Humility Takes Center Stage

Finally, I would have my moment, if only a brief one, in the AA spotlight. Oh, never mind those leads at my local AA groups, wonderful opportunities that they were to share my experience, strength and hope. This would be big, a gala affair celebrating our cofounder Bill W.’s emergence from the darkness of active alcoholism to sobriety, with as many as 1,500 AA members and their guests present in the grand ballroom of a well-known New York hotel. 



Ridiculously egotistical, you might conclude, but I take comfort in that part of our Seventh Step prayer that reads, “…have all of me, good and bad.” And maybe we are not the best “deciders” of what is good and bad. Maybe that is the province of HP. Maybe Bill is sounding a caution note that our actions cannot, in all cases, be reduced to one motive. 



Beyond the introductory boilerplate needed to start off the event, I had added a few words built around the momentous visit Ebby, Bill’s childhood friend, paid to Bill in November 1934. Ebby, to Bill’s astonishment, was now sober. He shared with Bill the principles of the Oxford movement, a precursor of AA, and reliance on God, which he credited with bringing about this startling transformation. When Bill balked at the very mention of God, Ebby suggested he choose his own conception of a higher being. Ebby had planted a seed.



“I hope you too will see the hand of God as you read these pages.” So reads the inscription my longtime sponsor Cubby added to the book Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, which he gave to me on my first anniversary. 



And what exactly do we see in reading these pages? On a December day in that same month, our cofounder Bill is drinking bottles of beer on a New York City subway en route to Towns Hospital for another round of drying out. And yet, within a week in the confines of that hospital, “a wind not of air but of spirit” is blowing through him and he is rendered sober. 



Are we not all, in a sense, the children of Bill’s “white light” experience and all the wondrous good that has followed from it? Would any of us be here without that moment of surrender in which, on his knees and in complete despair, our cofounder cried out to whatever God there might be to reveal himself?