by Bill Wigmore

Fr. Bill Wigmore
CEO of Austin Recovery

I once met a man who got sober before the Big Book was published. The Big Book came out in 1939; but during the four years prior to that, alcoholics met as members of what the Oxford Group affectionately called: their “Alcoholic Squad.” They huddled together sharing their stories and recovering from their addictions by practicing the spiritual principles of the Oxford Group and by reading the Group’s spiritual literature. They recovered through the same basic method people still recover through today – by changing.

One piece of literature these folks found really helpful in bringing about their much-needed change was the 13th Chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Not yet having the Big Book, they used this, and other scripture passages, to understand what their spiritual change should look like, so they would know when it happened to them.

This chapter from Paul is sometimes known as “The Love Chapter.” The alcoholics who read it back then were all desperate cases. They needed to find something in their lives that would change them and make them feel better than booze had done or they knew they’d soon be going back to their old ways.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on having its own way....

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I grew up, I gave up childish ways. For now we see as in a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

That fellow I met explained to me how those early drunks used this Love Chapter to help them change. He said they’d meet weekly as a group and study it – study it one phrase at a time – and as they studied and learned what love was really about – then they tried to practice it, taking it home and putting it to work in their lives one phrase at a time. “Love is patient and kind,” Paul says. And these guys said: they weren’t that – in fact, they were far from that. So all week long they practiced being patient and they practiced being kind.

• Patient when things didn’t go their way.
• Kind when they wanted to say something un-kind, the way their razor-sharp tongues had always cut people down before.
• These guys were not saints – but now they were willing to grow along these new spiritual lines.

And so each week they’d come back to their Oxford Group and report how they’d done at practicing these new principles in all of their affairs. Sometimes they’d succeeded and sometimes they fell flat on their face – but they kept coming back and they kept trying to grow and they kept trying to change.

Then they’d read Paul’s next lesson and off they’d go to put it to the test.

• “Love is not jealous or boastful” - They discovered they were both.
• “Love is not arrogant or rude” - They found they’d been arrogant and rude for years.
• “Love does not insist on having its own way.” - They had to spend more than a few weeks practicing that one!

And so these lessons in love kept rolling out, week after week: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” The guy said that by the end of a few months – both he and the people in his group had started to change. As they practiced love – Love slowly started working its way into their hearts and into their lives. Love started changing them – and pretty soon, they started liking the way Love felt – and just like addicts, wouldn’t you know: they wanted more of it!

Paul writes, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I finally grew up, I gave up my childish ways.” Growing up is what recovery is really all about. It isn’t just about quitting drinking and drugging! Recovery’s about growing up and growing through some of the things we all avoided through our long and painful detours into addiction. Perhaps, like Paul says in his closing, “the greatest of these things we avoided is Love.”