Alcoholics Anonymous. - The soul of sponsorship: the friendship of Father Ed Dowling, and Bill Wilson in letters

If you dont know the kind of person I am
and I dont know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephants tail,
but if one wanders the circus wont find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give yes or no, or maybe
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford
Stories That Could Be True
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 52.

CHAPTER 1
Father Ed Meets Bill W.

CHAPTER 2
Bills Story

CHAPTER 3
Father Eds Story

CHAPTER 4
The Story in Letters 1941 to 1944

CHAPTER 5
In Touch on the Run

CHAPTER 6
The Purple Haze: Depression

CHAPTER 7
Boundaries: Mr. AA and Bill Wilson

CHAPTER 8
Bill and the Catholic Church

CHAPTER 9
The Spiritual Exercises and the Traditions

CHAPTER 10
A Christmas Gift: The Prayer of St. Francis

CHAPTER 11
Is This God Speaking?

CHAPTER 12
20th Anniversary Celebration:
Gods Steps to Humanity

CHAPTER 13
A Softer, Easier Way: the LSD Experiment

CHAPTER 14
Dowlings Last Night with Cana and AA

APPENDIX A
Edward Bowling, S.J., A.A. Steps for
the Underprivileged Non-A.A.,
Grapevine, July 1960

APPENDIX B: Edward Dowling, S.J.,
How to Enjoy Being Miserable,
Action Now, Vol. 8, December 1954, No. 3

Appendix C
The Prayer of St. Francis

Appendix D
Bill W., The Next FrontierEmotional
Sobriety, Grapevine, 1958

Appendix E
The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of AA

Appendix F
Father Ed Dowling, S.J.s Biographical Sketch

Appendix G
Bill W., Humility for Today,
from The Language of the Heart, 255-259

We live in a funny world. What used to be Alcoholics Anonymous became, first, a Twelve-Step group and then part of the Recovery Movement. Many gained from those changes, but something was also losteven in what remains Alcoholics Anonymous.

There have been other gains and losses. Within A.A., some have moved away from the practice of sponsorship the great gift to the fellowship from its early Cleveland membership. In the wider world, as we emerge from the 1970s and 1980s decades that observers have named Me and Greed respectively there has been a perhaps greater loss: the ancient and indeed sacred understanding of friend. This is a 1990s book, a book about friendship.

The co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, although both Vermont-born Yankees, were two very different individuals. Bill became a pushy New York promoter; Bob, a reserved midwestern surgeon. As many have observed, if they had met in a bar, they would probably not have chosen to drink together. But because they met while trying desperately to stay sober, and because they found that they could do that only together, they gave the world a fellowship that has saved countless lives.

To a casual observer, Bill Wilson and Father Ed Dowling had even less in common. Although loosely Protestant in background, Bill had been raised without any religion. In prep school, in fact, in his despair over the death of his beloved Bertha Banford, Bill had decided that the universe made no sense. Too lazy to become a real atheist, he would later describe himself (and others) as We Agnostics.

St. Louis-born and street-wise Eddie Dowling, meanwhile, not only came from an urban, immigrant Catholic background, he was a Catholic priest. And, worse than that to most Yankee-oriented Americans, he was a Jesuit that mysterious Society of the Popes loyal shock-troops, generally regarded by people of Bills background as cunning, devious, and treacherous.