Going With the Flow

Today’s passage is the first half of Step Eleven, as the Twelve and Twelve, AA’s 1953 book of essays on the Steps and Traditions, sets it at the head of Bill W.’s essay on that Step. Three pages on, Bill gives beginners a prayer to start meditating with, and it opens by asking to be made a channel of God’s peace. He called it a classic. Its author, he wrote, had been “rated as a saint” for several hundred years and, though no alcoholic, had been through “the emotional wringer.”

The saint didn’t write it. The earliest copy anyone has found was printed in Paris in December 1912, unsigned, in La Clochette, the little magazine of a league devoted to the Mass, as a prayer to say during it. In 1915, with the First World War on, a French marquis sent it to Pope Benedict XV, and in 1916 the Vatican’s newspaper printed it in Italian. Around 1920 a French Franciscan put it on the back of a picture of St. Francis, under the title Prayer for Peace and with no author’s name, which is probably how the saint’s name came to be attached to it. By 1927 it was being printed as his: in French by a Protestant movement, and that January in English, in a Quaker magazine in Philadelphia, the earliest English printing found so far.

In AA it became Bill’s own. At AA’s convention in St. Louis in July 1955, after a talk by the Rev. Sam Shoemaker, from whom, Bill wrote, he and Dr. Bob had first taken most of the principles of the Steps, Bill closed his part of the session by reciting “the prayer of Francis.” In January 1958 the Grapevine, AA’s monthly magazine, printed “The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety,” drawn from a letter Bill had written to a friend who also suffered depressions. One autumn, Bill wrote, a depression with no rational cause had almost taken him “to the cleaners.” By the hour he stared at the prayer’s line about comforting rather than being comforted. “Here was the formula, all right. But why didn’t it work?”

His answer was that he had always leaned, almost entirely, on other people and on how things went, for standing and a sense of safety. Only free of those props, he wrote, could he love the way St. Francis loved. A few paragraphs on, likening that love to a circuit, he wrote that “the real current can’t flow” until the leaning is gone at its roots. When Bill died in January 1971, the prayer Pass It On calls his favorite was said at a private memorial three days later at Stepping Stones, his and Lois W.’s home.

More on Bill’s depressions: The quarter mile, in Number One Man. On another prayer AA took up from outside: The Serenity Prayer, in Keep Coming Back.