Fr. Bill Wigmore
CEO of Austin Recovery

Before there was a Big Book, there was a Good Book. And before there was an Alcoholics Anonymous, the first recovering drunks in Akron and New York went to their Bibles to find the spiritual path that would lead many of them to recovery. As active members of the Oxford Group, they tried to base their daily lives on the Group’s Four Standards: Absolute Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness, and Love. These were the spiritual yardsticks by which they took their inventories, made their amends, and checked daily for God’s guidance.

The Four Absolutes were deduced from the spiritual qualities demonstrated in the life of Jesus, the only man they believed to have lived them perfectly. Oxford Group people didn’t expect to become perfect but they were willing to grow along those same spiritual lines. When they came up short at the end of each day, they grew in spiritual humility and tried practicing the principles again the following day . One day at a time, they grew in the likeness of their Creator. Absolute Love may have been the fourth and final standard, but it was the one toward which the other three pointed and towards which all of the struggling drunks were drawn. After all, it was “a program of attraction.” The love they had sought in a bottle had let them down and nearly killed them; now they went searching desperately of the real thing.

In studying their Bibles, Oxford Group members were directed to three readings in particular to help them shape their new spiritual lives. These were Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Letter of James, and the Thirteenth Chapter in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, better known as “The Love Chapter.” Since they didn’t have a Big Book or even the Twelve Steps to guide them, those first recovering pioneers searched these scriptures to find their spiritual truth.

If you’re not familiar with the Love Chapter, or if it’s been a while since you’ve studied it, you might spend a moment reviewing and reflecting on Paul’s powerful and challenging words. Maybe even try reading them through the eyes a newly recovered alcoholic back in the 1930’s who had no steps to guide him but knew there was something missing deep inside his own soul. Paul wrote:

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 its own way. It is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.

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 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.

Someone who researched the history and practices of those first alcoholics-in-recovery told me that after their weekly Oxford Group meeting, they would go home and try to practice the Love Chapter and begin to make it a reality in their lives. “Love is patient and kind,” Paul had said, and they knew they were neither. So for that week they would practice being patient and practice being kind. I’m sure they failed as badly and as often as you or I, but they “kept coming back.” Next week, it was on to “Love does not insist upon its own way” and “it isn’t irritable or resentful” either. So, for the next week, they tried their hand at those as well.

And don’t you know, that just as with us, they failed to achieve perfection again and again. But the far deeper lesson they needed to learn, they learned. That lesson was how very much they needed God to come into their lives and help them in their struggle. They were incapable of staying sober without God and they were equally incapable of loving without Him.

The Oxford Group, especially through their emphasis on the Four Absolutes, tried to build a whole, new world. They sought a world where Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness, and Love would become a reality in them and then spread to each life they touched. They followed Gandhi’s advice to, “become the change you want to see in the world.” They followed Jesus’ directive to, “remove the beam from your own eye before removing the splinter from the eye of your neighbor.” Some would say that in their effort to change the world, the Group failed. I guess those same people would say that Jesus failed and Gandhi failed – and in a sense those people would be right. We all fail – our world remains deeply flawed - especially when it comes to love. Not one of us gives or receives the love we were made for, the love we each crave. That love can come to us only from God – but when it comes, God shines His love through us, and, at least for a moment, the whole world changes. Like the Big Book says, “We have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.” And like the Good Book says, “The kingdom of God is now among us.”

Many years ago, I heard a woman share her recovery story and she said some words that I’ve never forgotten. She said that, in the final analysis, her addiction boiled down to a “love disorder.” She said she was made to be loved and to love, but alcohol and her own egoism kept her from both. Dr. Bob summed it up pretty well when he said, “Love and service are our code.”