A.A.’s Bill W. – Accurate AA History of
His Christian Upbringing and Deliverance
Dick B.
Copyright 2013 Anonymous. All rights reserved
Bill W.
[As a youngster in
Vermont, Bill had repeatedly heard the story of how his alcoholic grandfather
Willie had been converted to God through Jesus Christ on a mountaintop next to
Bill’s village. Willie was saved, said so, and never touched a drop during the
remaining years of his life. And Bill was no stranger to revivals, conversion
meetings, temperance meetings, the reliability of the Word of God, and salvation
teachings—the latter through his family and parental training, church, Sunday
school, confession and creeds, sermons, reading of Scripture, four year Bible
study, and daily chapel at Burr and Burton Seminary and at Norwich Military
Academy.
When overseas with the Army, Bill “stood in Winchester Cathedral with
head bowed, for something had touched me then I had never felt before.” He
said: ‘Where now was the God of the preachers. . . Where was he? Why did he not
come?’ He was there. I felt an all enveloping, comforting, powerful presence. .
. I saw on the faces of others nearby
that they too had glimpsed the great reality. Much moved, I walked into the
Cathedral yard. [An excerpt from Bill’s Original Story, which Dick B. saw,
copied with permission, and later bound into a covered volume]
Later:
(1) Dr. Carl Jung
had told Rowland Hazard that he had the mind of a chronic alcoholic and that a
conversion experience might heal him.
(2) Rowland Hazard
made a decision for Jesus Christ, joined the Oxford Group, and worked actively
with Rev. Sam Shoemaker.
(3) Rowland and two
other Oxford Group friends told Bill Wilson’s long-time drinking friend Ebby
Thacher the solution that Jung had proffered. Rowland taught Ebby about the
efficacy of prayer. He informed Ebby of a number of the Oxford Group’s
Christian principles. Then Ebby was lodged in Calvary Rescue Mission in New
York.
(4) Meanwhile, Bill
Wilson had already made his third visit to Towns Hospital. Dr. William D.
Silkworth, Bill’s psychiatrist, had a long talk. Silkworth had given Bill a
virtual death sentence contingent upon his continuing to drink. Dr. Silkworth,
a devout Christian and a long-time parishioner of Sam Shoemaker’s Calvary
Church, told Bill Wilson that the “Great Physician” Jesus Christ could cure
Bill.
(5) In this same
period, Ebby Thacher had made a decision for Jesus Christ at Calvary Mission, decided
to witness to Bill, visited Bill, and told Bill what had happened at the
Mission. Told Bill he’d “got religion” and that God had done for him what he
could not do for himself.
(6) Bill decided to
check out Ebby’s story and went to hear him give testimony at Calvary Church.
(7) Bill decided there
that since the Great Physician had helped Ebby recover, He might help Bill. And
Bill went to the Mission for help.
(8) Bill W. went to
the altar and accepted Jesus Christ at Calvary Mission, wrote in his
autobiography that “For sure I had been born again.” Wrote Dr. Strong he’d “got
religion.”
(9) Bill continued
to drink, became severely depressed, and thought, If there be a Great
Physician, I had better call on him.
(10) Bill staggered
on to Towns Hospital drunk and very depressed and was hospitalized.
(11) He said to
himself, “I’ll do anything, anything at all. If there be a Great Physician,
I’ll call on him.
(12) He cried out,
“If there be a God let him show himself.”
(13) He said the
effect was, instant, electric. Suddenly my room blazed with an indescribably
white light.
(14) He continued:
Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit
where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean
strength it blew right through me.
(15) The light and
the ecstasy subsided. Bill became more quiet. A great peace stole over him.
(16) Then he became
acutely conscious of a presence which seemed like a “veritable sea of living
spirit.”
(17) He thought,
“This must be the great reality.” And in one account, he said to himself: Bill,
you are a free man. This is “the God of the Scriptures.”
(18) He said, “I
thanked my God who had given me a glimpse of His absolute Self.
(19) He said that
faith had suddenly appeared—no blind faith—but faith fortified by the
consciousness of the presence of God.
(20) Briefly he
stopped doubting God and said “this great and sudden gift of grace has always
been mine.”
(21) He never drank
again.
(22) But he did have
his “hour of doubt.”
(23) Dr. Silkworth
appeared and sat by Bill’s bed. Bill told Silkworth what had happened. Bill
asked: “Doctor, is this real? Am I still perfectly sane?”
(24) Sikworth
assured him that he was sane. He said “You have had some kind of conversion
experience.”
(25) Ebby showed up
at the hospital, agreed with Bill that he and Bill had a release that was a
gift, real. He handed Bill a copy of a book by Professor William James. It was
called “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Bill said he had read it “all
day.”
(26) The James book
was filled with studies and stories of the cure of alcoholism at missions such
as the one founded by Jerry McAuley at 316 Water Street in 1872, and later (in
1882) at 104 West Thirty-second Street, known as Cremorne Mission. In 1886,
S.H. Hadley took charge of the Water Street Mission. Hadley had been converted
at Jerry McAuley’s Cremorne Mission, and in the years of service in Water
Street not less than seventy-five thousand persons came to the mission for
help. Hadley died in 1906.
(27) Before his
discharge from Towns Hospital in December of 1935, Wilson had been inspired to
help drunks everywhere.
(28) On his
discharge, he raced feverishly to the streets, the missions, the hospitals, the
Bowery, and flea bag hotels. He went with a Bible under his arm and insisted
that drunks give their lives to God.
(29) Bill’s story is
briefly told as follows in the Big Book: “Henrietta, the Lord has been so
wonderful to me curing me of this terrible disease that I just want to keep
talking about it and telling people.”
(30) But in his
first six months of witnessing, Bill was unable to get a single person sober.]
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