DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s Did You Know is excerpted from a South Bend History professor’s latest book, Changed by Grace: (2), God must be made flesh before we can apprehend Him as concrete, objective reality. Until we can see God before our eyes, mirrored in another living human being who is serving as the channel of His Grace, and hear and touch a living embodiment and witness of God’s grace, we are only talking words. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein explained, we are only playing language games when we open our mouths–speaking empty words which have no meaning–until we can connect them to concrete objects and events which we can see with our eyes and touch with our fingers.
It would be an extraordinary experience if alcoholics could do their fifth steps with some great channel of God’s grace, like Jesus, Moses, Buddha, or Mohammed, where we had a human being who as able to be flawlessly transparent to the divine power and grace. But in the twelve step program, it has been found that by doing our fifth steps with frail imperfect channels of His grace—men and women who attempt to make clear to us over and over, that “we are not saints”—we can concretize the grace and forgiveness and acceptance and love, and carry out a full and effective atonement, and be washed clean of our guilt, remorse and shame, and can enter once more into the divine presence and stand before the heavenly throne with robes washed white in the blood, sweat and tears shed for us by the God—bearers who came to pass on to us this gift of salvation.
(3), John Wesley spoke of an additional task which was made clear to him by his Aldersgate experience. He had to deal in some way with his festering resentments against the people in colonial Savannah, and all the hurt feelings which had been torturing him since he returned to England: “I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used and persecuted me.” This enabled him to gain the spiritual healing which later came to the Oxford Group. Leaders Frank Buchman and Samuel Shoemaker also discovered that had to be done, two centuries later, when they first underwent their own soul changes. Buchman and Shoemaker called it, “Making restitution.” Wesley could not make direct amends but could at least start praying for the leaders of the Savannah colony and other people there who had treated him so terribly. A.A. formalized this process in their eighth step (made a list of all persons we had harmed), and the ninth step (made direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others), these are A.A.’s amends steps.
It is a vital and important part in the process of healing troubled human spirits: the Big Book, “Alcoholics Anonymous” makes it clear that the Twelve Promises contained on pages 83-84 of the Big Book, do not fully start coming true until we are at least halfway through step nine.
(4) Wesley discovered that it was not necessary to have the kind of ecstatic, extraordinary, bright light experiences that A.A.’s founder Bill Wilson and Marty Mann (first woman in A.A. to achieve long-term sobriety), had. John Wesley simply “felt his heart strangely warmed” and that was all that actually happened. The subsequent pages of his journal make it clear that, as a “babe in Christ,” he was still going to have to make a long journey before he attained teleiosis, (full spiritual adulthood). In Appendix II (Third Edition) at the back of the Big Book, we see where the early A.A.’s likewise had to give a strong warning that most soul—changing, was a matter of a series of “educational experiences” extending over a long period of time. To be continued…
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