The Spiritual Heroes of 12 Step Recovery
Controversy followed Frank Buchman all of his professional life. Some loved and some hated him. His defenders viewed him as a relentless fighter for a new and badly needed wave of practical, American-style spirituality while critics saw him as hopelessly “ego-centric” and a threat to traditional Christianity. He left his mark on the fields of religion, psychology and world politics – he was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But what seems most amazing to me is that the man who did even more than Bill Wilson to shape and form the principles and the Steps of AA is so little known within the fellowship and his many contributions so rarely acknowledged by people in recovery who quite probably benefited most from them. All of this is, of course, no accident. Buchman’s name and his contributions were carefully and intentionally expunged from the official record of AA by the founders, much like the existence of a crazy uncle is denied by a proud family. When AA chose principles over personalities, Buchman’s personality may well have been the one they most wanted to forget.
(The next three articles in this series will attempt to trace the role Buchman played in the origins of the AA program. What must be recalled from the outset is that when Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob and most of the first 100 alcoholics came into the fellowship seeking recovery, the fellowship they came into was not AA, it was the Oxford Group founded by Frank Buchman.)
Frank N.D. Buchman was born of Pennsylvania Dutch stock on June 4th, 1878. He attended Muhlenberg College and then the conservative Mount Airy Seminary. He was ordained a Lutheran minister but showed no great promise as either an orator or a scholar. In fact, he was criticized by classmates for being ambitious and for usually exhibiting a preference for enjoying the finer things in life. Perhaps it was to counter some of these criticisms that he chose a first assignment in the inner city where one of his duties was to run a hospice for unemployed, young men. That’s where the origins of AA can first be traced. Characteristically, it all began with a resentment. Frank was accused by hisboard of directors of spending too much money feeding the men and exceeding his food budget. Buchman became indignant and quit the position immediately embarking on a grand tour of Europe with money from his perhaps co-dependent parents. What’s critical for us is the keen observation Buchman made about the effect his resentment had on his spiritual condition. The longer he nursed the resentment, the more distant and detached he felt from God. Both his anger and his consequent depression deepened unbearably as he slowly trekked across Europe finally arriving at a conference he planned to attend in Keswick, England. It was there in 1908 that Buchman had his spiritual awakening. A woman was giving a sermon on the power of the cross and Buchman said: “I began to see myself as God saw me, which was a very different picture than the one I had of myself…. I realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness, had eclipsed me from God. I was the center of my own life. The big “I” had to be crossed out…. There was no longer the feeling of a divided will, no sense of calculation and argument, of oppression and helplessness; a wave of strong emotion following the will to surrender, rose up within me…. It produced a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had been poured into me.”
Buchman surrendered both his will and his life to God that day and the effect and the power of that surrender would stay with him for the rest of his life. But as with the program, the surrender drove Buchman into taking action – the action was forgiveness. He immediately went to his room where he wrote letters of amends to each of the members of his board. His letters were all the same:
My dear friend,
I have nursed ill-will against you. I am sorry. Forgive me.
Yours Sincerely,
Frank
Atop of each letter he included the first lines from an old hymn that summed up his new found and more humbled state of consciousness:
When I survey the wonderous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died.
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride
Buchman said he never heard a response from the six men to whom he made his amends; but his response from God was immediate. Just as the surrender of his pride in the little church brought about an increase in his conscious contact with God, the writing of the amends letters deepened his sense of “Presence” still further. If you’re starting to see the outlines of the first several steps here, wait till you see what happens the next day. Buchman is at breakfast with a young man who was also attending the conference but who was considered a “difficult case” and was, as we might say today, “not getting with the program.” Buchman shared with the young man what had just happened to him: how his pride and his anger had blocked him from God, how he surrendered that “blockage” and felt God’s power and presence come into his life and how the amends he made further increased that closeness. This “sharing” by Buchman of his own faults and his own story brought about an admission from the young man of a similar “blockage” and a similar process of transformation followed. The chain of carrying the message from one “blocked soul” to another had begun. It would go out from there in an ever-widening circle that would eventually touch the whole world.
Buchman returned to the States and his early work centered on the universities. He began to look on the chain of conversion described above as an “experiment” for which he was always in search of finding a still broader and broader sphere of influence. His was not to be a program of attraction; it was rather one of radical and personal evangelism. Beginning at Penn State University and then moving on to Yale and Harvard and Princeton, Buchman began repeating and widening the experiment. His style of “sharing” sobered up an alcoholic who was the local bootlegger at Penn State, a man quite appropriately named Bill Pickle. Like many who would follow, Bill responded to Buchman’s personal style of confessing his own faults and then drawing out a similar admission from the man to whom he “confessed.” Young men and women were particularly attracted to Buchman attending group meetings where the formula was used on greater and greater numbers. Buchman and his followers were not only interested in a man or woman’s drinking – they were interested in anything and everything that separated them from God or from their neighbor. The angrier and the more separated the case might be, the greater the challenge. Unfortunately for Buchman, controversy surrounded some of the sharing that was going on among the students since it was ocassionally of a sexual nature and was more than some of the conservative administration and faculty would approve. He was asked to leave Princeton and moved to England where he was given a more open and receptive hearing.
Buchman’s experiment attempted to tap into what he considered the awesome power of first century Christianity. He originally called his group “A First Century Christian Fellowship” with favored scriptures drawing from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6 and 7), the Love Chapter of Paul (First Corinthians, 13) and the Letter of James. This might be a good place to stop and assign the above as homework for the next month. Read those chapters and begin to see the AA program laid out in its original.