DID YOU KNOW?
by an anonymous
South Bend professor
The Oxford Group said to V.C. Kitchen, “We believe there’s a plan. Did it ever occur to you to get in touch with the author of that plan, asking Him directly what His plan is and what He wants us to do about it?”
Kitchen had his own ideas about a “spiritual environment,” but the idea of getting directly in touch with God himself—of asking Him questions and getting directions for conducting his personal life—seemed to him an absurdity. A.A. was not going to make any use of the attempt to achieve divine guidance as part of a group praying together like the Oxford Group sometimes did, that is, in the particular way Kitchen was describing in the above paragraph.
A.A.’s group conscience however, is supposed to be a discussion inspired by the spirit of the tables, taking individual quiet time and preserving the spirit of love and peace. Group conscience, as its name implies, is not intended to be a confrontational debate followed by a vote. But the idea of obtaining individual guidance through prayer and meditation played a major role in both of the two most important early A.A. books: The Big Book which came out in 1939, and especially in Richmond Walker’s Twenty-Four Hours a Day, which he began publishing and distributing for the A.A. group in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1948.
Seeking individual guidance, where a single person communed with God all alone, was also of course an Oxford Group practice. Kitchen learned to start off each day with an hour reading the Bible, or some other spiritual book towards which God had guided him, followed by his own personal quiet time. (Notice it did not have to be the Bible, as long as it’s a spiritual book to which God has led us.) And he learned to make a careful assessment of what he thought God was guiding him to do, by attending group meetings and discussing it with other people in his group.
Slowly he learned to “hear” God in some way or other—it is difficult to put the experience into words—and he learned how to apply this guidance to his everyday life. Kitchen said, “God is teaching me directly through my daily quiet time, in the morning, directly through passages in the Bible that He indicates, and through the books He guides me to read, through the group meetings and Schools of Life He guides me to attend, through the rich experiences He leads me into and through difficulties He uses to develop my moral fiber. In this instruction He brings me down to the very essentials of living. He wastes no words in superfluities. He tells me what I am living for and there is no mistaking it. He tells me when I fail to live that way. He tells me what the problem is and how to correct it. He tells me how to add to my stature physically, mentally and spiritually. Notice the goal of the Oxford Group quiet time is NOT to figure out ways of perverting religious legalisms in order to provide and excuse for persecuting other people.
The goal is always for me, the one who is seeking guidance, to learn how to grow spiritually myself, regardless of what other people around me are doing. The A.A. people learned this lesson well, and turned it into one of the basic principles of their program. The only person whose life we try to reform is our own. That is what divine guidance is about. If I attack other people trying to get them to think, believe or behave like I want them to, argue and play underhanded political games then I am not practicing the spirit of A.A.’s 11th Step: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
To be continued.
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