The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

heard or read of wisdom and of truth seemed to be concentrated in those speakers,who more and more assumed for me the semblance of pillars of light.*I was still plunged in the same absorption about an hour and a half later as Iwas pacing up and down the lawn of the college quadrangle. “Well, what do youthink of them?” asked the companion by my side who had been with me at themeeting. Out of the depths into which I had been plunged only one thing cameup into consciousness—the story of the Japanese alleged to have said that he knewwhat God the Honourable Father and God the Honourable Son were, but did notknow what the Honourable Pigeon was. And so, “This is the Honourable Pigeon!”I replied.Those words, which sprang to my lips at that precise moment because of theirquaintness, expressed exactly the flavour which the most catastrophic event that canbefall any human being had for me. For me, to whom God had been successively abeing infinitely remote, though longed for, in my childhood, the wicked invention ofpriests in my adolescence, an idea to be philosophically analysed in my undergraduatedays and later, and most recently Goodness of which the notion was immanent inall genuinely moral intuitions—for me to come thus suddenly upon the reality andfamiliarity of God was, above all, a strange discovery. Indeed, when subsequentlyI tried to give the peculiar quality of all that I had been through for about a yearstarting from that afternoon, what I wanted to say seemed to me to be summed upbest in a jingle modelled after another jingle:So this is God!How very, very odd!So this is God!How very, very odd!Such was the personal aspect of an experience which must for everyone havevery personal characteristics indeed. Everything about that experience is interestingand helpful, even its most private peculiarities, which, therefore, deserve not only tobe mentioned but even to be described at length. But because this experience is, as Ishall show, such that it can preeminently become the possession of Everyman, it hasalso a preeminently public aspect. It is the latter that I propose to give in the followingpages in the language of Philosophy, of Psychology and of the imagination.In doing this I shall be offering Everyman the prescription for the medicine thetaking of which by him will save the world by making it sick and sane.UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, Leicester, December 1938* As I look back upon this first experience and ask myself what in it was the special mark ofextravenient saving grace, it is of this listening that I think. It was like something that came and tookhold of me from outside myself. At the same time, since it was a listening, and a very philosophiclistening at that, I felt and was more intimately I in it than I had ever felt and been in anything else.This same kind of listening has all the time helped me to grow in the experience.32