"Minneapolis 2000,": The International Convention of A.A.: June 29 - July 2, 2000

Transcribed Copy by: www.bridgegodfellowship.org

Huntsville, Alabama
Minor editing by Dick B.'s son, Ken

[(Introduction by "Don":) Good morning, everybody, I am a grateful alcoholic from Greenville, S.C. My name is Don. I belong to the world famous Summit Group in Summit County. Ohio is where A.A. was born. There is a wonderful, rich history of A.A., and I started studying and learning about it, and made some of the pilgrimages a couple of years ago, and I found a web site that has much of this information, too. And I found a very prolific author who has captured the essence of the spiritual history of our fellowship and has committed so much of it to books, which I have in my collection and which I treasure. I am sure his journey is nowhere near done, but he carries the message in writing in a way that I have not found other people to do. It is with great honor and pleasure that I would like to introduce Dick B. (Applause . . .)]

[Dick B.'s Address on the Six Major Roots of Alcoholics Anonymous:] I'm Dick. I am a recovered alcoholic, from Maui, Hawaii. I have had the pleasure the last couple of days. As far as I know this is a first to actually have a historical display at a national convention. A good one, a big one, a tremendous resource here. This is the kind of thing I have dreamed about seeing for a long time, and it is here, and I am certainly grateful for the people who have worked so hard to put it together.

Last couple of days, I have had the pleasure of listening to a lot of young dudes who grew old in A.A., graciously old. Mel [B.] was here yesterday and had us all in laughter, and if I were ever going to live for 50 more years, I would like to be in the same position that he is. However, I am an old dude that got young in A.A. I did not get in until I was 60, and the best years of my life, truly, have been the last 14.

It was not that way at the beginning. I had a nine-month drunk and then a week's blackout. I came bounding into A.A., got a sponsor, got a Big Book, had grand mal seizures at my 9th meeting, went into a treatment program, from there to the VA nut house for a couple of months, and from there I went to Vacaville State Prison, which I like to think of as a health facility because they were treating Charlie Manson there at the time I was there. The long and the short of it is--I had to get well. Things were worse, as they often are in early sobriety, than they were at the end, although the last drinking was pretty ghastly.

A young man, now dead of alcoholism, said to me shortly before the convention in Seattle [the 1990 A.A. International Convention], "Dick, did you know that A.A. came from the Bible?" And having gone to meetings intensely for four (4) years, I said, "No," that I sure did not. He said, "Well, why don't you read DR. BOB and the Good Oldtimers. And I did. And I was astonished. That got me to read Mel's Pass It On and A.A. Comes of Age; and I realized that we had a rich history that I just did not hear about at meetings. Didn't even know about the books. But what I found was missing were the details. Yes, we came from the Oxford Group. Yes, we got a lot of information from Sam Shoemaker. Yes, Anne Smith was "the mother of A.A." Yes, the Bible was the source of our basic ideas. Yes, Quiet Time was a must. Yes, they read a lot of books. And what were they? And what did they say? Because I had a feeling that A.A. was founded on a rock! And I believe that today. I will let you decide what the rock is, but the rock essentially is truth, and it works.

I don't hold with those people that say, "Well, I don't know how it works, it just works." It works because it is founded on a rock. Dr. Bob knew that, and Bill knew that. Dr. Bob said many times that our basic ideas came from the Bible. Bill and Bob both said that the underlying philosophy of A.A. was the Sermon on the Mount--and Emmet Fox did not write it! So, what we are going to do today? 10 years ago, I wrote a lengthy book. I think I even showed it to Mel. I did not know what I was talking about, and Frank Mauser, our [General Services] archivist, told me that. He said, "Dick, you don't have to tell everything you know." Since I did not know much, I had to start over again and take it piece by piece.

A. A. has been correctly characterized as a spiritual program of recovery. Bill Wilson defined "spirituality" as a reliance on our Creator. Now where do you suppose he got that idea? The same place that Dr. Bob got it when he talked about that "your heavenly Father will never let you down."

So, the first thing we are going to talk about is that A.A. basically has six (6) basic roots. They have all been short circuited in detail, and it is not possible to cover those details today, but I will try to go as far as I can with each of the six roots of A.A. Just to give you a flavor of the rock that I think A.A. is founded upon.

[1] The first root is the Bible. That is the one we don't talk about. If you read our literature, you will see that there was talk by Dr. Bob that the principal ideas, the ones that were felt to be essential, came from 1 Corinthians 13--called the "love chapter,"--the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapters 5 through 7, and the Book of James. Some early members wanted to call A.A.'s fellowship "the James Club." That is how popular it was. What did this mean in terms of where our ideas came from?

Let us think it about it in these terms. Dr. Bob studied the Bible, Anne Smith used to do a Quiet Time at the Smith home each morning where people came for what they called "spiritual pablum." They read the Bible. They prayed. They had Quiet Time. They consulted devotionals, like The Runner's Bible, The Upper Room, My Utmost for His Highest. Old timers used to open meetings by reading from Scripture. It was exciting for me to go to Akron for the first time, and Dr. Bob's daughter said, "Would you like to go to the King's School Group? [A.A. Group Number One]" And I said I sure would. And the first thing I saw was Dr. Bob's Bible being brought from the back of the room to the front. And that Bible is signed by Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, and Bill Dotson (AA # 3). It is symbolic of where we came from.