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passed away. Behold all things are become new.” The key to his understanding and presentation of A.A. is that it is first and foremost “a life-changing program,” “a program that teaches us how to live,” and so “not a sobriety program but a living program.” Also central to Clarence’s appreciation of Alcoholics Anonymous, as fellowship as well as program, is his insistence that “alcoholics are different from people”: they are a “Chosen People.” The alcoholic is a “type,” and “it is a privilege to be an alcoholic.” He presents the “whole [A.A.] program” as derived from “two sources in the Bible: the Sermon on the Mount and Saint James on faith without works being dead and the healing ministry.” “Carrying this message to other alcoholics is our ministry,” says Clarence, stressing that “every alcoholic can have a terrific effect on another human being.”
    Especially in his larger public presentations, Clarence S. offers a clear framework for positive thinking to the alcoholic mired in self-hatred. Yet he also proclaims his A.A. to be “a very tough program.” In order truly to “get A.A.,” one must “qualify” as Clarence himself did: one must say that he is “willing to do anything” to achieve sobriety, and the first “anything” is blind, absolute obedience to one’s sponsor. This specification of Wilson’s “deflation at depth” clearly equates with “the act of surrender” that Dr. Harry Tiebout analyzed as the core of “the therapeutic process” not only in Alcoholics Anonymous but in any psychotherapy. Indeed, despite its clothing in classic and explicitly religious language, and for all Clarence’s carefully expressed wariness of psychiatrists and psychiatry, his appreciation of Alcoholics Anonymous seems identical to that of the self-consciously secular Tiebout. The Pietist insight that one must “let go” in order to “be” to say nothing of to “have” need not always be affirmed in a directly Pietist vocabulary, but this message is surely clearest in that language. 14
    The Cleveland-rooted longest member speaks “Absolutes,” stressing “Absolute Honesty.” He would change the word “Rarely” at the beginning of “How It Works” to “Never,” and relishes describing to appreciative audiences with all his abundant rhetorical skill how Dr. Bob Smith, “my sponsor,” treated his initial lack of faith in early 1938:
    These birds came into the hospital and visited me every day. They were smiling and laughing — it was a long time since I’d had anything to laugh about. They told me their stories, and then at the end they told me they “had the answer,” and then they up and left. They never told me what “the answer” was: they just told me they had it and then hightailed it out of there.
    Finally this day Doc comes in and as usual sits down on the end of the bed and asks me what I think of all this. I tell him it’s just wonderful. I mean all these guys who don’t know me from a bale of hay coming in and visiting me and telling me their stories. “Only,” I tell Doc, “I’m puzzled about just one thing.” And he says in his abrupt way, “And what’s that?” So I say, “Well, they all tell me they have the answer to my drinking problem and then they leave. What are you going to do to me? How do I get ‘fixed’?”
    Doc says, “Young fellow, you’re kind of young yet, and we don’t know if you’ve had enough.” My God! “Enough!” Well, I finally convinced him I’d had “enough,” and he says to me, “Well, okay, young fellow. I’ll give you the answer to this: do you believe in God?”
    Now that’s the last thing I expected to hear from a doctor. Well, I was too smart to try to answer that, so I say: “What does that have to do with it?”
    “Young fellow, that has everything to do with it: do you or do you not believe in God?” Now notice: Doc doesn’t say, “Do you believe in a God?” He says, “Do