First Reading: Carl Jung wrote a famous reply to a letter from the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W. In his reply, Jung discussed alcohol as an expression of a person's need for God. Jung believed that a spiritual awakening--the replacement of alcohol with a spiritual expression--was necessary for recovery. Jung talked in the letter about Rowland H., whose recovery indirectly sparked Bill W's recovery. Rowland had been a patient of Jung years earlier. Jung writes:

[Rowland H.'s] craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God...

I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil...

You see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison...[1]

Second Reading: The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in our affairs.[2]

God commands Jonah to go to the great city of Ninevah and denounce the people there for their wickedness. Jonah does what any sane person would do: he flees in the opposite direction from Ninevah. Fast. In an effort to get as far away as possible from both Ninevah and God, he boards a ship bound for lands far away. God sees where he is headed and whips up a mighty hurricane. With the waters thundering over the ship and the ship just another crushing wave or two from breaking apart, the crew members gather all those on board and draw lots to find out who is to blame for the calamity. (What a marvelous response!) The lot falls to Jonah. "Now what have you done to have incurred the wrath of this hurricane?" the crew members ask. Jonah confesses that he is trying to escape God. "What shall we do with you?" they ask. "Take me and throw me overboard," Jonah replies, "and the sea will go down. I know it is my fault that this great storm has struck you." Unwilling to throw him overboard, the crew tries to row as hard as they can for shore. They soon realize they won't make it, and in desperation, throw Jonah overboard. The sea immediately stops raging.

Almost as soon as Jonah hits the water, a great fish swallows him at God's command. Jonah remains in the fish's belly for three days and three nights. Jonah prays to God from the belly of the fish:

I called to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me;...
Thou didst cast me into the depths, far out at sea, and the flood closed round me;
all thy waves, all they billows, passed over me.
I thought I was banished from they sight
and should never see thy holy temple again.
The water about me rose up to my neck;
the ocean was closing over me.
Weeds twined about my head in the troughs of the mountains;
I was sinking into a world whose bars would hold me fast for ever.
But thou didst bring me up alive from the pit, O Lord my God.
As my senses failed me I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer reached thee in thy holy temple...[3]

Then God speaks to the fish, and it spews Jonah onto the dry land. God asks Jonah a second time to go to Ninevah and denounce the people there. This time, Jonah follows God's command. With the wisdom gained in the pit of the whale's belly, Jonah knows he better embark on his life's journey. He goes to Ninevah and delivers God's message. The people take his message to heart and repent, earning God's complete forgiveness.

In Star Wars, the formative myth of my youth, Luke Skywalker is a little quicker to heed the call to his life adventure than Jonah. Bored with his life at his aunt's and uncle's place in the middle of nowhere and feeling unfulfilled, Luke continually lobbies them to allow him to leave. The tragic murder of his aunt's and uncle's by the evil Imperial Storm Troopers finally liberates him for his adventure. His adventure soon leads him from the horror of his aunt's and uncle's murders to another abyss aboard the Imperial Death Star. Luke, Princess Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacka escape an onslaught of storm troopers by jumping into one of the Death Star's trash compactors. They find themselves trapped in the liquidy, smelly, horrible trash. A terrifying snake-like monster grabs Luke by the legs and pulls him down in the ooze. Luke and the monster battle, with Luke once and awhile able to come up for gasps of air. Luke, like Jonah, faces death in a great, disgusting belly. The monster lets Luke go just as all four walls of the compactor start compressing. Luke and his comrades realize they will soon be crushed and struggle in vain to stop the relentless movement of the walls. Only the timely intervention of their robot friends saves them from being compacted. Luke goes on from his experience in the trash compactor and on the Death Star to become the person he was destined to be, to become the person he really was on the inside. He eventually becomes a great Jedi master and devotes his life to the service of others.

Joseph Campbell spent much of his life studying the hero's journey in myth. The hero's journey is a constant theme in myths across the world and the ages. The pattern of the hero's journey is similar across time and place. On the threshold of the journey, the hero must first leave his or her everyday world in search of something that is missing, something that is deeper and more important--just as Luke leaves the familiarity and routine of his aunt's and uncle's quiet homestead to search for his destiny. The hero figuratively and sometimes literally travels far from the realm of his or her ordinary life. Typically, the journey takes the hero on a descent into the abyss, into the hell of the whale's belly or the trash compactor. There, the hero is confronted head-on with the reality of life's pain and loss and the inevitability of death. And there, in the very depths of hell itself, the hero finds what's missing. In Campbell's words, the hero comes in contact with the Source of life, with God, or, in the words of Star Wars, with the Force. The Source of life has been present forever inside and around the hero; it takes the descent into hell to make the hero realize this truth. The hero's quest, says Campbell, is "to find that inward thing that you basically are,"[4] or are part of. Descending into hell and facing death also give the hero another important insight: as powerful and strong as we are individually, there is much in the universe beyond our control. Certainly Luke and Jonah had this realization in the trash compactor and the whale's belly.

That moment of contact with and recognition of God is the moment of illumination or conversion. Life will never again be the same for the person who has had this experience. Like Jonah, the hero then is spewed out of the abyss a new, transformed person. The old self is dead, replaced by a new, more mature, wiser self. The hero has died and been resurrected.
Part of the wisdom gained in the hero's conversion experience is the realization that life's true meaning lies in helping others. The hero recognizes the bonds that connect him or her with all life and with God. Inevitably, the hero's new life focuses on helping others--as Luke helps the princess and the others struggling for justice against the tyrannical Empire, or as Jonah saves the people of Ninevah.

Like many young men in 1917, Bill Wilson became personally acquainted with alcohol abuse as he prepared to fight "over there" against the Germans. For the next seventeen years, alcohol was the one constant in his life. After his return from the Great War, he studied business and law between binges. He decided to make a go at business, and soon found himself on Wall Street in the great bull market of the 1920s. His drinking--and, for a time at least, his success on the market--became pretty constant. Then came Black Monday in October 1929, and most of his wealth evaporated instantly. In response, he went out and had a drink. A Canadian friend who still had some money left rescued Bill and his wife. He invited Bill up to work for him, but Bill's boozing got him fired in pretty short order.

For the next five years, Bill was forever between jobs. The time between drinks, though, was getting ever shorter. Bill's wife supported him with the meager earnings from her department store job. With increasing frequency, Bill stole money from his wife to pay for his booze. He routinely had the morning shakes. His pre-breakfast drink of gin and six bottles of beer usually got rid of the shakes--for awhile anyway.

Every now and then, Bill would realize that the bottle was killing him. He would resolve to quit drinking. He and his wife were filled with hope for a few days, maybe a few weeks, but before long Bill always found a reason to have just one more drink. And of course, one drink would lead to many more. Full of remorse, horror, loneliness, self-pity and hopelessness, Bill would sink further and further into his addiction. Forty pounds underweight and physically nearing his end, Bill even tried several hospitalizations in rehabilitation centers. After one hospitalization, he stayed away from alcohol for three or four months before relapsing. Bill later wrote of this time of one failed attempt at sobriety after another: "Now I was to plunge into the dark, joining that endless procession of sots who had gone on before."[5] Bill had finally hit bottom.

Then an old drinking buddy came to visit him. Bill, sitting in his kitchen, offered his buddy a drink. "No," said his friend. With the help of Rowland H., whom Jung referred to in the letter cited earlier, Bill's friend said he'd found religion and a way of staying sober. As he shared his story, Bill finally felt a glimmer of hope. If it could work for his friend... His friend told Bill to choose his own conception of God and cultivate a relationship with God. This more open way of viewing God liberated Bill from his traditional understandings of God, with which he had long struggled. He began to view God not as a distant, punishing figure but as a benign, ever-present Higher Power. As he did so, he felt in the presence of this Higher Power. Bill went back to the hospital, de-toxed, and offered himself to God. For Bill, that act of turning his life over to God was a moment of conversion. From that moment on, in spite of the challenges and sorrows with which he was confronted, Bill always felt the loving presence of God. He made a list of his errors and shortcomings, shared the list with a friend, and set about making amends to those he had harmed. Bill began the process of moving beyond his self-centeredness. As he did so, he began to realize some peace and serenity. In recovery, Bill found a purpose in life. And he found some wholeness, which I believe is another word for recovery. Sobriety, of course, did not solve all of Bill's problems. He still had moments of despair. In such moments, he found the company and wisdom of fellow recovering alcoholics to be enormously helpful.

Early in his recovery, the thought occurred to Bill that maybe he could help others, as his friend had so profoundly helped him that day they talked in his kitchen. With the help of others, Bill W. (as he became known), founded Alcoholics Anonymous and created the Twelve Steps that have become the basis of AA and many other recovery programs. Multitudes of people since then have used the Twelve Steps to find sobriety and serenity, including many people in our Fellowship. Bill wrote in the Big Book of AA, "Each day my friend's simple talk in our kitchen multiplies itself in a widening circle of peace on earth and good will to [all]."[6]

Do you see the pattern of the hero's mythic journey in Bill W.'s story? During the years from World War One to the beginning of his sobriety in 1934, his alcoholism led him down, down, down into the abyss of shattered health, destroyed relationships, and utter hopelessness. At the very bottom, he finally and unexpectedly found the source of life and what had been missing in his life. For Bill, they were one and the same thing: God. He realized at last that he was not in control of everything, could never be completely in control no matter how hard he tried. In a moment of illumination and conversion, he turned his life over to God. The experience transformed him. His old self died, giving birth to a new, more mature Bill W. He returned to his life completely different: rather than focusing only on himself, he gave of himself to others through AA.

Bill W.'s story is an inspirational metaphor for anyone embarking on the hero's journey called recovery. It is not that every recovering person's story exactly mirrors Bill W.'s. His story is a signpost, an illustration of the rhythm and pattern of the recovering alcoholic's or addict's heroic journey. As Joseph Campbell says, the hero's journey does not reveal the truth itself, but a path to the truth.[7] Bill W.'s story and the archetype of the hero's journey reveal a path to recovery and wholeness.
What's more, the Twelve Steps, coming so much out of Bill W.'s experience and founded on the insights of ancient religions,[8] also reflect the rhythm and pattern of the hero's journey. The Twelve Steps start at the abyss, with the painful acknowledgment that one cannot control one's addiction--or all that much else in life for that matter. The recovering person then recognizes and names the Source of Life, the holy Presence, the Higher Power. She establishes an on-going relationship with that Higher Power. Then, guided by her Higher Power, she changes her life by admitting her wrongs--another trip to the abyss for many of us--and making amends where possible to those she has hurt. And finally, like Jonah and Luke and Bill W. and all of the other heroes, she reaches out to others her helping hand.

The Twelve Steps and the recovery process are built on deep mythological themes. They echo the Hero's Journey that all of us heard told in so many stories. Campbell says that myths are important because "they grab you somewhere down inside"[9] and reveal some basic truths about your life. I believe that the mythic dimension of the Twelve Steps is a very significant reason the Twelve Step program is so powerful and successful.

I also believe that each of us can learn from the Twelve Steps' wisdom--whether we are in need of recovery or not. The hero's journey beckons each and every one of us. As Campbell says, the hero's quest is "to find that inward thing that you basically are." The hero's quest is to lead an authentic life that reaches out to others in love and concern. The dedication ceremony we had this morning for Jacob Leasum expresses the hope that he will lead an authentic life, that he will in his life undertake the hero's journey. That is my hope for each one of us, from Jacob to the oldest member of our Fellowship.

Copyright 1997. This sermon should not be reproduced without the consent of its author.

[1]Mel B. New Wine: The Spiritual Roots of the Twelve Step Miracle (Minneapolis: Hazelden, 1991), pp. 12-13.
[2]Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1988).
[3]Jonah 2:2-7 (The New English Bible translation).
[4]Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 139.
[5]The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc., 1976), p. 8.
[6]Ibid., p. 16.
[7]Campbell, p. 150.
[8]Mel B., p. 158.
[9]Campbell, p. 148.