A Universal Search

Today’s two sentences come near the end of the Big Book’s pages on Step Eleven, in the chapter “Into Action.” They close a few lines about the morning. A member whose church asks for a morning devotion keeps it, the book says; one with no church might learn a few set prayers by heart, and a priest, minister or rabbi can suggest helpful books. The two sentences read just the same in the loan copy, the draft sent out for comment early in 1939, though the lines around them were rewritten from “you” to “we.”

Bill W., who wrote at least ten of the book’s opening chapters, had come to these words the long way round. Before Ebby T. sat across his kitchen table in November 1934, he says in his own story, on page 11 of the book, he doubted that religion had done the world more good than harm; the wars over it, and the burnings, sickened him. Then Ebby told him plainly that God had done for him what he had been unable to do alone, and Bill could find no other power in the man that might have. “It began to look as though religious people were right after all.”

He wrote the book in the middle of an argument between the two sides. Fitz M., whose father was an Episcopal minister in Maryland, wanted a strongly religious book; Hank P. and Jim B., both former atheists, wanted one that leaned on psychology and left the spiritual side for later. As umpire, Bill wrote in 1957, he had to go “pretty much down the middle,” settling on spiritual language that was neither churchly nor only psychological.

The book expected some of its readers to have been where Bill had been. In “The Family Afterward,” it suggests a family with no church might look into one, and adds: “Alcoholics who have derided religious people will be helped by such contacts.” In the loan copy the family “may do well to” make contact, and the alcoholic is only “sometimes” helped. The printed book left joining to the family’s own wishes, and dropped the “sometimes.”

Later Bill turned the line on himself. Introducing the Rev. Sam Shoemaker at AA’s convention in St. Louis in July 1955, he wondered how many hours some of them, himself included, had spent “criticizing the men of religion.” Yet from those men, he said, had come all they knew of things spiritual. Shoemaker, a clergyman, then turned the same eye on his own side. A lot of religious people, he told the members, are like people “sitting around a railroad station thinking they are on a train.”

More on the argument over God in the Big Book: How It Works, in Keep Coming Back. The night at the kitchen table is the film, The Kitchen Table.