The Intolerance Antidote

August 29, 2010

On September 25 of this year, as many as 10,000 walkers and supporters will descend on Philadelphia’s Penn’s Landing for the 5th annual Recovery Walk. The television network A & E is a co-sponsor this year and they will be sponsoring delegates from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each of these delegates will have over ten years since they stopped imbibing a substance that was making their lives unmanageable. We hope to have a total of 500 over ten year sober folk in what we are calling the Honor Guard. This Guard will rim the path of the walkers, encouraging them as they start the brief walk from Front to 5th and Market St.
Among the glories of the 12 step fellowships is their insistence that the Higher Power that can and does deliver us from the tombs of our addictions be one of our own understanding. A Muslim, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Buddhist, Hindu…even an atheist or an agnostic can sit side-by-side in a 12 step meeting without any cause or reason for dissension about belief systems. The eminently practical spiritually inspired modifications of behavior the program suggests, not only delivers us from lives of torment and dysfunction, but also to lives of happiness and fulfillment. And there is absolutely no reason one has to have an addiction problem to work the 12-step program. Being powerless over a substance and/or how our individual world was going was the incentive most of us in recovery had to take this spiritual path. But as I look at our world bereft with suicide bombings and the vandalizing and protesting the building of houses of worship, of a cab driver being stabbed merely because of his faith, of a rally in Washington where as many as 10,000 people go to support a fanatically proud and vocal proponent of divisiveness and intolerance, it seems our world collectively is approaching the individual bottom the addict must hit before he is willing to change.
So what of these steps? Where did thy come from? Well ironically enough as this huge throng of recovering people are about to descend on Philadelphia the City of Brotherly Love, 102 years ago a Lutheran minister from Allentown, Pa. found himself in a church in England where a female descendant of William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia, was giving a sermon on the cross of Christ. This minister named Frank Buchman heard those words and knew he had resentments in his life that he had to give up…that they stood between him and He who was hung from that cross.
So to the six board members who had pulled the plug on his wonderful projects for the poor and homeless of Philadelphia, Frank Buchman sent apology letters. His realization that in order to change or help others, one must first purge himself thus became a cornerstone of a vibrant, active spirituality that really would change the lives of people from all over the world. The self-cleansing was necessary in Buchman’s scheme so that the flow of God-given guidance would not be blocked. Daily quiet time and guidance would become something near as central to his life as was breathing. And very early on, his guidance told him it was necessary to work one-on-one with people - that the time had come for the preacher man to come down from the pulpit. A la Francis from Assisi and John Wesley from England, Buchman knew that it was people and not congregations who had to experience the wonder and love of Christ.
Buchman’s program began to grow in popularity and numbers and by the mid-20’s they would finally get a name – they’d be called the Oxford Group. That was their name when, in 1931, a wealthy New Englander named Roland Hazzard with a crippling alcohol addiction, after having relapsed after being treated for near a year by his psychiatrist, Carl Jung was told that he was hopeless unless he had a life-changing spiritual experience. Hazzard joined the Oxfords because that was exactly what they were selling. That was still their name when in 1934 a drunk named Ebby Thatcher was spared a jail sentence if he agreed to go through the Oxford Group program Hazzard and a friend laid out for him. Ebby then followed the same Oxford suit they had - that to keep this thing you have to take the message to another - and the other that he found was a New York drunk named Bill Wilson. On December 11, 1934, Wilson took his final drink.
Near 6 months later, Wilson’s first success in helping get someone else sober would take place in Akron, Ohio. The second drunk was named Bob Smith and although he’d been in the Oxford Group for a couple of years, until a fellow who shared the same affliction wrapped the Oxford program around the admission of powerlessness to that bottle, it had done him no good. By the late 30’s, the alcoholics would break from the Oxfords and they took the essence of the program they were leaving and would make it the more concrete and workable 12 steps. And as Wilson and Smith and their followers would take to the byways and highways pulling drunks out of the gutter, the Oxfords would become Moral Rearmament. As MRA tried to instill in the politicos of their time the necessity to re arm morally, though his efforts were hailed by many as positive, his fellowship began to slip in popularity.
Still Buchman and his group had great successes. They were the main player in resolving a crippling miners strike in England in the late 1940’s. Same was true for a railroad strike in Germany. Their concept was that in practicing absolute, honesty, purity, unselfishness and love in our dealing with the other, optimal outcomes would be achieved. But perhaps his greatest triumph was his influence on a lady named Madame Irene Laurie who had been one of the fiercest French resistance fighters in WW II. As she was about to walk out of a post-war peace talk because she heard someone speaking German there, Buchman stopped her and begged the question of what would happen to any chance of peace if she were to leave. The story has it she went to her room for two days to pray and meditate. She then opened her speech by telling the German people she apologized for her hatred of them. Willy Schmidt, the first post WW II prime minister of France said her speech more than anything else, opened the way for the post war peace in Western Europe.
Funny the difference in the speeches coming out of Lower Manhattan. On the news last Sunday night they had about five minutes of coverage of the people protesting the Manhattan mosque and then an almost parenthetic mention and 20-second stop of the pro-mosque crowd protesting about a block away. The medium is the message indeed. It is political now. All over right wing zealots are taking primary spots from less radical Republicans. Doubtless even more of the already waning progressiveness will be seeping out of the Democrats. One has to read the wind that is being inherited by the intolerant if he wants to keep his seat. When keeping that seat, hoarding what we have, and blindly stuffing our appetites became more important than honesty, unselfishness, purity and love, the fabric of our government and our society began to unravel.

The world was a different place 60 years ago as the 12-step movement, especially Alcoholics Anonymous, was spreading to every corner of the globe. And even though Buchman’s group’s influence and effectiveness that had been so effective that he was on the cover of Time magazine in the mid-50’s, by the late 60’s it was practically gone. His major failing, had to do again, with that ever present evil called pride. Buchman did not set up a system like AA’s 12 traditions so the fellowship would lose their dependence on their leaders. Some bad policy decisions in the 60’s and the unfortunate premature death of his hand-picked successor, a brilliant British author named Peter Howard, had MRA almost disappear from the map.

However a lot of MRA work was still being done and around 2000 the group re-emerged as Initiatives of Change. They are now headquartered in Washington DC and Richmond, Va. and are doing great interfaith work all over the world.
Among the reasons AA outlived MRA was precisely because they avoided politics and outside issues. But the essential aim of the steps and the program is to discern and then do as the Creator wills. What is going on in Lower Manhattan and the Middle East and a lot of other places in the world is for certain far removed from the will of God. To utilize a proven method to effect freedom, love, honesty and open-mindedness in a world in such desperate need for exactly those things, is certainly the will of a Higher Power of my own understanding.
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Recovery. For a person, for a world.

In a little sightseeing brochure I put together for the delegates to the Recovery Walk I mention Penn Treaty Park where William Penn, in 1682 signed a treaty with the Delaware Indians. Under Penn’s statue is the following quote.

He, who is not governed by God, will be ruled by tyrants.

The tyrants of greed, prejudice, fanaticism, intolerance, hate, ignorance, inequity, poverty, disillusion, and addiction govern far too much of America and our world in this third century after Christ.

There is a better way. Please God that we find it.
James F McGovern Jr.


Jim McGovern’s website 12stepsforall.com has information regarding a 12 step class for addicts and non-addicts. His book Twelve Steps to Change a World is available on the site.