Here is a piece found on the Hindsfoot Foundation website - clearly a site for those interested in spiritual growth according to Step 11. I present this page to spark interest in the subject, the Hindsfoot site, the Foundation's mission, this writing and its author: Changed by Grace: V. C. Kitchen, the Oxford Group, and A.A., by Glenn C. See http://hindsfoot.org/oxchang4.html

Seeking guidance in the Oxford Group was often a group activity. (Group guidance sessions were something which A.A. later on abandoned, but we need to talk about it a little here in order to give a full account of the Oxford Group practices which early A.A.'s encountered.) A number of Oxford Group members would gather together and have what they called a "quiet time." This had certain similarities to a Quaker meeting, where the members were seeking direct inspiration from the Inner Light. Under the leadership of George Fox, who began his preaching in 1647, the Quakers or Society of Friends rejected church buildings and ordained clergy, and gathered for meetings without any rituals or liturgy, sitting quietly until a member of the group felt the Inner Light urging him or her to speak God's word. The Quakers were extremely influential in the eighteenth century in both England and the English colonies in North America, and prefigured some of the practices of the A.A. movement later on, not only in seeking the Inner Light (what Richmond Walker in Twenty-Four Hours a Day called coming into contact with the spark of the divine within our souls), but also in the rejection of church buildings, ordained clergy, and rituals and liturgy. There are even interesting parallels between the way the local Quaker groups were coordinated with one another and the A.A. organizational structure.

It is nevertheless difficult to see any direct connection between the Quaker movement and the Oxford Group, or between the Quakers and A.A. We seem to be dealing with parallel developments arising out of certain common assumptions found frequently within the English-speaking Protestant Non-conformist tradition (going back to the seventeenth century and even earlier) being carried out in more radical fashion by the Quakers, the Oxford Group, and Alcoholics Anonymous. Arising out of that same matrix of assumptions, the twentieth-century Protestant Pentecostal movement and other modern Christian charismatic groups developed the idea that God could communicate directly with the human soul in an even more radical fashion, where one not only had people speaking in tongues during their worship services but also prophesying in the spirit in a way which they believed paralleled the great Hebrew prophets of the ancient biblical period.

I think it should be said that modern intellectuals are apt to comment almost immediately that believing that we are doing the will of God has lain behind the greatest religious atrocities of human history. They point out that the leaders of the Spanish Inquisition who tortured and burnt people at the stake insisted that they knew what the will of God was, and were simply carrying it out. The claim that we human beings can know things of that sort is the most dangerous thing in the world to let loose, or so these modern intellectuals believe.

Against that criticism, it should be said that the leaders of the Spanish Inquisition were legalists who were following a rule book, not prayerful people who were seeking the guidance of the Inner Light. The Quakers, who insisted on the principle of guidance so strongly, were complete pacifists who were peace-loving and gentle people.

One of the major goals of the Oxford Group, especially after it renamed itself as the Moral Rearmament movement, was to bring about peace between nations. The two principles of Absolute Unselfishness and Absolute Love provided a strong defense against any temptation to start burning other people at the stake, and the kind of guidance which they sought was a highly individualistic guidance, directed toward being more loving and less selfish in our individual daily lives, and directed against our human tendencies to attack other people, particularly in the name of intellectualized social and religious theories. The pietist strain in Oxford Group thought (coming from Frank Buchman's Lutheran pietist background) made them strongly dislike bickering and argument. Like the pietists in general, they sought to resolve differences by just keeping on praying until the group could reach a consensus upon which everyone could cheerfully agree. People who genuinely act like that do not go around burning other people at the stake.

The A.A. movement later on developed its own safeguards. The Third Tradition forbade the groups to discriminate against anyone, regardless of race, sexual preference, religious background, or any other issue of that sort. This means that A.A. people cannot engage in attacks on people of other races without a blatant disregard of the traditions, and must also welcome men and women of all religions into their meetings. For the same reason members cannot participate in things like the Spanish Inquisition or the creation of the Nazi death camps while following the true spirit of A.A.'s Twelve Traditions, nor can they be involved with any organized hate groups at all, no matter who a particular group's target might be. Furthermore, from the very beginning A.A. people have also intuitively understood that attacks on homosexuals were not allowed among the true people of God (as Dr. Bob put it when the first case came up, "what would the Master say?").

In addition, the Tenth Tradition stated that "Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues," which meant that "the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy." In practice this Tenth Tradition meant that the A.A. groups were forbidden to become involved in the perverted kind of supposedly moral campaigns which ended up in religious wars and religious persecution, and burning members of other religious groups at the stake.

So let us not be overimpressed by the modern intellectuals who argue that believing in divine guidance leads to the greatest wars and atrocities. The kind of religiously-motivated persecutors whom these intellectuals are afraid of -- and rightly so! -- are invariably legalists who are trying to save themselves by works of the law, not the people of true faith who seek only to sit in God's all-loving presence at the foot of the Throne of Mercy.

The first time V. C. Kitchen attended one of the Oxford Group's "quiet times," he did not seem to obtain any special divine guidance himself. Others in the group did, but at first he could not.

A.A. was not going to make any use of the attempt to achieve divine guidance as part of a group praying together, in the way that the Oxford Group sometimes did. But the idea of obtaining individual guidance played a major role in both of the two most important early A.A. books: in the Big Book which came out in 1939, and especially in Richmond Walker's Twenty-Four Hours a Day, which he began publishing and distributing in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1948.

As an Oxford Group member, V. C. Kitchen learned to start off each day with an hour spent reading in the Bible or some other book towards which God had guided him, followed by his own personal quiet time. (Notice that it does not have to be the Bible which we read in, as long as it is a book to which God has led us, which contains good spiritual teaching.) And he learned to make a careful assessment of what he thought God was guiding him to do, by attending group meetings and discussing it with the other Oxford Group people there. Slowly he learned to "hear" God in some way or other -- it is difficult to put the experience into words -- and he learned how to apply this guidance to his everyday life.

Notice that the goal in the Oxford Group quiet time is NOT to figure out ways of perverting religious legalisms in order to provide an excuse for persecuting other people. The goal is always for me, the one who is seeking guidance, to learn how to grow spiritually myself, regardless of what the other people around me are going, whether it is good or bad.

The A.A. people learned this lesson well, and turned it into one of the basic principles of their program. The only person whose life I am trying to reform is my own. That is what guidance is about. If I am still going around continually attacking and harassing other A.A. people, trying to get them to think and behave like I want them to, and continually starting up divisive arguments in A.A. committees and groups with my own know-it-all behavior, and playing seamy underhanded political games -- and believing that this is carrying out the spirit of the eleventh step -- I have still not gotten the foggiest notion of what reading godly books and engaging in quiet time and seeking God's guidance is really about.

Kitchen says that before he started having a quiet time every morning, he used to sit down instead and make an elaborate plan for his day's work. On his list there would be jobs that had to be completed, people that had to be seen, phone calls that he had to make, and letters that he had to write. Nowadays, however, he says that:^4.3

By doing this, Kitchen says, he now receives supernatural aid every day, not through using some magical Ouija Board or peering into a crystal ball or using tarot cards, but through simply developing his God-consciousness. The reason why he could not do this at first, he discovered, was because he still had to make a full surrender. He had to quit trying to be the captain of his own soul. He had to quit trying to do everything by will-power and clever strategies. As long as he was doing that, he was still trying to supply all the power himself. And he still continued doing that for a while, he said, after he first joined the Oxford Group, "even after I learned that power for moral growth would have to come from the outside." But gradually he learned to trust God (what the apostle Paul called saving faith), and once he was willing to let go and let God take care of things, he received all the guidance and power that he needed to live a full, rich, productive, and satisfying life.

One way we learned to feel God's immediate presence was through practicing a quiet time every day. But there were other ways to feel God's presence. There is an important passage in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 6:3, in which the prophet Isaiah described his vision in Solomon's temple. He saw the mighty throne of God, and seraphim with six wings flying about the throne and singing continually: "Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." This passage gets repeated, with various adaptations, in a vast number of Jewish and Christian liturgies, because it is so central to developing full God-consciousness. The entire universe, and everything in it, is filled with the divine glory. We can learn to feel God's majesty and power in and behind all the things of nature.

Kitchen says that he used to think that a beautiful sunset, for example, was just that, nothing more, some splendid colors that caused him to feel a certain kind of aesthetic pleasure if he looked at it. The sky, the ocean, the trees and mountains, and the animals and birds, were simply that and nothing more. But then he started to see them as the works of the mighty creator, and began to realize that this was God's hand at work which he was looking at. He says that he learned to see, with the poet Wordsworth, a divine presence everywhere and in all things:

The great medieval spiritual writer Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) said that "God was born" in me each time I learned see him, even in things like a tiny caterpillar crawling down a twig. In the Catholic tradition, one speaks of learning to develop a sacramental view of the universe: we discover that God is present in some hidden and mysterious way not only in the bread and wine of the communion service, and in the water of baptism, and in the rest of the seven sacraments of the Church, but in every part of the universe. Everything in nature is filled with the divine presence, and proclaims the infinite power and beauty which we can sense lying behind it. As the great Eastern Orthodox hymn declares to God every evening at the setting of the sun, when the western sky is filled with luminous crimson and golden light, "behold the universe sings your glory."

Many people, when they first come into the twelve step program, learn to feel God's presence in the world of nature in a new and extraordinarily powerful way, just like Kitchen did after he joined the Oxford Group. This is especially referred to, I have noticed, in Al-Anon writings, but A.A. people learn to feel it too. There is nothing wrong at all with newcomers who begin by regarding nature itself as their higher power as long as this is done in the right kind of way.

Regarding nature itself as our God will NOT work for beginners if nature is regarded as only a cold and sterile thing to be analyzed intellectually and turned into a set of automatic mechanical processes, where our job is to learn how to manipulate and control it by discovering the right set of scientific rules and laws. Most people come into the twelve step program suffering from frozen feelings -- no longer able to feel anything at all except for a dull pain and misery -- combined with a kind of control neurosis, where they believe that they can only be saved by learning how to obtain total control of their lives and the lives of everyone around them. They are completely locked inside their own heads, with a kind of morbid self-preoccupation which prevents them from genuinely seeing anything outside themselves, other than as objects which they are trying to manipulate and control for their own self-interest. If they combine all of this with the belief that they are "intellectuals" who are more intelligent than everyone else in the twelve step program -- people who need to think about the universe "scientifically" and "rationally" at all times and in all ways because of their superior intelligence -- then trying to regard nature itself as their higher power will only make their situation worse.

If I am a beginner, regarding nature itself as my higher power can only work if I learn to see nature as filled with beauty and life, and as something enormously grand and awe-inspiring, which was there before I came along, and will be there after I am gone, and is for the most part totally out of my power. I cannot make the spring flowers bloom when I want them to, nor can I control the flights of all the thousands of wild geese flying south for the winter. But I can view them with delight and feel the troubled waters of my spirit being calmed even as I behold their beauty. I need to learn that my job in life is, for the most part, to enjoy, not to try to control. Furthermore, if I can begin to understand that nature is filled with the power of life itself, I will be able to enter into a deeper kind of healing. There is an enormous healing power in nature, but the only way I can learn how to obtain its benefits is to learn how to quit standing in the way, so to speak. It will not be able to restore my soul if I am continually blocking its healing power by trying to control everything all the time. It will not be able to revive my spirit as long as I refuse to stop and look at the world outside myself because of my obsessive self-preoccupation, where all I am ever really thinking about all of the time is essentially me, me, me, me, me.

After we have made more progress in the twelve step program and are no longer just raw beginners, we will eventually begin to understand that nature (paradoxically) both is and is not God. We cannot, any of us, know God in his essential reality -- that is a fundamental article of faith among the orthodox religious teachers in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all three -- but nature itself is God's glory, God-as-he-makes-himself-known-to-us, the light of beauty which surrounds his throne. In the Jewish tradition, it is called the shekinah, the visible manifestation of the divine presence.

As St. Gregory of Nyssa put it in the fourth century, nature is not the essential core of the Godhead itself (the divine ousia), but is God's temporal energy (energeia), the power of the divine creativity as it is played out in the realm of space and time. Or to put it another way, God is the singer and nature is the song, God is the dancer and nature is the dance, God is the artist and nature is the work of art, God is the weaver and nature is the tapestry, God is the story-teller and the universe is the story being told -- where all of us are necessary threads among the tapestry of great beauty which is being woven, or essential characters in the plot of the great tale which is being told, or however we wish to construe this. When we are beginners in the twelve step program it does us no harm at all if we take the song of nature as our higher power, for if we listen to the divine song for long enough, we will come to know the singer of the song.

John Wesley at one point discussed the biblical passage which instructs us to "pray without ceasing." He pondered deeply about what this prayer should be. In the Eastern Orthodox hesychast tradition, for example, the proper prayer without ceasing is said to be an adaptation of the prayer of the publican in Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the Publican: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner." Wesley decided however that the best kind of prayer without ceasing was the prayer of Moses in Exodus 33:18, "I pray you O God, show me your glory." We should go about at all times looking with awe at the beauty and goodness in the world all around us, and seeing the grandeur and glory of the universe as God's garment.

Kitchen said that the best description in writing he had ever found of this kind of God-filled vision of the world was found in an article by Margaret Prescott Montague, entitled "Twenty Minutes of Reality":

To learn how to feel the presence of God, Kitchen says that we must also come into personal contact with one of the God-bearers, some other human being who has learned how to develop his or her own God-consciousness, and is actually living this new way of life. It cannot be learned from reading books. At the end of the work, Kitchen says that "if this book fails to bring you or some other reader to talk to me in person -- or to some other group member, minister or evangelist who can show you the way to relate your sins to the remedy" -- it will have accomplished nothing useful.

This is a vital principle which A.A. took over and built into the basic structure of its program. We commonly remind ourselves that "we are the only Big Book that most people are ever going to see." But it goes well beyond that. I must speak and act in such a way that newcomers can see the love and compassion of God reflected in me, however imperfectly at times. Love is not words in a book; it must be felt in person to be truly understood. No one can learn how to feel God's presence in any profound way except by being around people who have already learned how to feel God's presence.

But even more important in the A.A. program is the basic principle that my story is my message. The way I can communicate God-consciousness to someone else is by telling them my story. I must honestly reveal all of my flaws and inadequacies, and all the wrongs I have done. But I must also talk about the new world of hope in which I now live, and the way my life has been transformed by the power of God's spirit. And I have to be there for these newcomers to help them interpret what is happening to them at various points along the line, mostly by sharing some of my own experiences of similar things that happened to me, and how I dealt with them, as I attempted to walk in the will of God under the sunlight of the spirit.

So A.A. meetings require no sacred sanctuary. There are no ordained clergy or specially certified teachers, no elaborate rituals or liturgies. There is no melody of hymns or chants being sung at A.A. meetings. This is a curious thing, in fact, because most spiritual movements develop all sorts of music and chants, whether it is Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Native American religion, or what have you. What does happen is that one of the members stands up and tell the story of his or her life, or people simply take turns talking around the table, and sharing their experience, strength, and hope with one another.

The power of this is shown in the way that, in this odd manner, alcoholics quit drinking and drug addicts quit using drugs, and in each different kind of twelve step program, people start getting well and healthy again. The proof of the twelve step faith is that it works.

Many of the fundamental parts of A.A. belief came from the general evangelical tradition, and could in theory have first been learned by the founders from some other evangelical group, such as the Southern Methodists who put out The Upper Room meditational booklets. In fact, once they began breaking with the Oxford Group, they turned to those Methodist pamphlets, and we can see a vast number of specifically Methodist influences on the Big Book coming from that source.

Nevertheless, it was the Oxford Group where they first learned about the basic principles of evangelicalism, and some of the most distinctive features of A.A. practice still reflect their origins in the Oxford Group. We have seen this over and over again now in our perusal of V. C. Kitchen's little book. Studying the Oxford Group in the right kind of way can still help us to understand better the basic principles of the Alcoholics Anonymous program.

In our study of the Oxford Group, however, we must see it as it actually was, as a revival and revitalization of some of the most fundamental discoveries of the eighteenth-century evangelical movement. We need to look, not just at the world of the 1930's, but also at the world of the 1730's two hundred years earlier, when theologians like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley were first devising a new kind of psychês therapeia, a spiritually-based psychotherapeutic method for healing the human soul and producing real soul-change which was adapted to the world of modern science and technology. It is not just the Oxford Group alone which should be studied, but also the sources of that movement's most important ideas.

CHAPTERS:

1. The Oxford Group and the Eighteenth Century Evangelical Movement
2. Power to Heal the Soul
3. House Parties, Confession, Surrender, and Guidance
4. Quiet Time, Guidance, and God-Bearers
5. The Four Absolutes and the Dangers of Legalism
6. The Balanced Life: Seeking the Golden Mean
Notes to the chapters

For information on Professor Glenn F. Chestnut, D.Phil, see http://hindsfoot.org/resume.html