The Spiritual Angle of A.A.

The Spiritual Angle of AA

Volume 12 Issue 5October 1955
IT was clear to Bill from the first, I take it, that Dr. Jung's simple declaration that science knew no answer, and Dr. Silk worth's incalculable help from the medical angle, and William James' great wisdom in "Varieties of Religious Experience" still left the great need for a spiritual factor which would create a synthesis and offer a dynamic motive to sobriety. 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 as some of us had been living it, came Step Two: we "came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." The basis of this belief was not theoretical, it was evidential. Before us were people in whose lives the beginnings of a transformation had taken place. You could question the interpretation of the experience, but you could not question the transformation itself. In Acts 3 and 4 is the story of the healing of a lame man by Peter and John. A lot of the ecclesiastics wanted to know how it came about. The apostles told them it was through the name of Christ that the man was healed. And it says, "And beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it." You can fight a theory about an experience, but you have to acknowledge the experience itself.
AA has been supremely wise to emphasize the reality of the experience, and to acknowledge that it came from a Higher Power than human, and then leave it at that.
It would 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 a Power. All right: then let's define the Power! But this would have struck against several possible difficulties. If they had said more, some people would have wanted them to say much more, and define God in the way most acceptable to them. It would only have taken two or three groups like this, dissenting from one another, to wreck the whole thing.
Moreover, there were people with an unhappy association with religion--a dead church or parson, some church-going people whose weekday lives did not support their Sunday professions; and this would have added a factor to be overcome in addition to those already present. Also there are the agnostics and atheists, who say they either do not know anything at all about ultimate realities in the universe; or else definitely disbelieve in any definable or reachable god. There are a good many people who disbelieve in God for emotional reasons. As Unamuno says, "those who deny God deny Him because of their despair at not finding Him."
For an outfit like AA to become dogmatic would have been fatal. So the founders stuck to the inescapable experience, and told people to "turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him." That left the theory and the theology--very important as they are--to the churches to which people belonged. And if they belonged to no church, and could as yet hold no theory, then they must give themselves to the God they saw in other people. This is not a bad way to set in motion a spiritual experiment and the beginnings of a spiritual experience. Maybe it is what we all do when we let religion change over from a mere tradition to a living power.
I want to emphasize the psychological soundness of all this. Do not think it applies to alcoholics alone; it applies to everyone who is seeking genuine spiritual faith and experience. When one has done the best he can with the intellectual reasoning, there yet comes a time for decision and action. It may be a relatively simple decision: really to enter wholly into the experiment. The approach is more like science than like philosophy. We do not so much try to reason it out in abstract logic: we choose a hypothesis, act as if it were true, and see whether it is. If it's not, we can discard it. If it is, we are free to call the experiment a success.
You can sit about in a vacuum--whether this be the privacy of your room, or an academic classroom, or a pulpit--and discuss the truth of a theory forever, and it may do you no good. It is when you let truth go into action, and hurl your life after your held conception of truth, that things start to happen. If it is genuine truth, it will accomplish things on the plane of actual living. If God is what Christ said He is, then He is more eager to help us than we are to be helped. He does not trespass 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 down to business with us.
The experimental approach seems to me to be of the essence of our finding the help of the Higher Power. We first lean on another human being who seems to be finding the answer. Then we come to lean on the Higher Power who stands behind him. William James, in the famous passage from "Varieties of Religious Experience," says "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-surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning point of the religious life. . . . One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self-surrender."
This, of course, becomes the heart of all religion. Most of us come to God in the first instance from a need. If you want to say so, we come selfishly; but I would point out that, before we can be of any use to anybody else, we must find the beginnings of the answer for ourselves, so that this may represent a necessary step in progress.
There is a great hue and cry today about people seeking benefits from God. I'd like to know where, in Heaven's name, a bewildered and defeated person is to go for the help he desperately needs, if he doesn't go to God! Of course he is concerned about himself--he ought to be--he must be, if he is ever to be made useful to others. But later on he must also grow-up, stop just using God, and ask God to use him.
One begins a mature religion at the point where he stops trying to get God to do what he wants, and begins asking God to show him what He wants.
Many people will tell you they have given up faith: they prayed for something they wanted, and it did not come--so either there is no God, or else He is not interested in them.
What childish nonsense! How can you expect God to listen to every selfish half-baked prayer we send up to Him; He'd have the world in worse chaos than it is, in five minutes! Prayer is not telling God what we want, it is putting ourselves at His disposal so that He can tell us what He wants. Prayer is not meant to try to change the will of God, it is meant to find the will of God, to align or realign ourselves with His purposes for His world and for us. That is why it is at least as important for us to listen as to speak in prayer.
Oftentimes we come to Him feverishly and wilfully, and we just have to quiet down before He can do anything for us. When our voices are clamorous and demanding, there is no place for His voice. When we let the wilfulness cool out of us, He can begin to get His will across to us. And, as Dante said, "In His will is our peace."
There are many people who do not like the implication of weakness in the word "surrender." They like to think they are strong characters who can take care of their own destinies. This is fictitious thinking. Everyone in this world is some kind of a weakling; and if he thinks he is not, then pride is his weakness, and it is the greatest weakness of all. People may think they avoid the overtly disreputable sins; none of us avoids the folly of selfishness, of self-centeredness, or pride. That man is fortunate whose problems are of such a kind that they get him into trouble, and he has to do something about them. Would that temper and pride and laziness and scornfulness and irritability and greed brought people to the same state of conscious need as alcoholism does! No one is strong, and the people who think they are only self-deceived. We act as if character and reasonably good behavior were the end and aim of existence.
The real questions in life, which underlie matters of behavior, are definitely of a religious nature and can have only a religious answer, an answer that comes from God, Whence came I? What am I meant to be doing here? Whither am I going? These are the questions that, unanswered, leave us without direction or moorings. But science has no answer to them, and philosophy only the answers of a human guess. Religious faith is the one candle in the darkness of life's mystery. If Christ came down from God to represent Him and speak for Him, then we have an answer. The lesser revelations to prophets and seers are of the same nature, but not of the same authority, judged (if you will) simply by the size of their effects in human history. All these truly wise men seem to begin with the acknowledgment 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 to us, then we begin finding light and the answer.
The great need of our world and of our time is for a vast, world-wide 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 human blessings--the blessing of liberty--to God and religion.
There are four factors, it seems to me, in all genuine spiritual awakening: conversion, prayer, fellowship and witness.
By conversion I mean the place where one turns towards God, where one begins to want to be honest about oneself in the light of one's religion. I do not mean perfection, I mean the search for it and the start towards it. It is within the reach of all, and it is the beginning. A lot of religious people are like a crowd sitting in a railway station, thinking they are travelling. They hear the names of trains and stations, there is the smell of luggage and the stir of travel. But they have never gotten on the train. Conversion is where you get on the train. You leave St. Louis for Chicago, and you are not in Chicago right away; but you are soon out of St. Louis for Chicago, and you are really on the train. Conversion is getting on the train and beginning to move away from where you were.
Prayer--private, group or public--is the place where we get in touch anew with God and His power. God's power is always there, as there is always potential electricity in a wire plugged into a socket that is in touch with a dynamo. But you do not get the power till you close the circuit by turning the switch. Prayer, in ways unfathomable to us theoretically, but always open to us actually, turns on the switch, opens up the power by closing the circuit. We do not so much "get what we want" as find out what we should do. Awakening, in the individual, or in companies, or in nations always includes discovering the power that is in prayer.
But somehow we never can do this alone. From the first, Christ drew about Him a company. To join Him, you had also to join that company. The church has always been a scratch company of sinners. It is not the best people in the community gathered together for self-congratulation; it is the people who know they have a great need gathered to find its answer in worship towards God and fellowship with one another. The church is not a museum, it is a hospital. That's why we can all belong to it and should.
Witness comes by life and by word. A lot of average and self-righteous people think they are "witnessing" every day, but there is not enough difference between them and the rest of the world for it to make any real difference. It is when a spiritual experience has begun--one that changes us deeply on the inside--that it begins to show on the outside. This intrigues people. They wonder what has happened to us. They begin asking questions. And then is the time to open up and witness by words. We do not preach to others, we do not talk down to them, we do not point to ourselves as the answer: but we share those beginnings of victory that we know. Every real believer must engage in Twelfth Step work if he is to keep spiritually alive.
The parallels between these four points and AA's Twelve Steps must be obvious to anybody. To me AA is one of the great signs of spiritual awakening in our time. It is experimental and experiential in nature, not dogmatic; but none can doubt that God is what has made AA and today inspires and keeps it growing. I am thankful that the Church has so widely associated itself with AA, because I think the church needs AA as a continuous spur to greater aliveness and expectation and 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, if it keeps open to God for inspiration, and open to people for service. I believe that AA has been wise to confine its organized activity to alcoholics. But I hope and I think we may see an effect of AA on medicine, on psychiatry, on correction, on the ever-present problem of human nature itself and what we can do about it, and--not least--on the Church. AA derived indirectly a great deal of its inspiration from the Church. Now perhaps the time has come for the Church--all the churches--to let themselves be re-awakened and vitalized by the insights and practices which are found in AA.
God bless AA forever!
Rev. Samuel M. Shoemaker
Penna.
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