DID YOU KNOW?
This week, “Did You Know,” is excerpted from a South Bend history professor’s latest book, Changed by Grace: People can know that they have left the dark cave of illusion and denial, and come out into the sunlight of the eternal Good when those who saw nothing around them except dark and hateful things, suddenly see themselves surrounded by all sorts of worthwhile things. This is the fundamental change that takes place in Jonathan Edwards’ kind of conversion experience.
Oxford Group people rediscovered that it does happen. And those who have seriously worked A.A.’s Twelve Steps also know that it genuinely does take place. Genuine spirituality had to be based upon real personal experience in order to be credible. But the experience of walking out of the darkness and entering the sunlight of the spirit was one that both Oxford Groupers and A.A. people could experience for themselves, in ways and manners where it was impossible to deny that something truly extraordinary had occurred.
Let us look for example at the description of the change that occurred in Marty Mann, the first woman to obtain long term sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous. The year was 1939, and Marty had hit her spiritual, emotional and psychological bottom. For the first time in her life, Marty literally saw red; a description she’d always thought was a literary figure of speech. The whole room was red. Little blood vessels were actually breaking in her eyes. “I was raging and wanted to kill!” Seething with rage, Marty tore around her room at the Bellevue Sanitarium, pounding her fists together, furiously plotting revenge. “I’ll go out to the store and get two big bottles of whiskey, get good and drunk and come back here,” she panted, “and I’ll kill that guy (psychiatrist; Harry Tiebout), and wreck the place! That’ll show them!”…At the very moment she was about to fling herself out the door and race down the stairs, Marty glimpsed out of the corner of her eye “that damn book,” Alcoholics Anonymous, lay open on her bed. “In the middle of the page was a line that stood out as if carved in raised block letters, black, high, sharp—‘We cannot live with anger.’ That did it. Somehow those words were the battering ram that knocked down my resistance.”
The next Marty remembered, she was on her knees beside the bed. The coverlet was wet with her tears. She’d been praying, though it had been so long since she’d prayed that she didn’t think she remembered how. And she knew beyond the shadow of doubt that a Presence she came to call God was in that room with her. The room was alive, and she was a different person. “The prison walls crumpled and the pure, radiant light of God streamed in. This wasn’t religion, this was freedom! Freedom, from anger, fear, remorse, guilt, shame and depression; she looked at the world through a brand new pair of glasses. No longer, did I need alcohol to show them. To be continued…
> Read More Information About Us
> More Articles Written By Our Staff
- Diving Into The New Year - January 16, 2026
- Step Back in Time at The Old Fort During ‘Nouvelle Annee’ - January 16, 2026
- Fort Wayne Senior Completes Local Hiking Challenge 125 Times - January 16, 2026