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Time on your hands? Wondering what to do this summer in Vermont? AA historian Dick B. has written up a detailed suggestion for a walking tour of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, Dr. Bob’s boyhood home. Sounds like a good time. (Thanks, Dick, for sending this our way!)
YOUR WALK AROUND ST. JOHNSBURY, DR. BOB’S BIRTHPLACE AND BOYHOOD HOME
1. Begin at Dr. Bob’s Birthplace and Boyhood Home at 297 Summer Street.
2. Snap a photo of yourself and Dr. Bob’s family home.
3. Visit the premises.
4. If you like, attend one of the “open” A.A. meetings held there.
5. NORTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, ST. JOHNSBURY: Walk to the Smith family church at 1325 Main Street–North Congregational Church, St. Johnsbury.
6. Snap a photo of yourself and the beautiful, towering stone edifice.
7. Enter the church and view the ornate sanctuary.
8. Allow ample time to see, browse, and study the materials in the Dr. Bob Core Library, which has been graciously provided, and is maintained, by the church.
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Happy Father’s Day all.
Scanning and text-recognition are finally complete on another Oxford Group book—The Philosophy of Courage or The Oxford Group Way by Philip Leon. Leon had a keen philosophical mind, and in this work he attempted to bring Theological rigor to the Group’s practices. There is still plenty to do before the book gets posted in full, but you can expect to find bits and pieces of it here as proofreading progresses.
Here’s a taste of The Philosophy of Courage from later in the book, where Leon discusses the Oxford Group practice of Sharing:
“The right kind of sharing is itself an act of God. My contribution to it is to be willing to share first the life of the person with whom I am to share my own life. I must take on his sins and fears and make them mine, caring about them and about the healing of them in a way in which he does not care himself, and which confers the urgency and feeling of crisis necessary for the magic to work. That is to say, instead of running away from the condition of being members one of another, I must accept it and make the most of it. I must suffer the union of self-consciousness and God-consciousness, of self-sickness and positive God-feeling, which he will not have for himself, so that these may develop for his benefit in me. To do this is truly to love my neighbour—who in the kingdom of fear is also my enemy, just as he whom I specifically call my enemy in that kingdom is also my friend in the kingdom of Heaven. It is to love my neighbour-enemy as myself. It is when I do this that there springs from me the guided and yet unaimed word, the spontaneous talk, which works miracles.”
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