Hold Your Face to the Light

The reading cites page 3 of As Bill Sees It, the 1967 book of short pieces from Bill W.’s writings, each with a line under it saying where it came from. Page 3 is headed “Pain and Progress,” and it holds three: two pieces each marked as from a letter of 1950, and between them a few lines from his essay on Step Ten in the Twelve and Twelve. Today’s passage is the whole of the third piece. The book doesn’t say whom Bill was writing to, or whether the two pieces come from one letter or two.

In 1950 Bill was six years into a depression that, by Pass It On’s account, came and went for roughly eleven years, from 1944 until 1955, and was at its worst in the first two. Nell Wing, his secretary from 1950, remembered days when he sat in her office and “just put his head in his hands.” People wrote to him about their own depressions, and he answered with whatever he had tried. To one of them he wrote that pain, “quite as much as pleasure, is in God’s providence.” Pass It On doesn’t give that letter a date.

Years before 1950 he had already put the idea in writing. For AA’s tenth Christmas, in 1944, the first year of the depression, Bill sent a greeting to all members, from the trustees, from Bobbie (almost certainly Bobbie B., the office’s secretary) and from Lois and himself. Members, it says, had come in humbled by suffering, and pain was “not only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth.” Glenn C., in his life of Father Ed Dowling, sees in that greeting the Jesuit who had become Bill’s sponsor at the end of 1940, and he reads the touchstone as Father Ed’s advice to Bill.

Nine years later the Twelve and Twelve has a line much like it, in Step Ten’s review at the end of the day, where even a day of trying hard and failing counts for something. The remark that pain “was the touchstone of all spiritual progress,” Bill writes, came from “someone who knew what he was talking about,” and doesn’t say who. A touchstone was a dark stone used to test gold by the streak it left on it. More than fifty years later Ernest Kurtz, who wrote a history of AA, had only guesses. The same book, looking back in its essay on Tradition Three to AA’s second year, sees “two struggling, nameless groups of alcoholics trying to hold their faces up to the light.”

More on Bill’s years of depression: The quarter mile, in Number One Man. On the night Father Ed climbed the stairs to meet him: A sense of presence, in Some Bum from St. Louis.