A Classic Prayer

Today’s passage is the prayer itself. Bill W. set it three pages into his essay on Step Eleven in the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, for beginners to meditate on, and chose it as “one that is a classic.” The essay never names its author. It calls him a man long counted a saint, no alcoholic but one who had been through “the emotional wringer,” and later “our friend.” The saint was Francis of Assisi, and the prayer wasn’t his (November 6 tells where it came from). But by 1953 Francis had been in AA’s story for years.

Looking back in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, in 1957, Bill wrote that when the early members argued over how much money the work would need, the saint’s thinking counted for a great deal. His movement, too, had begun among lay people, “one man carrying the good news to the next,” and he had wanted the whole society poor, not just each member, so there would be less to quarrel over and less to pull them from their purpose. AA followed him into what Bill called corporate poverty.

In December 1949 the College of Steubenville, in Ohio, gave the first of its yearly Poverello Medals to AA. The medal took its name from the saint’s old nickname, il poverello: the little poor man. Sister Ignatia, the Akron nun who had worked beside Dr. Bob, accepted it on AA’s behalf. Bill took no part, and her biographer suggests he kept his distance from the honor, perhaps because Catholics were giving it. Whatever he made of the medal, a letter he wrote the next month shows the saint was on his mind. Markings, the newsletter of AA’s archives, quotes it as Bill’s answer to the first award Franciscans gave AA, which by its date was the medal. Honoring the fellowship rather than its founders set a helpful precedent, he wrote in January 1950, and the idea had come from Francis, whose example, he wrote, had “done so much for me and for A.A.”

On the last afternoon of the second General Service Conference, in April 1952, Bill gave the delegates a benediction, as the Grapevine reported it that June. He went through the people who had lit candles for AA, from Dr. Carl Jung in Zurich to those who carried the message in print, with William James among them. Between Sister Ignatia and James came Francis, who for holding to corporate poverty “had lit a candle for AA.” Then, borrowing from the Twenty-third Psalm, Bill looked back to the summer of 1934, when, as he told it, all was ready for AA except the alcoholics it was for.

At St. Louis in 1955, closing his part of a session by reciting the prayer, Bill called its saint one whose example was “so near and so dear to us all.” In 1967 Franciscans gave AA a second award, the Franciscan Award, which Markings said in 2004 was on display in the archives at AA’s General Service Office in New York.

More on AA and money: The basket, in Keep Coming Back. On the medal, and why Sister Ignatia wanted no honors: No professional job, in Your Size in Pajamas. On the prayer’s own path: November 6.