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“A
Squandered Spiritual Inheritance.......
When
Bill Wilson brought “ [The] Varieties of Religious Experience” into the mix as an
intellectual justification for the AA Program, he appears to have
missed one of the basic points of the William James text: authentic religious traditions are always rooted in
some transformative experience—not
belief or faith. Unfortunately, Wilson’s spiritual naïveté had
him taking the unfortunate path of most religions: turning a powerful
individual experience of “God” (let’s give the benefit of the
doubt and allow a little leeway with the vocabulary) into a
collective belief or faith in God. He interpreted his white-light
Towns’ hospital experience with the limited set of conceptual tools
at his disposal—thus, the Big Book and the quasi-cult it spawned.
But,
as James’ demonstrates, other equally sacred interpretations of
such transformative events are possible without all the baggage we
associate with fundamental religion at its worse. Religion as
spiritual experience
is not the exclusive province of the God-worshipper. So, a reformed
AA can embrace its roots in a spiritual experience
that heals the alcoholic while encouraging its members to freely
interpret—or not interpret—the experience any way they want. (Dr
Bob had his Jesus; Jimmy Burwell had his atheism.) Within this progressive environment,
recovery becomes an empirically-driven questioning of what it is the
Twelve Steps were designed to do
rather than what they say
with Wilson’s limited theological vocabulary.
“Back
to Basics,”( absolutely no
connection, Mary!) Dick B., the author of “Gresham’s Law &
Alcoholics Anonymous” (“24 magazine,” 1976)[and see Gresham's Law and Alcoholics Anonymous – a critique] & others falsely
assume that long ago there was some authentic, powerful AA teaching
and that all we need to do to solve all of the Fellowship’s current
problems is to get back to the garden. No such teaching ever existed
as AA; there are no good ole days. What the AA pioneers did deliver
was a fragmentary teaching and a challenge, an extravagant challenge,
for future generations to put the pieces together for themselves.
That challenged has been ignored, and a spiritual inheritance has
been squandered. Fortunately, the story continues…”
Cheers
The
Fellas (Friends
of Alcoholics Anonymous)
