Bill sat at his kitchen table drinking gin on a dreary November evening in 1934. The telephone rang. It was his good friend and drinking buddy Ebby who wanted to visit him. Ebby ended the call by telling Bill he was now sober. Bill knew how bad it had been for Ebby, so his parting words seemed unimaginable. Ebby shared his story, how doctors had pronounced him incurable, and society was about to lock him up, yet God had done for him what he could not do for himself. Bill was cautious, yet as he wrote later, “Here sat a miracle directly across the kitchen table. He shouted glad tidings.” They talked for hours, and Bill’s heart softened. When Ebby invited him to church, Bill resisted. He had felt the scorn of church people who had ostracized him for his drinking. Nevertheless, he went with Ebby to Calvary Church in New York. When he listened to Sam Shoemaker’s (1897-1963) sermon, “his utter honesty, great courage, and forthright manner struck me deeply.”
When Sam arrived at Calvary Episcopal Church a few years earlier, he converted a boarded-up chapel the church owned on East 23rd Street into a shelter for alcoholics in the “gas house” district. Bill soaked up Sam’s straight-talking sermons and writings like a sponge. He joined the Calvary mission, opened his life to Christ, and quit drinking.
When Bill sat down to formulate the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in “The Big Book,” Sam Shoemaker’s teaching on self-examination, fearless honesty, and self-surrender from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount feature prominently. As Bill said years later at an AA convention, “It was from Sam that we absorbed most of the twelve steps of AA.” Sam used to tell Bill we need only to give as much as we know about ourselves to as much as we know about God. The third step of AA about turning our wills over to God is accompanied by a prayer that has Sam’s imprint all over it: