The Life of Bill Wilson
We like our heroes strong and our saints holy; and if they were not these in life, then in death, you can be assured that time and tradition will make them so. When I visited Bill Wilson’s birth and burial place in East Dorset, Vermont several years ago I could see his canonization to AA sainthood was progressing right on schedule. Sober and grateful pilgrims visiting his gravesite now leave their sobriety medallions atop his tomb by the hundreds of thousands each year. Some well-meaning soul has even placed a lamp on the spot behind the bar where Bill was born. That spot has become sacred in the minds of many and the lamp marking it now has the feel of an eternal flame. Wilson the man is well on his way to becoming Wilson the holy myth and I think he would hate what’s being done to him.
Bill Wilson wrote a line in the Big Book for which he probably had himself firmly in mind. It reads, “We are not saints, the point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines.” Indeed, Bill Wilson was not a saint and the spiritual lines along which he grew were rather untraditional and often became somewhat of a scandal to AA’s new leadership. That leadership desperately wanted acceptance and respectability for both the program and its founders. Approved biographies in the past have carefully glossed over the “non-saintly parts” of Bill’s character so as not to upset the faith of his followers. Nowhere has this been more clearly attempted than in the cover up of his many extra- marital affairs. These affairs were well known to those in his inner circle but carefully hidden from public view. Wilson may well have been as addicted to sex as he was to alcohol. He had a young mistress who received some of the royalties from the Big Book and who moved into a house not far from his home. He was a frequent visitor. There was talk of his divorcing Lois and going to live with this former actress at another house she’d bought in Ireland. The recently published book “My Name is Bill” written by Susan Cheever lays much of this bare and while it may come as a shock and a scandal to many, she is to be congratulated for writing it. Truth will triumph over fiction no matter how well intended the fiction may be.
From the beginning, Wilson always saw Dr. Bob as the more spiritual co-founder of the new fellowship. Bob prayed and read his Bible daily. He had a library containing many books on spirituality that he often recommended and loaned to those whom he sponsored. Wilson, however, was always more skeptical of organized religion, read little and was far less traditional in his spiritual approach than was his Akron friend. Wilson did have several mentors from whom he learned much but from whom he always backed away in the end. Sam Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest and leader of the Oxford Group in this country, was an early confidant and confessor of Bill’s. Later, Fr. Ed Dowling, a Jesuit Catholic priest from St. Louis took on that role and Wilson even received instructions in the Catholic faith from Bishop Fulton Sheen. While he was attracted to the ritual, he wrote to Dowling saying, “I feel more like a Catholic, but I think more like a Protestant.” In the end, he became neither. He wrote to a friend, “The thing that still irks me about organized religion is their claim how confoundedly right all of them are.” Right or wrong, Bill was more comfortable traveling down his own path of spirituality.
Wilson was attracted to the work of Mary Baker Eddy and her Christian Science religion linking the workings of the mind to the healing of the body. He championed studies in niacin research thinking it would help alcoholics overcome addiction and believing he would be better remembered for his work in that field than he would for what he had accomplished in AA. He experimented with LSD hoping the drug might expand the consciousness of alcoholics and open them up to the higher state of spiritual awareness he had attained through his white light experience in Towns Hospital.
Part of Bill’s path included a belief in and the practice of psychic phenomenon. He claims to have received messages from spirits sometimes speaking to him in Latin and he had visitations from the spirits of some New England fishermen who had been lost at sea. When friends and visitors came to their home, Bill and Lois would often take them to what he referred to as the “spook room.” There, he and Lois would often use a Ouija board to contact departed souls and receive messages from spirits beyond the grave. He claimed to have levitated a table a few inches off the ground during some of these late night sessions and afterwards would often stretch out on his couch channeling messages from spirits believed to be present in the room.
In hopes of discouraging Bill from these practices, friends from a local AA group contacted C.S. Lewis the noted Christian writer in England and received a letter discouraging his practices in the occult in no uncertain terms. The letter had no effect on Bill. In the end, Bill wanted desperately to lead his own life and, for better or for worse, Lois was willing to journey it with him and put up with his hurtful infidelities. Perhaps if she had divorced him things would have been different, but this we’ll never know.
Bill’s lingering depression lifted somewhat after he turned AA over to the General Service Board in 1955 but he could never fully escape the heavy weight of the crown that marked him, “Founder of AA.” The principle of anonymity that he saw as so important for the maintenance of sobriety and for the achievement of spiritual maturity, this was denied to him by the members of the fellowship he founded. He could not go to meetings without being recognized and was always treated differently than the normal drunk. The disservice done to him in life is now being done to him as well in death. We will have our saints, perhaps so we need not look too closely at ourselves.
Cheever’s book may cause a storm of protest from those heavily invested in Bill’s canonization process, but it may also allow Bill Wilson to rest in the peace he so desperately sought. Bill was not a Man for all Seasons, but he was the right man for the right job at the right season. God uses us all as His instruments. A saint probably never would have gotten AA off the ground; but Bill, with all his character defects, has rocketed many into that “fourth dimension of reality” even if his own rocket may not have traveled as high or as straight as some might have wished.