The Spiritual Heroes of 12 Step Recovery
Bill Wilson’s spiritual experience occurred in a hospital room in New York City where he was detoxing from alcohol for the fourth time. That experience opened Wilson to a whole new world of consciousness. It took him to a level of awareness he had never known before. As the Big Book says, “it catapulted him into a fourth dimension of existence.” For just a moment, he said,he fully felt the presence of God in his life - and he was never again the same. That experience was the beginning of his sobriety. It changed Bill’s life forever.
Just before he had his spiritual awakening, Wilson had been deeply depressed. He’d tried repeatedly to get sober and it hadn’t work. People were giving up on him and he was close to giving up on himself. His doctor William Silkworth said to Bill’s wife that he was a hopeless alcoholic: she needed to start thinking about looking after herself. Wilson wasn’t a religious man - and he’d always struggled with the idea of a personal God who cared about him. But then he came to the bottom-point in his life when there simply was no one else left to turn to. In desperation he turned toward God.
This is how he describes what happened to him in that hospital room. He says: "My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the very bottom of the pit. I still gagged very badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, 'If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!' Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy, which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me…that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, 'So this is the God of the preachers!' A great peace stole over me and I thought, 'No matter how wrong things may seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.'"
That experience in the hospital marks the beginning of Wilson’s spiritual awakening. He wasn’t exactly sure what had happened to him. He tells us that later he met his doctor in the hallway and told him what had happened. He asked Dr. Silkworth, “Was I just hallucinating? Am I going crazy?” His doctor told him that he wasn’t quite sure just what happened to him either – but he said that he was making more sense than he ever had before and whatever this thing was that had happened - he needed to hang on to it. Wilson followed his doctor’s advice.
The next day Wilson had a visit from his friend Ebby who brought Bill a present – it was a book he thought Bill might find helpful. Back in the early days of AA that book was read by a lot of people in the program. It’s called The Varieties of Religious Experiences. The author William James was a Harvard professor and is considered the Father of American Psychology. James’s book is about spiritual awakenings. Wilson wasn’t much for reading, and he said the book was one of the toughest he’d ever read – but he devoured it. He read the whole thing straight through and said he just couldn’t put it down.
In the book, James gives case histories of more than fifty people who recorded experiences like the one Wilson had. Several of the people described in the book were drunks – some of them were hopeless alcoholics who’d turned to God in similar states of desperation and then had a personal experience of him in their lives. As a result, they were changed and as a result of being changed, they stayed sober. Wilson was trying hard to understand what had happened to him that night and James’ book put it into perspective. James says there’ve always been people whose minds have been able to open to another dimension of reality. These are people who can at times experience a Presence and a Power and a Reality that’s different and higher and superior to what they experience in their normal waking moments. These people he called mystics. For William James a mystic was a person who has a direct experience of God rather than just a secondhand belief in God. Jesus was a mystic. St. Francis was a mystic. Brother Lawrence was a mystic. Bill Wilson believed that he and many alcoholics and addicts are mystics.
God knows, our minds travel pretty far and they can go to some pretty strange places under the influence of alcohol and all sorts of other things. But for most alcoholics it’s never enough. There’s never enough alcohol or enough crack or enough of whatever to satisfy what we’re looking for. Never enough. That hole in our souls that most addicts experience just won’t be filled by the booze or the drugs. But James said that if an addict could somehow have a powerful, first hand experience of God – like the one Wilson had – then he’d finally find enough. God’s the only one who can fill that hole – and it seems our souls won’t find peace until they find rest in him.
James was a scientist and he studied as many of these spiritual experiences as he could. In his book, he says there are four qualities that seem common to all the experiences people report when they have spiritual encounters like Wilson’s. And while James gives these four things somewhat technical names –we shouldn’t get scared off by that. We need a solid understanding of what a spiritual experience is since that’s the thing that’s going to get us sober and keep us sober.
The first thing James says in his book about these experiences is that they are INEFFIBLE. And that simply means they can’t be described precisely with words. Have a spiritual experience and you’ll never be able to put it into words. The experience is beyond the ability of words to communicate. And so the language we’re forced to use is always the language of metaphor. Wilson says, “It was as if I stood on a high mountain and a wind of spirit and not of air was blowing.” When the gospel writers tried to communicate the power of Jesus’ awakening when Jesus was baptized they too were saying it was as if “he saw the skies torn open and the Spirit coming down toward him like a dove.” Words can’t describe what happens when our consciousness shifts and the walls of everyday consciousness come down. So we do the best we can with the words we’ve got – but if we cling to the words of the metaphor and mistake them for reality then we’ll miss the real meaning they try to convey.
The second thing James says about these experiences is that they’re TRANSIENT. That simply means they’re brief. Have a spiritual experience and it will probably last only a moment. It’s a state of altered consciousness we move into - and it does its work -and then we’re back. It seems like we humans just aren’t built to stay in that state of consciousness for more than a few moment’s time. Maybe it’s just too much for us. Maybe we just need to know and experience the filling of that hole in our souls – but then we need to come back to the everyday. And so we come back because this is where our work really is. Every spiritual tradition that’s stood the test of time teaches us that.
The purpose of a spiritual experience is to change the way we live in this world – it’s not to keep us looking for a spiritual high. The last thing we need as alcoholics and addicts is to become spiritual junkies. We can go to the mountain top and we can get changed – but then it seems like God always sends us right back down the mountain - right back to where we were before – and he says, “Now go and do what you were afraid to do before – but now know that I am with you – and know that it’s all right.”
And that’s the third point James makes about spiritual experiences, and that is, they are NOETIC. And that’s a scientific way of saying: The experience doesn’t just produce a set of feelings – it brings about a way of knowing. Wilson said right after his spiritual experience that he knew something: Listen to him again: He says that 'No matter how wrong things may seem to be, (he knew) they (were) still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.'" Maybe I have only three days of sobriety – but I know things are all right. Maybe I have only fifty cents in my pocket and debts a mile high – things are all right. Maybe my wife or my husband or my girlfriend took off and my family doesn’t want to see me again – things are all right. Wilson said he knew that his drinking problem was over from that day forward.
The fourth and final quality James noted was that spiritual experiences are TRANSFORMATIVE: And that means they have the power to change us. People can do a 180- degree turn. St. Paul had a spiritual experience on the road to Damascus. He went from persecuting Christians to becoming their most articulate advocate. Bill Wilson’s experience transformed him from a hopeless alcoholic and a borderline agnostic to the sober founder of a spiritual movement that’s changed millions of lives and maybe even the future of spirituality.
The Big Book says the spiritual life isn’t just a theory, we have to live it. It has to become real. For most of us in the program, our spiritual experiences won’t be as dramatic as Bill Wilson’s or St. Paul’s. Most of us won’t be taken up to windy mountaintops or knocked off a horse. Our experiences will probably be slower and more gradual. They’re what William James calls, “the educational variety.” They’re more like waking up from a very, very long sleep. But whether our awakening’s sudden or slow the end result is always the same. In sobriety, we don’t just stop drinking and drugging. In sobriety, we wake up to God’s Presence in our life. We wake up and we see that God’s doing for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. We slowly become aware, like Wilson was aware, that “no matter how wrong things may appear in the moment, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and with his world.”