One Simple Idea (19 page)

The Swedenborgian faith that ran through Lois’s family does seem to have impacted Bill, especially when his binge drinking drove him to seek spiritual solutions. A key tenet of Swedenborgianism, later reflected in AA literature, was that man could serve as a vessel for higher energies. Swedenborg wrote of a “Divine influx” suffusing the material world. Ralph Waldo Trine called it a “divine inflow.” This notion appears to have helped Bill define his own “awakening experience” in December 1934. At the time, Bill was laid up in Towns Hospital in Manhattan, a place where he frequently retreated to recover from benders. He was stuck in a cycle of binge drinking, drying out, and drinking again. Bill was in agony over being unable to control the alcoholism that was sending him down a path that would likely have ended in his death, due either to a drinking-related accident or illness, or to indigence.

“Lying there in conflict,” Bill wrote, “I dropped into the blackest depression I had ever known. Momentarily my prideful obstinacy was crushed. I cried out, ‘Now I’m ready to do anything …’ ” What happened next completely reordered his life:

Bill had experienced something like the “Divine influx.” The experience of religious awakening was confirmed for him several days later during a visit by his friend Ebby Thacher. Ebby was involved with a Christian evangelical fellowship called the Oxford Group. He gave Bill a book that became his closest companion and source of insight:
The Varieties of Religious Experience
by William James. “I devoured it,” Wilson recalled. In James’s case studies, Wilson recognized his own awakening episode. The philosopher had termed it a “conversion experience.” The realization of a higher power, James wrote, often struck the believer with such clarity and power that it objectively altered the circumstances of his outer life. The conversion experience had done so for Bill; he never drank again.

In the years immediately ahead, Bill codified his experience into the first three steps of the twelve-step program. The first three steps were a kind of blueprint for a Jamesian conversion experience. They were written in such a way that the word
alcohol
could be replaced by any other compulsory fixation, such as
anger, drugs
, or
gambling
:

Working as the chief writer, Bill published the twelve steps in 1939 in what became known as the “Big Book,”
Alcoholics Anonymous
. While William James’s work was central to Bill, many other influences shaped his book. Bill tore through spiritual literature, reading and rereading Mary Baker Eddy’s
Science and Health
, alongside New Thought books such as Emmet Fox’s
The Sermon on the Mount
, an interpretation of Christ’s oration as a mental-manifestation philosophy. He also read Christian inspirational works, such as Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond’s meditation on the transformative power of love,
The Greatest Thing in the World
.

Ebby Thacher also brought Bill to two additional philosophies that deeply impacted AA’s development: the teachings of the Oxford Group and the spiritual outlook of Carl Jung. In a sense, all of these early influences—William James, the Oxford Group, and Jung—reflected vastly different thought systems. But their unifying core was the principle that the sensitive, searching mind could bring a person to an experience of a Higher Power.

The Oxford Group was an enterprising and profoundly influential evangelical movement in the first half of the twentieth century. Its teachings brilliantly distilled therapeutic and self-help principles from within traditional Christian thought. So named in 1929 because of its large contingent from Oxford University, the Oxford Group devised a protocol of steps and principles intended to awaken modern people to the healing qualities of God in a manner similar to that experienced by first-century Christians. These steps included radical honesty, stringent moral self-examination, confession, making restitution, daily meditation or “quiet time,” and opening oneself to awakening or conversion experiences. Much of this was later reflected in the twelve steps.

To facilitate its program, the Oxford Group pioneered the use of group meetings or “house parties.” These took place in an encounter-group atmosphere of confession, shared testimonies, and joint prayer. Mutual help and lay therapy were central to Oxford’s program, and gave rise to a similar structure in AA.

Yet for some Oxford members, eventually including Bill and Lois
Wilson, the group-meeting atmosphere could deteriorate into a browbeating, accusatory climate in which members were singled out for not sufficiently sharing personal intimacies or detailing their moral failings. Oxford’s internal culture demanded a gung-ho approach—converts were often coached to be “maximum” in their commitment. This all-the-way style emanated from the group’s founder, Frank Buchman, an American Lutheran minister who initiated its meetings in the early 1920s. Buchman was the organization’s greatest asset and gravest failing.

A shrewd and impassioned organizer, Buchman built the group through a strategy of recruiting “key people.” Such a figure might be a celebrity, a banker, or, on a college campus, the captain of the football team. A key person, in turn, attracted others into the fold. Buchman often organized his Oxford meetings at posh hotels or in the homes of well-to-do members—again making the group attractive by its sheen of success. Mary Baker Eddy probably devised a similar strategy in building her Christian Science churches, schools, and reading rooms in high-end neighborhoods. Even the Oxford Group’s informal use of the great university’s name (which it was later asked to discontinue) lent it an air of respectability.

In 1936 Buchman upset all of his carefully laid plans. The Lutheran minister ignited an international uproar when he apparently set his sights on attracting a unique key person: Adolf Hitler. During the 1930s, Buchman traveled to Germany, where he met with Heinrich Himmler (whose wife was reportedly in sympathy with the Oxford Group). Buchman vocally praised Hitler as a bulwark against atheistic Communism. “… think what it would mean to the world,” he told a reporter for the
New York World-Telegram
in an interview published August 26, 1936, “if Hitler surrendered to the control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.”

The Oxford Group founder went further still, uttering his most notorious words: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.”

While Bill Wilson had wanted to save drunks, Frank Buchman said he wanted to save “drunken nations.” Buchman’s maximalist worldview held no appeal for Bill and Lois, who, after distancing themselves for some months following Buchman’s announcement, pulled away from Oxford entirely by 1937. By the end of the decade most of AA’s groups had stopped all cooperation with Oxford. Around that time the Buchman organization also lost some of its most thoughtful ministers and organizers, including the Reverend Sam Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest at New York’s Calvary Church, who was a major influence on Bill.

Yet Bill’s friend Ebby Thacher had also introduced Bill to another, very different stream of ideas: the psycho-spiritual theories of Carl Jung. Bill said the psychologist’s role was “like no other” in the founding of AA. At the same time, Bill also praised William James as “a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.” Bill may have eagerly emphasized AA’s debt to respected figures like Jung and James as a way of exorcising the shadows of Frank Buchman. Yet all of these influences could not be easily separated out, one from the other. As it happens, Ebby had been recruited into Oxford by a former patient of Jung’s, a Rhode Island businessman named Rowland Hazard. Rowland’s experiences, in turn, brought Jung’s influence into AA.

Around 1931 Rowland visited the Swiss psychologist to seek help with his alcoholism. He reported leaving the doctor’s care feeling cured, but suffered a relapse a few weeks later. Rowland returned desperate, pleading to know what could be done. Jung leveled with the American: He had never once seen a patient recover from alcoholism. “I can do nothing for you,” the psychologist said. Rowland begged, surely there must be something? Well, Jung replied, there may be one possibility: “Occasionally, Rowland, alcoholics have recovered through spiritual experiences, better known as religious conversions.” Jung went on: “All you can do is place yourself in a religious atmosphere of your own choosing”—here was the AA principle of pursuing God
as we understood Him
—and, Jung continued, “admit your personal powerlessness to go on
living. If under such conditions you seek with all your might, you may then find …”

Jung’s prescription matched what Bill had experienced at Towns Hospital. For Bill, it served as further confirmation of the need for a spiritual solution to addiction.

Years later, Bill finally wrote to Jung, on January 23, 1961, in the last months of the psychologist’s life. Bill wanted to tell him how his counsel to Rowland had impacted the AA program. He also told Jung that “many AAs report a great variety of psychic phenomena, the cumulative weight of which is very considerable.”

To Bill’s delight, Jung responded with a long letter on January 30. The psychologist vividly recalled Rowland and what he had told him. Jung repeated to Bill his formula for overcoming alcoholism:
spiritus contra spiritum
. The Latin phrase could be roughly translated as:
Higher Spirit over lower spirits
, or alcohol. It was the twelve steps in a nutshell.

Although no vast religion of mental therapeutics ever appeared on the American scene, Alcoholics Anonymous, through its blending of ideas from Swedenborg, James, Oxford, Jung, and New Thought, created a home for the “religion of healthy-mindedness.”

Mainline churches faced a crisis of mission in the 1920s and ’30s when congregants demanded practical help with the problems of life. An answer came from Glenn Clark, a Presbyterian lay leader who devised a radical theory of prayer drawn from mind-power influences. Although this college educator and athletic coach didn’t strictly consider himself part of the New Thought fold, he brought mental-therapeutic principles into the pews of mainline congregations. He also wrestled with ethical demons, which, at times, gained the better of his judgment.

Clark was born in 1882 to a large and devout Christian family in Des Moines, Iowa. He became a young literature professor and coach at
Macalester College, a Presbyterian liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minnesota. At Macalester, Clark developed ties to Christian Scientists and New-Thoughters, with whom he huddled in study sessions, prayer groups, and discussions.

Clark grew enamored of the ideas of an English scientist and spiritual seeker named F. L. Rawson, a follower of Mary Baker Eddy. Though Rawson later split with the Christian Science church, the English engineer continued searching for a methodical, even scientific, approach to prayer, an interest shared by Clark. When Rawson visited the United States in the early 1920s, Clark traveled to meet his British hero in Minneapolis. To Clark’s chagrin, however, Rawson seemed more like a technician of the soul than a man driven by a passion for truth and goodness.

“I determined then and there not to be a mere follower of his,” Clark wrote, “but to begin where he left off.” This was Clark’s strength: never to settle for an idea but always to look for ways to build on it.

Clark wanted a method of practical prayer—and he soon found it. In 1924 he realized that for two years straight he had experienced “an almost continuous stream of answered prayer.” What caused it? Clark was an athlete, and he discovered that to pray effectively a person had to prepare for prayer in much the same way a winning athlete trained and drilled before a competition. Clark’s prayer-preparation regimen included meditation, breathing exercises, and preliminary devotionals. With the proper degree of “warm up,” inner reflection, and sincerity, Clark insisted, prayers were almost guaranteed to work. Clark gained a national audience for his ideas in the summer of 1924 when the
Atlantic Monthly
(a journal rarely given to practical theology) ran his hugely popular article on effective prayer, “The Soul’s Sincere Desire.”

Clark had a gift for blending Biblical and psychological concepts into meaningful self-help formulas. One of Clark’s techniques came to him one day when he had a breakthrough in his understanding of the Biblical verse 2 Samuel 22:34:
He maketh my feet like hinds’ feet; and setteth me upon my high places
. Clark saw the verse as a psychological allegory: “hinds’ feet”—an animal’s powerful rear legs—are the subconscious mind, which is man’s
interior engine and spiritual center. Whoever can coordinate the workings of the subconscious with the strivings of the conscious mind—just as an animal coordinates its rear and front legs—is “most certain to reach the heights in life,” Clark wrote.

As a college varsity coach, Clark cultivated a backslapping rapport with young people. He wanted to find ways of instructing them in constructive prayer and practical Christianity. This coach of the soul found his answer in opening a network of Christian youth camps, Camps Farthest Out. The idea for the camps came to him in a dream in 1929. He dubbed them “laboratories for experimentation in the art of praying.” After the first camp launched on Lake Koronis in central Minnesota in 1930, Camps Farthest Out set the mold for twentieth-century programs in Christian youth development. They remain popular around the world today.