’s World Service structure. This talk together with a full account of our subsequent proceedings on this historic day may be read farther on in this book.
The full attendance of thousands of A.A.’s at St. Louis, representing an accurate cross section of A.A. opinion, now sat in convention before us. On the auditorium stage was the Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous, about a hundred men and women who were the named and chosen representatives of the whole fellowship. The Conference, having completed the fifth year of its experimental period with a record of high success, was no longer an experiment. It was the instrument destined to become the heart of A.A.’s Third Legacy of Service and the whole of A.A.’s conscience, world-wide.
In the simple ceremony that followed, I offered a resolution to the effect that our society should now take its affairs into its own hands and that its Conference ought to become the permanent successor to the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Amid a roar of acclamation from the floor, the Convention carried that resolution. There was silence, and then we heard chairman Smith offer the resolution to the Conference for its confirmation. A simple show of hands expressed the consent of the Conference and marked the exact moment when A.A. came of age. It was four o’clock.
An address was then given by Bernard Smith. It had been his skill and devotion that had tipped the scales of opinion among A.A.’s Trustees—nearly all of whom had had grave doubts—in favor of proposing the Conference in the first place. And so we knew that this was as wonderful a day in Bern Smith’s life as it was in ours.
And now the history-making hours had almost run their course. It remained only for Lois and me to say brief words of farewell.
The Convention listened affectionately as Lois highlighted some of her memories of other days and gave thanks for the blessings that the years had brought to us and to her. To all present she was a symbol of what every family under the lash of Barleycorn had suffered, and she was also a symbol of what every united A.A. family has since found and has become. Lois made us all feel good clear through.
Standing before the Convention for the last time, I felt as all parents do when sons and daughters must begin to make their own decisions and live their own lives. No more would I act for, decide for, or protect Alcoholics Anonymous. I saw that well-meaning parents who cling to their authority and overstay their time can do much damage. We old-timers must never do this to the A.A. family. When in the future they might ask us, we would gladly help them in the pinches. But that would be all. This new relationship was indeed the central meaning of what had just taken place.
Like most parents at such an anxious time, I could not resist a few admonitions, which can be read in Part III of this book.
As I spoke I again felt the tug of that desire to set back the clock, and for a moment I dreaded the coming change as much as anyone. But this mood quickly passed, and I knew that all worrying concern as a parent was now at an end. The conscience of Alcoholics Anonymous as moved by the guidance of God could be depended upon to insure A.A.’s future. Clearly my job henceforth was to let go and let God. Alcoholics Anonymous was at last safe—even from me.
1 Father Dowling died in 1960.
2 Dr. Tiebout died in 1966.
3 See Appendix E:b for Dr. Tiebout’s papers.
4 See Appendix D, Lasker Award citation.
5 Rev. Sam Shoemaker died in 1963.
6 “Dr. Jack” Norris died in 1989.
7 These figures as of 1957. In 2009 there are over 1,500 groups in correctional facilities and more than 1,000 in treatment facilities in the U.S. and Canada.
8 Sister Ignatia died in 1966.
9 As of 1957.
10 Ruth Hock Crecelius died in 1986.
11 As of 2009, there are more than 116,800 groups worldwide