Father Ed and AA's Bill W.
Presentation given by Father Edward Dowling, S.J. at the 20th anniversary
of A.A., held at St Louis, in 1955. It includes a first introduction,
Bill W's introduction, and Father Ed's presentation
by Robert Fitzgerald, S. J
The Catholic Digest April 1991
Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was down. His feet hung
over the end of the bed that nearly filled the small room he and his
wife, Lois, had rented above the 24th Street AA Club in New York. It was
a cold, rainy November in 1940. Lois, who supported them both with a job
at a department store, was out. Bill was wondering whether the stomach
pain he was feeling was an ulcer.The walls were closing in. Thousands of
copies of the Big Book were waiting in a warehouse, unsold. A few people
were sober, but Bill was frustrated. How could he reach all who wanted
help? Nine months earlier, a gathering of rich New Yorkers had come and
gone with applause for the young movement, but no money. Hank P., after
complaining for half a year, finally got drunk in April. Rollie H., a
nationally famous ball-player, sobered up but broke AA's policy of
anonymity by calling the press for a full name-and-photograph story.
Eventually, Bill fell into the same trap as Rollie; he began calling
reporters, too, wherever he gave talks. Now he was becoming the center of
attention. He had just returned from Baltimore, where a minister had
asked him to face the self-pity in his own talk. He was depressed. What
if he--five years sober--were to drink?
It was 10 p.m. The doorbell rang. Tom, the Club's maintenance man, said
there was "some bum from St. Louis" to see him.
Reluctantly, Bill said, "Send him up." To himself, he muttered, "Not
another drunk."
But Bill welcomed the stranger, all the same. As the man shuffled to a
wooden chair opposite the bed and sat down, his black raincoat fell open,
revealing a Roman collar. "I'm Father Ed Dowling from St. Louis," he
said. "A Jesuit friend and I have been struck by the similarity of the AA
twelve steps and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius."
"Never heard of them."
Father Ed laughed. This endeared him to Bill. Robert Thomsen tells the
rest of the story this way in his book, Bill W.:
"The curious little man went on and on, and as he did, Bill could feel
his body relaxing, his spirits rising. Gradually he realized that this
man sitting across from him was radiating a kind of grace....
"Primarily, Father Ed wanted to talk about the paradox of AA, the
'regeneration,' he called it, the strength arising out of defeat and
weakness, the loss of one's old life as a condition for achieving a new
one. And Bill agreed with everything..."
Soon Bill was talking about all the steps and taking his fifth step
(telling the exact nature of his wrongs) with this priest who had limped
in from a storm. He told Father Ed about his anger, his impatience, his
mounting dissatisfactions. "Blessed are they," Father Ed said, who hunger
and thirst."
When Bill asked whether there was ever to be any satisfaction, the priest
snapped, "Never. Never any." Bill would have to keep on reaching. In
time, his reaching would find God's goals, hidden in his own heart.
Thomsen continues:
"Bill had made a decision, Father Ed reminded him, to turn his life and
his will over to God ... he was not to sit in judgment on how he or the
world was proceeding. He had only to keep the channels open ... it was
not up to him to decide how fast or how slowly AA developed.... For
whether the two of them liked it or not, the world was undoubtedly
proceeding as it should, in God's good time."
Father Ed continued quoting Bill's work to him. No one had been able to
maintain perfect adherence to the principles. None were saints. They
claimed spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection.
Before Father Ed left, he pulled his body up, and leaning on his cane he
thrust his head forward and looked straight into Bill's eyes. There was a
force in Bill, he said, that was all his own. It had never been on this
earth before, and if Bill did anything to mar it or block it, it would
never exist anywhere again.
That night, for the first time in months, Bill Wilson slept soundly.
Thus began a 20-year friendship nourished by visits, phone calls, and
letters. Both men spoke the language of the heart, learned through
suffering: Bill from alcoholism, Father Ed from arthritis that was
turning his back to stone.
Bill turned to Father Ed as a spiritual sponsor, a friend. Father Ed, in
a letter to his provincial, noted that he saw his own gift for AA as a
"very free use of the Ignatian Rules for the Discernment of Spirits for
the second week of the Spiritual Exercise."
Thus Father Ed endorsed AA for American Catholics with his appendix in
the Big Book and his Queen's Work pamphlet of 1947. He was the first to
see wider applications of the twelve steps to other addictions, and wrote
about that in Grapevine (AA's magazine) in the spring 1960 issue. Bill
added a last line to that Grapevine article: "Father Ed, an early and
wonderful friend of AA, died as this last message went to press. He was
the greatest and most gentle soul to walk this planet. I was closer to
him than to any other human being on earth."
For his part, Father Ed counted many gifts from Bill. He had told his
sister, Anna, that the graces he received from their meeting were
equivalent to those received at his own ordination. And he thanked Bill
or letting him "hitchhike" on the twelve steps. In 1942 he wrote to Bill
that he had started a national movement for married couples to help each
other through the twelve steps: CANA (Couples Are Not Alone). He used the
steps to help people with mental difficulties, scruples, and sexual
compulsions.
When chided by an AA member about his smoking, Father Ed stopped with
help from the twelve steps and wrote to Bill that as a result he was
becoming as "fat as a hog."
Next, he tried to use the twelve steps with his own compulsive eating.
One story of his struggle ends with Father Ed one night eating all the
strawberries intended to feed the whole Jesuit Community. He became so
sick he had to receive last rites. He went from 242 to 167 pounds and up
again like a yo-yo. He asked Bill to start an 00 ("obese obvious") group.
Often Father Ed spoke of being helped by attending an open AA meeting and
wrote to Bill that AA was his "lonely hearts club." In his last 20 years
his ministry changed radically due to AA and his friendship with Lois and
Bill. He gave CANA conferences for families, using the twelve steps, once
a month from 1942 to 1960. He cheered Lois on as she started and
continued with Al-Anon. Father Ed rejoiced that in "moving therapy from
the expensive clinical couch to the low-cost coffee bar, from the
inexperienced professional to the informed amateur, AA has democratized
sanity."
He wrote his superior to free up another Jesuit, Father John Higgins, who
was recovering from mental illness, to work with Recovery Inc., a group
Dr. Abraham Low had started for people with mental problems. Those groups
for mental illness were especially close to Father Ed's heart as there
was a history of depression in his own family. He called people to be
wounded healers" for each other.
Was there anything from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius in Father
Ed's gift to Bill? Father Ed pointed out parallels between the Spiritual
Exercises and the twelve steps several times, but Bill had written the
twelve steps before he ever heard of the Spiritual Exercises.
Father Ed did give Bill a copy of the Spiritual Exercises in 1952,
underlining the "Two Standards" meditation. When Father Ed met Bill,
moreover, he had called him to the place where he bottomed out and
surrendered to his higher power. Father Ed believed that this was the
place where humiliations led to humility and then to all other blessings.
In saying this, he paraphrased Ignatius's closing prayer of the "Two
Standards" meditations.
And this, Father Ed maintained, was where the Exercises become most like
AA. He went a step further and invited Bill to make choices based on
poverty and humiliation rather than on money, power, or fame.
This suggestion helped Bill Wilson turn down an honorary degree from
Yale. On the packet of letters dealing with his decision, he wrote: "To
Father Ed, with gratitude." In the letter to Yale he stated his reasons
for declining the honor:
"My own life story gathered for years around an implacable pursuit of
money, fame, and power, anti-climaxed by my near sinking in a sea of
alcohol. Though I survived that grim misadventure, I well understand that
the dread neurotic germ of the power contagion has survived in me also.
It is only dormant and it can again multiply and rend me--and AA, too.
Tens of thousands of AA members are temperamentally like me. They know
it, fortunately, and I know it. Hence our tradition of anonymity and
hence my clear obligation to decline this honor with all the immediate
satisfaction and benefit it could have yielded."
This, then, is where Father Ed met Bill that rainy night long ago, in the
small room where bottoming out opens up to life, where humiliations lead
to humility--and to all other blessings.
Contact:
The Legacy Group of Alcoholics Anonymous © 2005