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The woman’s self-analysis does not deal with spiritual issues in the narrow sense — there is no explicit reference to things such as losing the vital sense of God’s presence or feeling excluded from the company of God’s people — but as Father Dowling pointed out, the spiritual dimension is in fact there, deep underneath, and was the driving force behind creating the table.
There are interesting parallels between this chart and what the Oxford Group called “the Game of Truth,” described in 1934 in V. C. Kitchen’s book I Was a Pagan.435
There are even more parallels between the items this A.A. woman was tabulating and the ones on what was called the Jellinek Curve or Jellinek Chart. This diagram was drawn up by the famous early alcoholism researcher E. M. [Elvin Morton] Jellinek in the same year that Father Dowling published his article in The Queen’s Work. Jellinek put a questionnaire in the April 1945 issue of the A.A. Grapevine, and used the responses which he received to create a chart called “The Progressive Disease of Alcoholism.” One side of the curve displayed the descent of the alcoholics into graver and graver problems as their alcoholism progressed, while the other side of the curve showed the gradual recovery of health and a workable life style.
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