DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend History professor’s latest book, Changed by Grace: Bill Wilson, after getting a temporary reprieve from his alcoholism at the Oxford Group, was nevertheless barely hanging on to his sobriety until he met an alcoholic surgeon named Dr. Bob Smith. The two future founders of Alcoholics Anonymous quickly began modifying the Oxford Group’s spiritual program in ways that enabled them to work more specifically with chronic alcoholics. Richmond Walker, the author of the little black Twenty-Four Hours a Day meditation book had managed to stay sober for a while in the Oxford Group, but then he once again started drinking destructively, and did not obtain long-term sobriety until he joined A.A. Neither Ebby Thacker nor Rowland Hazard, who preceded Bill Wilson in the Oxford Group, was able to stay permanently sober until they joined A.A. (although one might argue that poor Ebby did not do well in A.A. either). Dr. Bob was never able to stay sober in the Oxford Group at all, even for just a short time. So I feel a certain amount of hesitation when reading works which claim that A.A. could improve its success rate if it would just go back to doing things exactly the way the Oxford Group did them.
What early A.A. did was focus the part of the Oxford Group teachings which seemed to give some relief to alcoholic cravings and learned how to make those methods work even better in terms of that one issue alone. This focus on the problem of alcoholism alone was what A.A, called its singleness of purpose. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that their primary concern was keeping chronic alcoholics away from the bottle, they rapidly began producing soul changes which could result not only in lifelong sobriety, but also in the development of an impressive amount of serenity, joy and all-accepting love. The modifications which A.A. made in Oxford Group practices did not weaken the spiritual fruits which the evangelical method was capable of producing, but—in my own estimation—seem to have created more in the way of positive spiritual changes, and more rapidly too, than any other version of the evangelical program that I have ever observed.
For in fact the truly extraordinary love and compassion which one saw in the best of the good old-timers in A.A., along with their indomitable courage and inner peace and delight in life, were the spiritual goals which the eighteenth-century evangelical movement had proclaimed as the fruits of authentic faith and grace. Evangelicals like John Wesley in particular would have acknowledged, that “seeing-is-believing,” and that in A.A. one saw what could only be described as the strong hand and mighty arm of God himself at work. As 1 Corinthians says, the greatest of all the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit is the grace which teaches us how to love: “faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.” One gains them in that order—faith first as the gateway to salvation, then hope, which gives us courage along the road, and finally love is the fruit they bear. It is a special kind of love, for the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and the word for love which the Apostle Paul used when he actually wrote that passage was agape.
There are three Greek words for love: eros, philia, and agape the first word (eros), refers primarily in most Greek authors to sexual lust and other forms of lusting after and desiring things, and is a natural drive (mostly physical and erotic) operating in the human beings and animals alike. The second word (philia) means to “like” someone, in the way we like our friends and family. When we are looking at the world from the perspective of philia, we love our friends and hate our enemies. This too is a natural human drive, just like eros. Agape love however is not a natural human or biological function in the same kind of way, and can arise only in the realm of Divine grace and the fullness of saving faith. It is the power, which only God can grant us, of participating in His Divine love for the universe and all the creatures in it.
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