Authors: Ernest Kurtz
Not-God (43 page)
Especially in his larger public presentations, Clarence S. offers a clear framework for positive thinking to the alcoholic mired in self-hatred. Yet he also proclaims his A.A. to be “a very tough program.” In order truly to “get A.A.,” one must “qualify” as Clarence himself did: one must say that he is “willing to do
anything”
to achieve sobriety, and the first “anything” is blind, absolute obedience to one’s sponsor. This specification of Wilson’s “deflation at depth” clearly equates with “the act of surrender” that Dr. Harry Tiebout analyzed as the core of “the therapeutic process” not only in Alcoholics Anonymous but in
any
psychotherapy. Indeed, despite its clothing in classic and explicitly religious language, and for all Clarence’s carefully expressed wariness of psychiatrists and psychiatry, his appreciation of Alcoholics Anonymous seems identical to that of the self-consciously secular Tiebout. The Pietist insight that one must “let go” in order to “be” to say nothing of to “have” need not always be affirmed in a directly Pietist vocabulary, but this message is surely clearest in that language.
14
The Cleveland-rooted longest member speaks “Absolutes,” stressing “Absolute Honesty.” He would change the word “Rarely” at the beginning of “How It Works” to “Never,” and relishes describing to appreciative audiences with all his abundant rhetorical skill how Dr. Bob Smith, “my sponsor,” treated his initial lack of faith in early 1938:
These birds came into the hospital and visited me every day. They were smiling and laughing — it was a long time since I’d had anything to laugh about. They told me their stories, and then at the end they told me they “had the answer,” and then they up and left. They never told me
what
“the answer” was: they just told me they had it and then hightailed it out of there.
Finally this day Doc comes in and as usual sits down on the end of the bed and asks me what I think of all this. I tell him it’s just wonderful. I mean all these guys who don’t know me from a bale of hay coming in and visiting me and telling me their stories. “Only,” I tell Doc, “I’m puzzled about just one thing.” And he says in his abrupt way, “And what’s
that?”
So I say, “Well, they all tell me they have the answer to my drinking problem and then they leave. What are you going to do to me? How do I get ‘fixed’?”
Doc says, “Young fellow, you’re kind of young yet, and we don’t know if you’ve had enough.” My God! “Enough!” Well, I finally convinced him I’d had “enough,” and he says to me, “Well, okay, young fellow. I’ll give you the answer to this: do you believe in God?”
Now that’s the last thing I expected to hear from a doctor. Well, I was too smart to try to answer that, so I say: “What does
that
have to do with it?”
“Young fellow, that has
everything
to do with it:
do you or do you not believe in God?”
Now notice: Doc doesn’t say, “Do you believe in
a
God?” He says, “Do you believe in
God?”
Well, now I’m getting scared that they’re not going to fix me, so I come up with: “Well, I guess I do.” Doc almost shouts: “There’s no guessing about it — you do or you don’t.” So finally I say, “Well, yes I do believe in God.” And Doc says, “Well, now then, that’s fine, young fellow; now we can get somewhere.”
And then he says, “Get down out of that bed and get on your knees.” Well, I remember that he’s a rectal surgeon, so I say; “For
what?”
And Doc says: “You’re going to pray;” and I say,
“Who’s
going to pray?” and he says,
“You’re
going to pray.”
Well! I tell him: “I don’t know anything about praying;” and he says, “I don’t suppose you do, but you get down there, and I’ll pray, and you can repeat it after me — that’ll do for
this
time.”
And so Clarence, “on that cold, concrete floor, in my shortie nightgown,” got down on his knees and got the A.A. program a year before it was first called by that name.
It is in this context that the continuing significance of Clarence S. in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous seems best grasped. “No one does
anything,”
Clarence states with emphasis, “unless he hurts pretty badly. But then, you have to take a stand: because if you don’t take a stand, you’re liable to fall for anything.”
The emphasis that Clarence and others like him place on “absolute honesty” and on the words “entirely” and “all” in A.A.’s Twelve Steps thus in no way implies rejection of “not-God” as the central theme of Alcoholics Anonymous. As has been explored in Chapter Eight, the first step of surrender — so essential to the Pietist process — is the rejection of
any
claim to an absolute in oneself. The one absolute of admitting absolutely “I am not God” may be a mysterious paradox in the acceptance of not-God-ness, but it appears a contradiction only to those whose claim to absolute relativism seems itself at least as great a contradiction.
15
The apparent challenge to “not-God” posed by the Survivors Program promulgated by The Church of The Way is substantially similar but historically different. Exploring this viewpoint in context should clarify and deepen both appreciation of the centrality of the theme of the wholeness of accepted limitation to Alcoholics Anonymous itself and the special threat that is posed for Alcoholics Anonymous by pulls from the religious “right” even if not by the Survivors Program itself.
16
This program — “The Way” — consists of “The Twelve Steps,” which are the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous with the words “over alcohol” omitted from the First, and in the Twelfth, “other alcoholics” changed to “others,” and “The Four Absolutes”:
1. Absolute honesty — non-lying to oneself or others; fidelity to the truth in thought, word, and actions.
2. Absolute purity — purity of mind, purity of body, purity of the emotions, purity of heart, sexual purity.
3. Absolute Unselfishness — seeking what is right and true in every situation above what I want.
4. Absolute love — loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
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It is of interest and significance that A.A. members who are adherents of the Church of The Way and its Survivors Program and the most extreme critics of Alcoholics Anonymous from the religious “right,” virtually echo the critique leveled against A.A. by Synanon. Synanon, while perhaps in the categories of some sociologists itself a glaring expression of “religious” righteousness, understands itself and has been culturally regarded as a manifestation of therapeutic radicalism. The founder of Synanon, Charles E. Dederick, in 1958 turned his incorporated A.A. club, which he “found limiting,” into what would become that confrontational creation of slurred speech, Synanon.
“We were building something new and different. Although I will always be grateful to A.A. for helping me personally, Synanon has nothing to do with A.A., any more than a rowboat compares with an airplane.… We emphasize self-reliance rather than dependence on a higher being.”
Synanon emphasizes
self-help
, with a focus on individual self-reliance. This attitude reflects one of the major areas of contrast between Synanon and Alcoholics Anonymous. The latter builds upon man’s reliance on a higher being. Synanon’s emphasis is upon the individual’s self help and “actualization.”
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The comparison of “airplane” to “rowboat” also infuses the attitude of adherents of the Survivors Program toward Alcoholics Anonymous. Further, despite strong claims — advanced with special vehemence after late 1970s developments within Synanon itself— that “The Survivors Program” originated from a return to the Oxford Group roots of Alcoholics Anonymous rather than from any Synanon connection, a large inspiration to and some of the formalization of this “return” derived proximately from informal contact with Daytop, one of many Synanon offshoots.
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The critique that some adherents of “The Way” have offered of Alcoholics Anonymous bears significance also because it reveals the dangers of even unintentional historical distortion supposedly in service to “absolute truth.”
There is much that AA could learn from Synanon. Where-ever AA has grown weak and ineffective — and many AA groups suffer from complacency and conventionality — it has done so because the truth has been dishonored. Many AAs will argue that life can be compartmentalized. It is not necessary, they say, to try to correct
all
one’s character defects, just the drinking. Synanon’s demonstration of the enormous power released by dealing with the truth as it concerns
one’s whole life
ought to have been, and could have been, a stimulus to reform within AA, a return to the original sense of AA’s Twelve Steps, which clearly point to moral reform in
all
areas of one’s life. Bill Wilson said that he built the four absolutes of the Oxford Group — absolute truth, absolute love, absolute unselfishness, and absolute purity — into the Sixth and Seventh Steps of the Program.
20
What is said of “many AA groups” and “many AAs” may be correct, but the leap from this value-judgment to locating the source of realistic “reform within AA” through a postulated “original sense of AA’s Twelve Steps” to ‘“the four absolutes of the Oxford Group’” at best unintentionally ignores or unconsciously distorts the actual historical development of Alcoholics Anonymous. The quotation of Bill Wilson is accurate. Yet lifted so starkly from context, it misconstrues and distorts the deeper problem with “absolutes” with which Wilson was concerned. Sensitivity to this more profound difficulty more directly and even selfconsciously infuses the approach of Alcoholics Anonymous than this criticism adverts. Exploring the precise problem in historical context may clarify this study’s presentation of the A.A. fellowship and its program under the title, “not-God.”
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It is significant that, when Wilson himself felt pressured about A.A.’s omission of the Oxford Group “Four Absolutes,” he consistently responded from historical context. The fellowship’s early experience and awareness of its own history had taught it two relevant and related things: the problem with the specific term “absolute” and the special danger to alcoholics of the quest for perfection. As Bill replied to one curious and challenging correspondent:
… As you so well understand, we drunks are all-or-nothing people.
In the old days of the Oxford Groups, they were forever talking about the Four Absolutes — Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness, and Love. There we saw people going broke on this sort of perfection — trying to get too good by Thursday.
… There is another factor, too, which perhaps you have overlooked.
Absolutes in themselves are not necessarily destructive. Every sound theological system contains them. When we say that our destiny is to grow in the likeness and image of God, we are stating a healthy relation between a relative and an absolute state of affairs. Therefore when writing the Twelve Steps, it was necessary to include some sort of absolute value or else they wouldn’t have been theologically sound.… That could have been unfortunate. However, we couldn’t make them as promising and as misleading as we found them in the Oxford Group emphasis. So in Steps Six and Seven, and
in the use of the word God, we did include them
.
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Wilson’s stress on alcoholics as “all or nothing people,” on “going broke on … trying to get too good by Thursday,” and on the need for “taking the middle course” infused and pervaded not only this one letter but his every response to any challenge concerning A.A.’s omission of “absolutes.” How this emphasis permeated and was lived out in Alcoholics Anonymous informs much about “not-God” as the fundamental message of the fellowship and its program. Appropriately, this emphasis is best explored by a study of the paradoxes of A.A. experience.
The core paradox confronted most newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous at the first meeting at which they were sober enough really to listen. On the one hand, the key initial intuition of A.A. — quoted from the Big Book — proclaimed that “Selfishness — self-centeredness” lay at “the root of our troubles.” Yet, almost simultaneously, the newcomer heard emphasized an equally key A.A. slogan epigram: “This is a selfish program.”
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In time, with increasing sobriety and deeper immersion into the A.A. program, the member attained awareness of the resolution of the apparent paradox. Like the “instincts” deftly analyzed in
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
, selfishness was recognized as a given of the human condition and so to be honestly accepted rather than dangerously denied. But also like the instincts, selfishness could be directed and tempered — applied to its proper object with the help of another of the program’s maxims: “First Things First.”
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On several occasions, Bill Wilson labored to clarify and to drive home a necessary distinction in the alcoholic’s selfishness. “… It seems to me that the primary object of any human being is to grow, that being the nature of all living things. Therefore he is bound to have a huge self-interest.” Another correspondent complained directly that he had been “disturbed to hear some A.A. speakers say, ‘A.A. is a selfish program.’” The co-founder’s response was eventually published in
The A.A. Way of Life:
I can see why you are disturbed.… The word “selfish” ordinarily implies that one is acquisitive, demanding, and thoughtless of the welfare of others. Of course, the A.A. way of life does not at all imply such undesirable traits.
What do these speakers mean? Well, any theologian will tell you that the salvation of his own soul is the highest vocation that a man can have. Without salvation — however we may define this — he will have little or nothing. For us in A.A. there is even more urgency.
If we cannot or will not achieve sobriety, then we become truly lost, right in the here and now. We are of no value to anyone, including ourselves, until we find salvation from alcohol. Therefore, our own recovery and spiritual growth have to come first — a right and necessary kind of self-concern.