The Opportunity to Communicate with our Creator and Know His Will by Dick B via Silkworth
GNN Note – If you want to know the history of the 12 Steps, true recovery from addictive behavior of any kind and the origins of how a very small group of Godly men brought a simple way to introduce the world to Jesus Christ, the library of Dick B, the many books he has written is a wellspring of valuable information. Highly, highly recommend. / END
And only a fool could read the Big Book, discover its over 400 references to God as Creator, Maker, Father of Light, Heavenly Father, and God, and still conclude that A.A.’s Eleventh Step discussion suggests praying to some mysterious god of one’s own making, rather than Yahweh, the Creator, Maker, Father of Light, God of our fathers, and Heavenly Father, to which Bill and Bob so often referred.
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The references were clearly to Yahweh, the God of the Bible, as they understood Him—as they sooner or later came to Him through Jesus Christ
Bill Wilson and Sam Shoemaker both spoke of a surrender to Yahweh our Creator. They indicated that, for a start, you need only surrender as much of yourself as you understood to as much of God as you understood. They said this long before the Eleventh Step was written.
In his own personal story in the first chapter of A.A.’s Big Book, Bill wrote of his surrender: There I humbly offered myself to God, as I then understood Him, to do with me as he would. I placed myself unreservedly under his care and direction (Big Book, p. 13, bold face added). Explaining that he (Bill) was then following the instructions that his sponsor Edwin Thacher (Ebby) had received from his Oxford Group friends, Bill told his distinguished audience at the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies: Ebby said, “Where does the religion come in?” And his friends went on to say, “Ebby, it is our experience that no one can carry out such a program with enough thoroughness and enough continuity on pure self-sufficiency. One must have help. Now we are willing to help you, as individuals, but we think you ought to call upon a power greater than yourself, for your dilemma is well-nigh insurmountable. So call on God as you understand God. Try prayer” (Lecture 29, The Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. W.W. Alcohol, Science and Society: Twenty-nine Lectures with Discussion as given at the Yale Summer School of Alcohol Studies. New Haven: Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 1945, p. 463) Thus instructed by Ebby, and though he told the following details in varying ways, Bill, the conservative atheist (as he then called himself), said in his 1954 autobiographical tape: “But what of the Great Physician? For a brief moment, I suppose, the last trace of my obstinacy was crushed out as the abyss yawned. I remember saying to myself, “I’ll do anything, anything at all. If there be a Great Physician, I’ll call on him.” Then, with neither faith nor hope, I cried out, “If there be a God, let him show himself.” The effect was instant, electric. Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably white light. . . . Then came the blazing thought, “You are a free man”. . . . “This,” I thought, “must be the great reality. The God of the preachers” . . . . I’d been incapable of faith and so, God’s help. . . . Yet, out of no faith, faith had suddenly appeared. No blind faith either, for it was fortified by the consciousness of the presence of God. . . . For sure I’d been born again (Bill W. My First 40 Years: An Autobiography by the Co-Founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2000, pp. 145-147). Many forget that only a few days before his Towns Hospital appeal to our Creator, as Bill then understood Him, Bill had gone to Calvary Rescue Mission, the rescue mission run by Sam Shoemaker’s Episcopal Church. There Bill made a decision for Christ at the altar or, as his wife Lois put it, “He gave his life to Christ.” And that trip to Calvary was made as the result of Ebby’s first declaration to Bill that it was there at the Mission that he (Ebby) had “got religion.” It was from that event at Calvary Mission that Ebby was able to declare to Bill that God had done for him what he could not do for himself. And this challenge was what propelled Bill to the altar at Calvary.
