Advent Day 15: Bill Wilson
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Advent Day 13: Bill Wilson (1895-1971)
In November 1934, Bill Wilson checked himself into NYC’s Towns Hospital to dry out. It was his fourth stay, and he arrived drunk. After checking into a room, his doctor started him on a cocktail of barbiturates and belladonna, a regimen known as purge-and-puke.
For five days, Bill suffered the shakes, delirium and vomiting of withdrawal. Once the physical symptoms had dissolved, he fell into a deep depression. He’d ruined his life. He had no job, no money. The only reason to keep living was his wife Lois. But she’d be a widow if he couldn’t kick the bottle. So far he’d been a spectacular failure at that.
His mind cast back to the heady 1920s when he’d been a successful stock speculator, the trips he and Lois enjoyed, their roomy apartment. All that was gone. By Bill’s account,
Shame and failure had replaced success, and fear had banished security. The terrifying darkness had become complete.
Nowadays we call this hitting bottom. This is where Bill was when his old friend and former drinking buddy Ebby Thacher came to visit him at the hospital. Ebby had recently gotten sober through the Oxford Group, a Christian movement started by a Lutheran pastor who’d recognized that institutional religion often failed to truly transform people’s lives. Oxford’s program for healthy minds, bodies and souls—steeped in the Jesus’s teachings—had attracted adherents across the US and Europe, including Joe Dimaggio, Mae West, Harry Truman and Henry Ford.
The night Ebby visited Bill in the hospital, he urged him to try Oxford. Bill wasn’t having it. He didn’t go in for God. He was a commonsense New Englander—an up-by-your-bootstraps type. He saw his alcoholism as a technical problem (lack of willpower) with a technical solution (medicines), not a spiritual problem with a spiritual solution.
Ebby knew that many people, including Bill, had been raised on a fire-and-brimstone God—an image in direct opposition to the compassionate healer Jesus, and the loving father-God Jesus called Abba. But Ebby knew the deep spiritual life wasn’t about believing in God, it was about knowing God. So, he suggested Bill seek God on his own and see what he find. In essence, Ebby was prescribing the classic hero’s journey.
Later, Bill wrote,
(That) hit me hard. It melted the icy intellectual mountain in whose shadow I had lived and shivered many years.
That night after Ebby left, Bill issued a challenge: If there be a God, let him show himself!
The effect was instant, electric. Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. I was conscious of nothing else for a time. Then, seen 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 through me. Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man.” I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided. I again saw the wall of my room. As I became more quiet a great peace stole over me…I became acutely conscious of a presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.”
This was Bill’s road-to-Damascus moment—knocked off his proverbial high horse, blinded by the light, to rise again transformed. Like the Apostle Paul, Bill underwent an immediate and profound shift in consciousness. He would spend the rest of his life—again like Paul—spreading the good news that through self-surrender and disciplined spiritual practice we may heal what hurts us.
Bill Wilson was born in 1895 in Dorset, Vermont. When he was young, his parents abandoned him, leaving him to be raised by grandparents. This primal wound punched a hole in his heart. Though peers remembered him as handsome, smart and charismatic, Bill felt awkward, anxious and needy.
In 1916, Bill was called up to military service in advance of World War I. At a party during basic training, he had his first drink, a Bronx cocktail: gin, sweet vermouth and orange juice. The reaction was swift, and Bill’s description of it will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt liquor’s lubricating effects:
I took (the drink), and another one, and then, lo, the miracle! That strange barrier that had existed between me and all men and women…seemed to instantly go down. I felt that I belonged where I was, I belonged to life, I belonged to the universe, I was a part of things at last.
His drinking career spanned seventeen years—through war, marriage to Lois, a lucrative Wall Street career. The last of those helped him sustain the illusion he had his act together. He was, for a long time, a functioning drunk. As long as he was able to work and make money, what was the problem?!
Then came the crash of 1929. Overnight, the Wilsons went from living in a fancy apartment to sleeping on Lois’s parents’ couch. Bill spiraled down. Th next few years saw an ever-worsening series of alcoholic binges, squandered opportunities and self-sabotage until the night in his hospital room when he saw the light.
Bill’s post-hospital life took a swift and positive turn. He was healthier than he’d been in years. His marriage was refreshed. He had some good job prospects. With his pal Ebby he began attending Oxford Group meetings. At Oxford, people were taught that the source of all the world’s problems came from profound disconnection from one another, one’s self and God. Heal the disconnection, you heal yourself and the world.
The Oxford Group operated on a set of principles inspired by Jesus’s sermon on the mount, called The Four Absolutes: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. To cultivate those values, Oxford laid down four spiritual practices:
Sharing our sins and temptations with others.
Restitution to all whom we have wronged, directly or indirectly.
Surrender our life past, present and future, to God's keeping and direction.
Listening for God's guidance, and carrying it out.
Bill Wilson embraced these practices with the zeal of the converted, and in them are the seeds of the 12-step program he would later develop. He was especially passionate on the third point—that lasting sobriety could only come when the drinker had undergone a spiritual rebirth.
(It should be noted that the pioneer in shifting the view of alcoholism as a technical illness caused by failure of will to a spiritual illness cured by spiritual rebirth was Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. In the early 1930s, Jung had treated Rowland Hazard, an American who brought Jung’s beliefs back to the Oxford Group. Roland gave Jung’s beliefs to Ebby Thacher who gave them to Bill Wilson who gave them to the world. Decades later, that circle would be completed when Bill personally sought Jung out. More on Carl Jung tomorrow.)
At the Oxford Group, Bill launched a meeting of men seeking sobriety. In these meetings, he shared how the Oxford principles and rules had helped him kick the bottle. The men listened in silence then went back to their lives to practice on their own. It didn’t take Bill long to notice that, though Oxford had worked for him, most alcoholics he met there couldn’t sustain sobriety.
In spring 1935, a fateful meeting took place when Bill temporarily moved to Akron in order to scout a business deal with the National Rubber Machinery Company. He’d been sober five months. When the deal fell through, he found the hotel bar a temptation almost impossible to resist. Desperate for a lifeline, he scanned the phone directory for the local Oxford Group.
This search landed him, that evening, at the home of local doctor Bob Smith. Like Bill, Bob was a skeptical Vermonter. He was also an active alcoholic. When Bill started talking about his sobriety, Bob figured Bill was about to start preaching at him. He said he didn’t want to hear it. Bill told Bob he’d got it wrong. It was he, Bill, who’d come seeking help. He was tempted to drink, and he needed to talk to the only person he thought might help him through: a fellow alcoholic.
That night was the breakthrough that forever changed the way alcoholism was treated. Bill had the epiphany that all the anti-drinking programs in the worlds were useless if alcoholics didn’t have fellowship. Addicts (and every other human being) needed to know they weren’t alone, to be joined in what Bill called a kinship of suffering—to know that who they were and what they’d been through could add up to something and be of service to others—as the Apostle Paul said, “…so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.” Bill said of that first night with Bob,
I knew that I needed this alcoholic as much as he needed me. This was it!
Through the summer of 1935, Bill and Bob—who took his last drink that June—spent long hours sharing their stories and struggles. Other alcoholics soon joined them. It didn’t take Bill and Bob long to notice that this mutual aid society was more effective in getting people sober than medical treatments, willpower, or Oxford’s principles had ever been. The two men were so excited, they hatched plans to grow their little meeting into a nationwide network. Though it didn’t yet have the name, Alcoholics Anonymous had been born.
Almost without exception alcoholics are tortured by loneliness. Bill Wilson
Word of the Akron group’s success spread quickly. Soon, meetings were popping up throughout Ohio. Back in New York, Bill dove into systematizing what had happened in Akron so that it could be duplicated. These were lean times. Not wanting his nascent organization to be corrupted by money or corporate influence, Bill refused any grants that came with strings attached, and all offers to develop the program at hospitals and for-profit institutions. This principled stand has served AA well, but in the early days it meant that its founder and his wife had to continue crashing on her parents’ couch, eating beans out of cans and subsisting off Lois’s job as a saleswoman at Macy’s.
Bill decided the best way to spread the gospel of AA was by publishing a book. With the help of a number of people who’d gotten sober through his program, including writers from the New York Daily News and New Yorker magazine, Bill created a draft. In April 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous—commonly referred to as The Big Book—was published.
The core of AA, as laid out in the book, is the 12 steps. These steps synthesized all Bill had learned through the years about getting and staying sober. Many of the steps evolved from his time in the Oxford Group: self-examination, making amends, humility, practice of prayer and meditation to God as we understood him (While Bill was Christian, he was adamant AA not be affiliated with any religion, and that seekers follow the mystical path Ebby had prescribed to him, to seek God on their own; today you will find AA groups meeting in Jewish synagogues, Muslim mosques, Buddhist and Hindu temples, Christian churches, and secular spaces). But steps 1 and 12 were his.
Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Admitting powerlessness—that we don’t have the control over our lives we think, or wish; that we can’t fix everything, or even anything, alone; that we can’t grow in compassion if we’re living our lives in the muck of self-delusion; that we are at the mercy of a Love we can’t control—only comes for most addicts at rock bottom. It’s the point where we finally cry uncle. But it’s in admitting the powerlessness that we find the strength. This is one of life’s great paradoxes, put best by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians: when I am weak, I am strong.
Step Twelve: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The key phrase here is having had a spiritual awakening. If undertaken sincerely, if reflected on, practiced, and returned to again and again, the eleven preceding steps will necessarily lead to spiritual waking, to getting closer to a Light that never fails. And then it is one’s duty to model what spiritual awakening looks like so that others may be led to their own awakenings.
Sales of Alcoholics Anonymous were slow for the first couple years. Then, in March 1941, The Saturday Evening Post—the most popular periodical in America—printed an article about it. Within two weeks, more than six thousand inquiries had poured into the Post’s office, with people wondering how they could start an AA group in their own town. Almost overnight, AA went from being local to Ohio and New York to having outposts across the continent.
Bill Wilson remained at the head of AA until 1955. During those years he continued turning down opportunities he felt might personally benefit him, but that would compromise the group or its principles. Among countless accolades, he refused lucrative job offers, an honorary doctorate from Yale, a listing in Who’s Who In America, and—in keeping with the principle of anonymity—his face on the cover of Time Magazine.
In the years after retiring from his position at the head of AA, he continued to pursue his interests in spirituality, psychology and addiction recovery. He and Lois—who, in 1951, created Al-Anon, the support group for family members of addicts—traveled around the country, appearing at AA conferences, and meeting researchers in the new field of addiction research. He maintained friendships with notable thinkers of the era, including Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley who called him the greatest social architect of our century. Wherever he went, he was lauded for saving lives.
Bill brushed off the accolades. As Susan Cheever writes in My Name Is Bill:
He tried to discourage the idea that he was a leader, or any kind of model for human behavior. He had a lot of help, and he always acknowledged that. He fought the idea of himself as a hero; he knew better. The brilliance of his guidelines for the operation of AA, the Twelve Traditions, reflects his understanding of his humanness and his desire to be judged as a man, not as a leader. Bill Wilson never held himself up as a model; he only hoped to help other people by sharing his own experience, strength, and hope.
Bill Wilson died in 1971. In 1999, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Though addiction treatment continues to evolve, his revolutionary spiritual approach—which has since been applied to every kind of addiction—remains the gold standard.
Practice
Bill Wilson felt strongly that contemplative practices were key to healing. One of his cherished practices was a method of creative spiritual dialoguing called Two Way Prayer. In fact, Bill said that he was engaging in Two Way Prayer when the 12 steps came to him. For your practice today, use the links below to learn about Two Way Prayer, and then try it out. *If you don’t have time today, I encourage you to hold on to this for when you do.*
Two Way Prayer is a wonderful practice that has been life-changing for many. My introduction to it was through the work of a former Episcopal priest named Father Bill W, a longtime practitioner who offers workshops on the method. I’ve also recently heard it mentioned by a number of other notable public figures including Elizabeth Gilbert, Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach. It seems as if this wonderful contemplative practice that was so important to Bill Wilson is experiencing a much-deserved revival.
The links below are from Father Bill W’s website about Two Way Prayer. Though, in his work, he addresses himself mainly to those in addiction recovery, this practice is great for anyone. Here are some links to get you started:
I also highly recommend Father Bill’s podcast, especially if you are in recovery, or if you have an addict in your life. I stumbled upon it years ago while seeking resources to help me understand what a loved one was going through in their addiction. I’ve stayed with it because Father Bill is a highly engaging, and very funny, spiritual guide. And though he addresses himself to those in recovery, and speaks that language, the principles he explores—those of the 12 steps—are good for all people, in all times and places.
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