One more post prior to beginning our consideration of the influence of the Book of James.

Often we find it difficult to know how to pray.  The Psalms offer excellent examples of prayers.  Dick B. in his book The Good Book and The Big Book* offers some wonderful insight concerning the role of The Psalms in the early days of A.A.:

“In a book read by many early AAs, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick quoted Psalm 55:1-5 in describing man’s plight without God’s listening ear:

‘Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication.  Attend unto me, and hear me:  I mourn in my complaint, and make a noise.  Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked:  for they cast iniquity upon me, and in wrath they hate me.  My heart is sore pained within me; and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.  Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me.” (136-137)

“Dr. Carl G. Jung eventually gave AAs an even more specific Biblical picture of their spiritual problem and the necessary spiritual solution.  Years after Bill Wilson had written the Big Book and the Twelve Steps, Jung responded to a letter from Bill and explained to Bill that he (Jung) had told one of Bill’s Oxford Group mentors, Rowland Hazard, the solution to the alcoholic’s spiritual problem.  To his spiritual restlessness and discontent.  And to his estrangement from God.  Jung wrote:

‘His [the alcoholic’s] craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.’

Jung then referred Bill to Psalm 42:1:

‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.'” (138)

*Dick B.  The Good Book and The Big Book: A.A’s Roots in the Bible.  Bridge Builders Edition.  Kihei, Hawaii:  Paradise Research Publications, Inc., 1997.