DOWLING — 1955 ST. LOUIS — 1
Father Ed Dowling, talk at the 1955 Alcoholics Anonymous International Convention in St. Louis, in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age (New York: A.A. World Services, 1957), pp. 254-261.
[254] FATHER DOWLING: I forgot to bring my store teeth, so if I am not being understood just wave a handkerchief and I’ll try to do something about it. I asked my friend of very recent vintage, Dr. Shoemaker, to say a prayer for me and for you during this talk, and he said, “God is with you.” I think you know what he meant, and it is reassuring, and I hope in the spirit of the Eleventh Step, through prayer and meditation, to try to improve our conscious contact with God.
May I suggest a few thoughts on the three words of our assignment: “God,” “we,” and “understand.” And, if you will listen with your hearts, as I know you have during this whole meeting, rather than with just your ears, I think God will bless us.
My trying to understand God somehow reminds me of a definition of psychiatry which I heard just a day or two ago. It is “the id being examined by the odd,” and I think that there could be our breakdown of topics: The id is the primary reservoir of power, or God. Examined could mean understood. And the odd is us.
First of all, to look at us: We are three things, I think — alcoholics, Alcoholics Anonymous, and agnostic.
[255] Alcoholic means to me that we have the tremendous drive of fear, which is the beginning of wisdom. We have the tremendous drive of shame, which is the nearest thing to innocence. One of the early members of the Irish groups likes to quote some author whose name I forget but who said, “Alcohol doth do more than Milton can to make straight the ways of God to man.”
Alcoholics Anonymous — not merely alcoholics, but Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill spoke last night of the outside antagonist in Alcoholics Anonymous, John Barleycorn. But I have always felt that there is an inside antagonist who is crueler, and that is the corporate sneer for a phony, and who of us is not a phony? I think that in all groups you have the problem of people of lynx-eyed virtue.
A third qualification is that I think we are all agnostic. I believe there are several groups, qualitatively, in A.A. There are the devout who did not seem to be able to apply their old-line religious truths. They were agnostic as to application. They are people like the priest who passed the man in the ditch before the good Samaritan helped him. A very good priest friend of mine says, “I really think that the first thing we will say when we get to Heaven is, ‘My God, it’s all true I’” I think all of us are rusty in some phases of our application of beliefs. Then there are the sincere eighteen-carat agnostics who really have difficulty with the spiritual hurdle.
The next word is understand. As we move from an obscure and confused idea of God to a more clear and distinct idea, I think we should realize that our idea of God will always be lacking, always to a degree be unsatisfying. Because to understand and to comprehend God is to be equal to God. But our understanding will grow. I am sure that Bill, sitting in that chair, and Dr. Bob, whose angel is probably sitting on that oddly misplaced empty chair, are growing in the knowledge of God. There is an old German saying that applies here: “Very few of us know how much we have to know in order to know how little we know.” I’m sure Dr. Bob and Bill would certify to that.
There is a negative approach from agnosticism. This was the [256] approach of Peter the Apostle. “Lord, to whom shall we go?” I doubt if there is anybody in this hail who really ever sought sobriety. I think we were trying to get away from drunkenness. I don’t think we should despise the negative. I have a feeling that if I ever find myself in Heaven, it will be from backing away from Hell. At this point, Heaven seems as boring as sobriety does to an alcoholic ten minutes before he quits.
However, there are positive approaches, and the Twelfth Step mentions one: experience. (I still weep that the elders of the movement have dropped the word “experience” for “awakening.”) Experience is one of the ways. It is mentioned in the Twelfth Step, and in the Second Step in another way. Now experience can be of two kinds. One kind is a sudden, passive insight like Bill’s experience and like the Grapevine story of that Christmas Eve in Chicago. Those are all in the valid pattern of Saul’s sudden passive insight as he was struck from his horse on the road to Damascus. There are other types, probably dearer to God since they are commoner, and those are our routine active observations. “I am sober today.” This meeting this morning, this convention this week, as experience distills and condenses, have been born of suffering. The other night Bernard Smith, Chairman of A.A.’s Trustees (I get that hierarchy all mixed up), said something which to me was so good that I took it down. He said, “The tragedy of our life is how deep must be our suffering before we learn the simple truths by which we can live.”
Some time before Whittaker Chambers became a well-known character, in his sister publication — he was on Time then — he wrote in Life an article called “The Devil.” Quoting Satan, Whittaker Chambers says this: “And yet it is at this very point that man, that monstrous midget, still has the edge on the Devil. He suffers. Not one man, however base, quite lacks the capacity for the specific suffering which is the seal of his divine commission.”
The second approach to understanding is mentioned in the Second Step, “Came to believe. . . .” I’ve known some of my Catholic friends who at that Step said, “Well, I believe already, so I don’t have to do [257] anything.” And in a great burst of kindness they kept on drinking to let the Protestants catch up with them!
Belief is capitalizing on the experience of others. Blessed are the lazy, for they shall find their short cuts. The world can now capitalize on the A.A. experience of two decades. Newman says that the essence of belief is to look outside ourselves. Dr. Tiebout seems to think that, psychiatrically, the great problem is the turning of our affection away from self, outward. Faith is hard, as hard and as easy as sobriety, and has been called the greatest of our undeveloped resources.
What experience should we seek? What beliefs should we accept in our quest for God? The third word then would be God. Bill early wrote a letter — I have it — in which he said, “How far the alcoholic shall work out his dependence on God is none of A.A.’s business. Whether it is in a church or not in a church, whether it is in that church or this church, is none of A.A.’s business.” In fact, he implied, “I don’t think it’s any of the members’ business. It’s God’s business.” And the A.A.’s business is charted in the Eleventh Step. Seek through meditation and prayer to find God’s will and seek the power to follow it out.
I would like to share with you what I have found to be God’s will. I believe the problem which half the people in this room have had in attaining sobriety I have had in attaining belief and faith. Where do you start? Well, I believe there’s something to be said about starting at the nearest manifestation of God. Where is God nearest to me? Francis Thompson answers in his poem, “In No Strange Land”:
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air —
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars! —
The drift of pinions, would we harken,
Beats at our own day-shuttered doors.
[258] We know A.A.’s Twelve Steps of man toward God. May I suggest God’s Twelve Steps toward man as Christianity has taught them to me.
The first step is described by St. John. The Incarnation. The word was God and the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. He turned His life and His will over to the care of man as He understood him. The second step, nine months later, closer to us in the circumstances of it, is the birth, the Nativity. The third step, the next thirty years, the anonymous hidden life. Closer, because it is so much like our own. The fourth step, three years of public life.
The fifth step, His teaching, His example, our Lord’s Prayer. The sixth step, bodily suffering, including thirst, on Calvary.
The next step, soul suffering in Gethsemane; that’s coming close. How well the alcoholic knows, and how well He knew, humiliation and fear and loneliness and discouragement and futility. Finally death, another step closer to us, and I think the passage where a dying God rests in the lap of a human mother is as far down as divinity can come, and probably the greatest height that humanity can reach.
Down the ages He comes closer to us as head of a sort of Christians Anonymous, a mystical body laced together by His teachings. “Whatsoever you do to the least of these my brethren so do you unto me.” “I can fill up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ.” “I was in prison and you visited me.” “I was sick and I was hungry and you gave me to eat.”
The next step is the Christian Church, which I believe is Christ here today. A great many sincere people say, “I like Christianity, but I don’t like Churchianity.” I can understand that. I understand it better than you do because I’m involved in Churchianity and it bothers me too! But, actually, I think that sounds a little bit like saying, “I do love good drinking water but I hate plumbing.” Now, who does like plumbing? You have people who like sobriety, but they won’t take A.A.
And then, the eleventh step is several big pipe lines or sacraments of God’s help.
[259] And the twelfth step, to me, is the great pipe line or sacrament of Communion. The word that was God became flesh and becomes our food, as close to us as the fruit juice and the toast and the coffee we had an hour ago.
Oh, we know the story of an alcoholic’s flight from God, and his movement toward Him. “Lord, give me sobriety, but not yet!” “Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief!” I don’t think there’s an A.A. in this room who isn’t worrying about one of those steps. “Lord, let me make that step, but not yeti” The picture of the A.A.’s quest for God, but especially God’s loving chase for the A.A., was never put more beautifully than in what I think is one of the greatest lyrics and odes in the English language. It was written by a narcotic addict, and alcohol is a narcotic. It’s a poem by Francis Thompson called “The Hound of Heaven.” Let me just give you a few of the lines and I’ll sit down.
I fled Him down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him and under running laughter
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Adown titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
And here’s his description of God:
But with unhurrying chase
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy
They beat — and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
And I’ll skip to:
“Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”
[260] And:
“Lo, naught contents thee, who content’st not Me.”
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years —
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Now the long chase comes at last to an end:
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
And the voice says, in conclusion:
“And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing,
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught” (He said),
“And human love needs human meriting:
How has thou merited —
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?”
And this I find consoling:
“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou mightst seek it in My arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
[261] And the alcoholic or the nonalcoholic answers:
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
And God’s answer:
“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.”
Thank you.