DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend History professor’s latest book, “Changed by Grace,” the chapter titled The changes which V.C. Kitchen saw in his life: I always drowned my train trips in tobacco smoke, for I was an inveterate smoker and lit my pipe the first thing in the morning, putting it out the last thing at night. When at times, I felt it threatening my heart and lungs, I had made the effort to cut down smoking. But that never lasted more than a few days and I had never succeeded in cutting it out. This time, however, I decided to see if the God of the Oxford Group had talked about could and would assist me. I asked His help rather then attempt the thing myself and something unusual happened. I did not strike a match all day and, to my surprise, felt no accompanying nervousness or discomfort.
It was the first time I had ever won a battle of this kind with what seemed to me an utter lack of struggle. I felt a strange sense of dependence on some power that was utterly dependable-a power within yet coming from outside myself-a power far stronger than I was.
I never saw a foaming glass of beer, for instance, without wanting it. I never saw an attractive woman without wanting her. I never saw a comfortable couch without wanting to lie down. Physically I found only two ways to handle desires. One was to satisfy the desire, which however always ended the desire but gave me no satisfaction in the end. The other way was to restrain the desire which proved even more unsatisfactory. As I got my bearings in the new Oxford Group life, however, I found that God had a far wiser and altogether different way of dealing with desire. He satisfied unsound desire by removing the desire itself and that has given me the only genuine satisfaction I have ever found.
After surrendering my life to God, for instance, I felt such peace and joy that my reciprocal, instinctive physical desire was to “celebrate as usual” by pouring out a generous libation of alcohol. I had actually started a bottle in the pantry when God intervened with my first real bit of guidance and told me that I could not serve Him as long as I was a slave to gin. I then and there admitted my inability to quit on my own will power and asked God to take charge of the matter. He did. I looked at the bottle and felt a distinct sensation of nausea. I was revolted at the very thought of a drink and desire for alcohol has never come back. God simply lifted the desire entirely out of my life, and I have found this new freedom far more desirable than any satisfaction or repression of desire I have ever experienced.
The soul change or psychic change which the Oxford Group promised did in fact happen, and as we see in Kitchen’s story, even the desire for alcohol could be conquered by that kind of spiritual transformation. Within the Oxford Group fellowship, the attempt to heal hard-core chronic alcoholism did not work all that well most of the time, but it did work better than anything else the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous had tried when they first began trying to devise their own methods for dealing with the problem. When I say that the Oxford Group method did not usually work well for the long term treatment of chronic alcoholism, we must remember that Bill Wilson, after getting a temporary remission from the urge to drink in the Oxford Group, was nevertheless only hanging on to his sobriety by the skin of his teeth until he met an alcoholic surgeon, Dr. Bob Smith, with whom he could join in working a program which the two of them quickly began modifying in ways which enabled them to work with alcoholics much more successfully.
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