Audio
Transcript
Source: Gert B – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: gert-b-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:22:46
============================================================
The main speaker for this evening is a young lady who recently got demoted in my affections. I, of course, Don Juan and Bo Brummel that I am, I have lots of women in my life, but she recently got demoted from second place to third place. And I think it's particularly appropriate that she be the main attraction for Dr. Jim's 8th birthday party because she can shoot me down in flames just as fast as she can him.
And she does so with a great deal of skill. Dr. Jim being the surgeon that he is, I'm sure his dexterity and finesse or whatever they call it with his capel is among the best. But this is a gal boy that she used those words and they're just as incisive and sharp and to the point as any surgeon's knife ever was. I hope, I hope that my God grants me the time and sobriety to greet my 8th birthday and I hope she's the main course for the evening's festivities then.
And I use that word main course because she is quite a ditch. Ladies and gentlemen, our, my good friend, I should say, I start to say our, but I'm a little selfish, our good friend, my good friend, Gert. I love you, John. What an ass. You call that dexterous, I call it just brute force. Well, as for Jim, yes, I can shoot Jim down, but lately I haven't had to. I want to tell you, this man's really grown up.
He's grown up. He's Jim R.. I'm impressed, just gotten back, I can't work this thing. My lighter's gone without fluid and I can't, I just got back from a trip last night that took me from the Atlantic to the Pacific and really I am amazed at how many people say to me, where do you live? And I say, Kerrville, Texas. And they say, Kerrville. Isn't there a doctor around there? Quite a man with drunks.
And I said, you mean that drunk doctor? Yeah. It's really absolutely astonishing how many people know about Jim and Starlight. And this is all over the country. This will be in South Carolina, where I just was, or Portland, Oregon, where I just was. And instead of, you know, having kind of an affectionate leer about Jim, I'm getting, so I'm beginning to name drop him. This is trying to switch for me, you know. Now I really, I go, of course, to very many places that are supposed to be like Starlight, a great many that are more elegant and a great many that are nowhere near so well equipped.
But I have never found the spirit, and I don't have to kid Starlight or Jim or anybody else. I don't have to make a hit with anybody anymore and this is the greatest freedom God has given me. But I've never found the presence of God. And in my opinion, it takes God to keep us sober. There's one thing about us drunks, we are not pipers. And when we shoot, we shoot high. God himself is the only one, in my opinion, who can bring us real sobriety, no matter how long it has been since we've had a drink.
This is the only place of its type that I know of in this country where the actual presence of God is felt and is intended to be the tent pole. There are no therapeutics here at Starlight that I know anything about except the spiritual steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and God and his kingdom. We are operating in the doctor who is the head of this, Jim, whose birthday we honor tonight, in Ray, his assistant doctor, and in members of the staff. In Ted C., in Evie, all down the line. It is God who is the boss here. And if you have not come to know this yet, you will unless you are one of the ones who is too blind to see and too deaf to hear.
[00:05:08]
This is why Starlight works more than any other place I know of its type. Works with us drunks. Now, there are very many here tonight who have heard my pitch. There are some here from Midland, for heaven's sake, who have heard it time before last. Gluttons for punishment. You've read it on tapes, you've read it on record, you've read it in my book. But then I have what I think is a very bright saying, and I think it's also true, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are always the same.
But we keep rereading them. So maybe you'll get something new out of it. And if you don't, well, that's just too bad. You can steal out any time you want. I've had it happen. I am not the kind of person who can get up and give a ten-minute talk. If it's an hour and ten minutes, you're lucky. There are some things that are newscasts and other things that are hour-long programs. Some things are short stories, other things are books.
I am not the mistress-of-ceremonies type, and I don't have any little cute, glib remarks to make. What I went through and what happened and what is now happening in the re-brewing life I lead is a very serious thing to me. And I just cannot be glib about it in any way. I'm just not gifted in that fashion where I can get up and make a short talk. Let me see your hands. How many of you have heard my pitch? Oh, you poor bastards.
Well, it won't be any harm, that's a sin. I think of myself, and I really do think of myself, as a woman under orders, a woman with a boss. And I think this is what my boss wants me to do. I go around doing this, I suppose I give a thousand talks a year. And I think this is what he wants of me. I'm not trying to change your lives, I'm not trying to convert anybody, I'm not trying to even make you sober. I have no axe to grind whatsoever. I just think this is what he wants me to do.
And I suppose this stems from my first reading of the New Testament, where a man by the name of Jesus Christ was crossing a lake with his pals, and when he got to the other side he went up a hill. Top of the hill, a man filled with demons came out to meet him. Well, we don't use words like demons anymore, we've all gotten so bright. Me, I use it, because I know exactly what demons are, and so do every one of you.
These inner things that seem to have a life of their own, that seem to push us into doing what we really don't want to do, and keep us from doing what we really do want to do. This happens almost every day of our lives, certainly to us drunks. Well, Jesus Christ healed this man and his demons, and of course he wanted to stay with Christ. Why not? Christ said, no, go and tell the people what the Lord has done for you. So he went on to say that the man went and told the people, and the people were simply amazed.
Well, I've been doing very little else for the last 15 years, but doing what I'm doing right now to groups of all types, and I'm still amazed that the people are amazed. Because I do not know what people are doing in all these churches, if they are worshiping a dead God. Now, to Alcoholics Anonymous, you never have to explain what a miracle is, because every chair is occupied by a miracle, and we all know it. But by and large, the people who say they believe in God, seem to think there hasn't been a miracle since a gentleman by the name of Lazarus.
I can't imagine all this fuss, all this getting dressed up, and time and energy and money spent going to church, if you do not know that God is going around healing every hour on the hour, precisely as he did when he walked the earth in person 2,000 years ago. The blind, the ones who won't see, are being made to see. The deaf are hearing. The lost are being found. And those like my former self, and many of you who are dead, now live.
So I think those are my orders too, that I go and tell the people what my boss has done for me. In order to do this, naturally I have to tell you what we had to work with. He didn't have much. I also have to talk about money, because I had a great deal of it.
[00:10:13]
I couldn't for a moment know whether money is the root of all evil, but if it isn't, it is sure a close second. There's nothing wrong with money of itself, of course. Money is a commodity, like bricks. You can build a shrine out of bricks, or you can slug somebody to death with them. It's what money does to people. It's what we do or do not do with it. Money is a very divisive thing, and anything that divides the children of God from the children of God is an evil. I was an only child, born to very wealthy parents, brought up in probably the most famous hotel in the world, the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.
And every breath I drew made me think I was set apart. I was different from other people. I had rights and privileges that they didn't have. I never saw a hungry person, let alone a starving one. I would see pictures of them, but pictures are not people. I never saw a slum or a tenement. I would see pictures of them and wonder how people could live in such places. Well, the truth is, they do not live there. They merely exist.
I had no brush whatsoever with stark realism. I had no responsibility toward anyone beyond that of good manners. My little world just revolved around me. And then I got out into the world and it did not revolve around me at all. It's a terrible thing to do to anybody. And people who want to make money so that their children can have that kind of a life had better shoot their children young, because it amounts to the same thing. It's just real death. These are called advantages. They are the greatest disadvantages that parents can ever give their children.
I couldn't have been more than five or six years old when I realized that my father had a brilliant mind and my mother had a beautiful face and I didn't have either one. Right there the sorrow began to be told for what later on became total escapism. Just an inner sense of not measuring up, missing the boat. I would go places with my mother who was a great beauty, acknowledged to be such on several continents. We happened to be on the same continent and happened to be together, which was very rare. Whatever people were doing, they would stop doing it to look at her and then they would look at me and do a double take and say about me, well I'm sure she's nice and wholesome anyway. Now that's a dirty word. There is no female who wants to be wholesome.
They all want to be killers. I don't know how much the use of this adjective has applied to me, contributed to my later downfall, but I'm certain it had something to do with it because I hadn't spent so much time and energy going around trying to prove I wasn't wholesome. Because my parents' marriage was already on the rocks when I was very young. My father decided his only child shouldn't marry. Marriage was for fools. I should get several college degrees in this country, go on to the Sorbonne in Paris and perhaps to Heidelberg in Germany. Then maybe I could be the first woman ambassador to Great Britain and perhaps in my spare time, some rainy Thursday, I could find a cure for cancer.
When you realize that all of this was over 60 years ago and neither one of these things has happened, you can just see how advanced my father was. I heard all this baloney and I knew perfectly well I would never do any of it, first because it wasn't bright enough and second because I didn't want to. But this too contributed to my sense of not measuring up. When I was nine, I went to Europe to school and I was over there for almost ten years. Growing from a little girlhood to young womanhood in a foreign language, no home, really no country. I then came back to the States and went to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Smith College, as many of you know, is not coeducational, so this was the first place I'd ever been that my father couldn't go with me. This was very heady business because he told me how often to breathe, what to think, what to feel, what to say, what to study, whom to know, what to wear, and here I was left without it. Because I wasn't supposed to marry, I never had a boat, I had no small talk. The first time in my life I saw girls batting their eyelashes at young men and telling the young men how wonderful they were and the young men would just capsize. If I'd known I had a soul, I'd have been charmed to have sold it for the ability to make some young man capsize.
Smith College is surrounded by men's colleges, it's very strategically located, and you can hardly miss an identity. …and I didn't. My junior year, I met a young man who was ass enough to ask me to marry him the first time we met.
[00:15:05]
And because the room was rather shadowy, instead of saying yes, I said, when? I thought, wait till he gets me out of the light and sees how wholesome I am. I had no idea there was supposed to be anything holy about marriage. It wouldn't have been anybody could have told me. My parents couldn't have been more moral, more responsible, more ethical. But there is no God whatsoever, and maybe that's a break.
Because, like so many of you, I didn't have a phony God to throw out. I didn't have anything to unlearn. But if there is no God the Father, then of course there is no God the Son. And of course there isn't anybody to pray to. I hadn't even been taught the childish prayer, and now I lay me down to sleep. I'd never seen a Bible. I'd seen the great Gutenberg Bible underclass in a museum in Europe. But I'd never seen a Bible, and I didn't know anybody who had one.
I'd never been to church, except for what I considered social functions like weddings, quite often my own, and christenings. I was a godmother five times before I was a Christian. Just how kiddos and ministers and parents be. And I read later on what I promised a damn near cut the throat. I'd never met anybody who called himself a Christian. Now that I'm a Christian, I think I have a right to assume I just must never have met a Christian.
Because how anybody could know about this? How anybody could know about this man, this God-made man, and then keep busting with it? I don't know. Either this is it. Either this is the good news, or it's a lot of junk and let's forget it. This is a great shock to a convert. Because we people have been pagans, no God whatsoever, not even one on the calendar. Look at all these churches and all these people going in and out. What are they doing?
What are all those people doing? And then we find him and we think, oh, that's what they're doing, they're worshipping him. I will go there and they will teach me. They will teach me what love is, and how to live it, and how to give it away. This gut-level love that operates down where we operate. Not on cloud nine, not from eleven to twelve on Sunday. But gut-level love that can end up on the cross with nails in it, they think.
Because if my God doesn't operate where I operate, down where there's cheating and nasty gossip and booze, then he isn't any good to me. And we go to these churches and we're lucky if anybody says good morning. This is a terrible shock. This really is a terrible shock because it's so not worth it. I don't understand how they've been sucked in for two thousand years. Of course it wasn't like this in the beginning. It couldn't have been or it would have died of boredom.
I just married this silly young man for the simplest of reasons. First, because I wanted to get away from my father's demands on me. And second, because I didn't think anybody else would ever ask me. Could be simpler reasons, but they're not very good ones for marriage. My marriage should have failed and it did. It lasted a little bit less than five years and I got a son out of it. A young man who graduated from one of our great preparatory schools, Andover, from Amherst College, both in Massachusetts.
And who some years back now graduated from ten very long years on Skid Row. A drunken, panhandling bum, thief, in and out of jails, once prison, in and out of cycle wards and straitjackets. There were years at a time when I didn't know whether Bill was dead or alive. He appeared at my house on the Mojave Desert in Southern California once with his wrists very deeply slashed, just beginning to heal over.
Standing in the only shirt and pair of pants he owned in the world, both of them stiff with his own blood. Two days later he disappeared again, and again it was several years before I knew whether he lived or died. Everywhere I've gone I've asked people to pray for my son, and they have. Even people who didn't believe in prayer were willing to give it a whirl for my son. We don't know what prayer is, only that it is.
And this great mass force has gone out from thousands and thousands of people in love and concern for a young man that they will never see.
[00:20:05]
Eight weeks ago, last Wednesday night, my son Bill called me from San Francisco to Kerrville. It was midnight in Kerrville. He said, Gerd, I want you to know that I'm flying to Macomb, Mississippi tomorrow to rebuild burnt homes and churches. He said, I now believe that there is a God and that he had a son, and that his son has kept me alive, that I might be of some use. He said, I understand in the book that was written about his son that he says, when you haven't done it under the least of these, you haven't done it under me.
And he said, I can't imagine anybody more of the least than what the American white has made of the American Negro. I said, praise be to God, Bill. Bill is now 46. This was the first time since Bill had been a little boy in sub-preparatory school that I'd ever known he was doing anything for anybody. You would send him some extravagantly beautiful, wonderful present that you knew he wanted and he wouldn't even acknowledge it.
And here he was flying to a strange state to rebuild the homes and churches of a people he had never seen. Don't ever decide what prayer can or cannot do. Our little minds need to know that they can only go so far. This is another one of these strange, mysterious imponderables. What prayer can or cannot do. Imagine the absurdity of man deciding what prayer could or could not do. The failure of my first marriage would have been, until then, just this uneasy sense of not measuring up.
And I became a cold, hard core of guilt and I lived with it. I slept with it, ate with it, sat with it, walked with it. With all this money, it was silly to think of getting a job in any way. I didn't know how to do anything. So I looked around for somebody else to marry. Men are such suckers. They really are. The only prerequisite for husband number two was that he be as unlike husband number one as possible.
Husband number one had been very dashing. Therefore, husband number two must be an ideal husband. Husband number one had been very dashing. Therefore, husband number two must be a nice, quiet Harvard. Well, I got one. I didn't know how quiet a Harvard could be. It can be very quiet. He's a good, kind man and very rich. We were married for fourteen years. When I came to write a book about all this, I couldn't think of anything he'd ever said.
And you know as well as I do, he's got to have said something in fourteen years. So those of you who read the late list, what husband number two says is what I think he might have said. Out of this marriage, too, I had a son, a young man who was now an Episcopal clergyman. I suppose extreme opposites in my sons more or less epitomized extreme opposites in their mother because I was a pagan, I was a homohoic pagan.
Now that I'm a Christian, you just better believe I'm a homohoic Christian and that's the way I like it. I like people who do things to the hilt. If you're going to sin, enjoy it. There's nothing worse than a sniveling sinner. You know these people who do something awful Saturday night and then whimper about it all day Sunday? I just can't stand these people and now that I'm a Christian, I have to stand people, it's quite a handicap.
This youngest son of mine is one that makes me understand perfectly what Christ is talking about when he says, blessed are the pure in heart because Bart has always been good. Not pretty good, God forbid, I might well have shouted, but good. He's just never been a phony, he's never been small or mean or cheap or a show off. Jump ahead a bit, he was in Yale in the summer of my conversion. He'd gone to Europe and when he came back, I met him at the airport.
Told him what had happened to me that summer. And I said, you know Bart, I've always wondered about you. You've always been so great and you had such a lousy mother that I wondered who brought you up. Well now I know, it was God. So I think you ought to give to him all the love and trust you've always given to me.
[00:25:01]
And Bart said, well that makes sense. He did what a fine old New York preacher by the name of Emerson Foster calls crossing the stream at the narrowest part. He was right there anyway, it was really just a matter of acknowledgement. As with so many of us drunks, as though we had said to God, oh so it was you after all. Because we drunks really are pushovers for God. If we want sober up and really start searching.
It was in this second marriage that I became an alcoholic. I'd been a social drinker, no problem. Growing up in Europe, I'd have wine with my meals as is the custom, no problem. First marriage I'd been a social drinker, no problem. Second marriage I'd been a social drinker, no problem. Suddenly I crossed this indefinable line between social and compulsive drinking. I don't think we alcoholics know when that line comes, what it is, or why, and I don't think it makes any difference.
But when I was writing my book, I was writing it for people like my former self who didn't know there was any hope. And I had to be as scrupulously honest as it was possible for me to be. And I came to believe that it was probably when I realized that my second marriage too was a failure, that I couldn't take it. I didn't know why, as I'd been growing up I'd been very law-abiding, perhaps too much so.
And now all my adult relationships were crumbling around me. There was only one thing I did know and that was that it had to be me. Because I was the only constant factor. I was the only child my parents had, they were two husbands, two sons, one mom. It had to be me, and I didn't know why. I looked around at my old social group, they didn't seem to have any more wisdom than I. My father was dead and in any way long since disgusted with me.
And of course there wasn't any God, God was a swear word. Jesus Christ were two swear words, that's all there was to it, never in my head. Nobody ever called me, no minister, no Christian. Nobody ever came to see me. Nobody ever mentioned that there might be something. I wouldn't have dreamt of calling myself an atheist. In order to be an atheist you have to decide that you don't believe in something that just might possibly exist.
I wouldn't have dreamt of trying to make fun of God. You know, I would have dreamed of calling myself an atheist. I wouldn't have dreamt of trying to make fun of God. You don't make fun of nothing. You people who live down here in the South and the Southwest, by and large you have a peculiar theory that this is a Christian country. This is not a Christian country at all. We do indeed have in God we trust and our money, oh you bet.
We have thousands and thousands of churches and we do have a few Christians. But this isn't a Christian country at all. If it is, it's a pretty puny little Christ. I have a friend who lived in Africa for seven years and because he's this kind of a man he knew everybody from the Topolitos down to the peasants. And to a man they said to him, you call yourselves a Christian country, send us brotherhood.
Because if you don't we'll have to take the communists. The communists are nearer than you are. We're afraid of the communists and we're not afraid of you. And the communists believed in their ideology. We all believe in ours to all. I never met anybody who called himself a Christian. And that was only 17 and a half years ago, so really this is not another generation. This is a very strange idea. And because of it millions of people go to church that we are Christians.
It's not only strange, it's blasphemous among them. And so many of the dry drunks in the South and so many of the dry drunks that I meet in AA and so many of the ones I don't meet who aren't dry outside of AA bring their guilt and their failures and their fears back to some church where they've been filled full of all this baloney which is not true. Love is what we've got in alcohol. It's anomalous, it's what starlight has.
This is the great factor that heals my heart. is the great factor that heals minds and hearts and bodies and relationships. It does not cause
[00:30:02]
fear, it frees us from fear. You do not find love in many of the denominations of the churches. It's a terrible, terrible sin. I ran because I didn't have any hope, any place to go to. I was packed, just as so many of you have been for so long, with guilt, shame, with fear, with confusion, with bewilderment, with hopelessness. Nobody ever told me there was anything that this might work. I'd been born with money and position, so I knew that neither one of those was different. I'd been born with a good mind and IQ the same as Einstein's, so obviously that wasn't different. I had nothing to live by, so I started to run away from an intolerable life.
It's ugly me and what I have made in this ugly world through total ignorance. It's not in me to make my world ugly any more than you ever intended to. Two years after the compulsive drinking started, I began to take barbiturates with it, and I think this is real murder. If I had to choose, God forbid, between drunkenness and fell addiction, I'd take drunkenness, because at least the drunk is gone somewhere.
He's gone down, but he's going somewhere. There's some action there, and you can do something with a little action, you know. Maybe you can get him and say, come on, buddy boy, start it this way a while, you know, a couple of beats. I used to take Benzedrine to get me up, liquor to keep me up, and sleeping pills to knock me out. Well, this makes a very short day. And a curse of pity has to set in, because if you go on the awareness that I didn't have in the beginning, that it had to be me, then you have to do something about it. If you're the one who's at fault, then you have to do something about it.
Well, I didn't know what to do, and by then I was too far gone to reason. And so I began to blame my parents, my husbands, my sons, the world. If I'd known there was a God, I would have blamed him too. And I would sit hour after hour on this vegetable, tears running down my face. Poor, poor Gert. Poor, poor Gert. World starving for one thousandth of what I had been born with. Poor Gert, indeed. This went on for eight years, then I left this good, though very quiet man, married another man for no reason but that somebody told me I couldn't get it.
Well, you know how a woman is using human souls for her own amusement, and my boss doesn't approve of that. Therefore, I hope you will all be glad to know that husband number three and I really had each other coming. We really deserved each other. It lasted for twelve years and there was never a dull moment. Husband number three was from the wrong side of the tracks. Didn't know the rules with the rich. You're not supposed to call the bluff with the very rich. Because all of us are snobs in one area or another, the very rich very seldom get their bluffs called.
And I had yelled divorce with my other husbands. They said, oh, what will we do without you? I yelled it once too often with my third husband and he said, okay, get going. Well, of course, I couldn't take it. I'd never taken anything else. It was the first time on any depth level that anybody had ever called my bluff. Anyway, I was past fifty and I have news for you women. When you're past fifty, the line to choose from thins out. So if you're thinking about leaving Joe, maybe you better take another look at Joe.
The idea of publicly acknowledging failure for the third time in a divorce court was just intolerable. So I took forty-five grains a second, all cold sober on an empty stomach. I wanted out. Ten to twenty grains, as you know, is supposed to be a lethal dose. I wanted to make quite sure that I made it. There was a lot of baloney that there was any afterlife, any extension of this life. That was a big joke. It would just be total oblivion. And I'd been seeking oblivion for many years and now this would be total and that would be final. I loathed myself. Totally hopeless, lost for the life.
[00:35:09]
So sick physically, it's almost incredible. Jim talked about himself and how frightened he was over eight years ago that night. All of those terrible, terrible fears. I can remember them and yet they're just a faint, faint facsimile of what they were. I'm so totally free of fear now that it's impossible to project myself back into the psychotic fears that I had then. And the physical manifestations of them were more embarrassing than you would like to hear.
I was just a total mess in every area without the slightest hope of ever finding anything because everybody had always told me that everything that I had was what everybody else wanted. If you had plenty of money and plenty of position and were plenty bright and had all the opportunities in the world, why you hadn't made? Well, I had them all since the first breath I ever drew and I didn't have anything made. The world had never told me anything about God or love. They told me Madison Avenue's type of love, but they hadn't told me the type of love that says, I give you me.
I do not give you admiration. I do not give you presents. I do not give you Mother's Day cards or anniversary gifts. I give you me. For what it is, I give you myself. Nobody had ever told me that. And so having everything that the world kills itself trying to get and being nothing but a total slob morally, physically, and mentally, I wanted out. I know perfectly well that the alcoholics are all hams and I think that's great. I love hams. That's one of the reasons I moved to Texas.
I never saw such hams as you people. If you had everything to say in the morning, you're still good. And I was living in the Mojave Desert. I had a couple of drunk friends who quite regularly would turn on the gas and telephone me and I quite regularly go and turn it off. It was a kind of a lively dance we did. They really hammed it up. I never said to them, for crying out loud, when are you going to stop turning on the gas? They didn't say, you know, you're great to keep coming and turning it off, but I used to wonder sometimes what would happen if I got stuck in the sand.
Just before I left there, a young man called me up and he was a little stoned, not much, and he said he was going to kill himself and I said, well, are you now? How are you going to do it? I kind of slowed him up a little. He said he had a knife and I said, do you? Well, I hope it's good and sharp. And he said, God damn you, and hung up. Well, now he's still alive and he's still stoned, but someday he may fall on that knife. I can't tell. Quite often I wonder how many of these suicides have really made it among us intended to.
Oh, no, we really do ham up our suicide attempts. The odd part of it was I didn't. I'm in business. I didn't write any notes. I didn't get out my best friendship on negligee. I just wanted out. My younger son had been overseas in World War II in the 1st Marine Division and this was practically his mother's homecoming present to him. They should find your body. He had great experience with death and near death. He knew just what to do. He let me lie there not knowing whether I'd gone or not. Called the doctor and the ambulance in the hospital and 36 hours later I woke up in the hospital room with a lot of tubes in it, all of them ending in me.
I really am against suicide. I don't think we should all commit suicide. But if you really want to, I kind of hope you do because there's nothing more embarrassing. And you'll find you can't even die. That's the living end. You can't live and you can't die and you can't pretend you didn't try because everybody knows you do. I was speaking in San Antonio just before I moved here to Texas to live and I met a young man who just a while before we met he had tried to kill himself and we agreed that this was the most embarrassing moment of our lives when he woke up and found we're not dead.
He'd been some kind of a half-baked Baptist. Of course you realize he couldn't have been a real Baptist. He wouldn't have had a liquor problem.
[00:40:08]
He had not expected to wake up in heaven but he thought he'd wake up in a nanny room. Took off to California to inherit more money. You know when I look at that woman and I can think of her as that woman, I know perfectly well what the words in the New Testament mean about being born again. This is no big deal at all. I'm just not that woman. That is another woman. I can look at her with some amusement, a great deal of compassion and a great deal of distaste but I'm not that woman at all.
There's a line in my book which I think is brilliant and nobody else ever quotes it so I have to. It's as though we were Siamese twins, one of whom has died that the other might live. I was out in California for several months while the estate was being settled and I returned to the Chicago area where I was living at that time. By then my crippled mind and heart had crippled my body. I was walking with a cane, dragging my right leg from psychosomatic arthritis.
My spine was so packed with calcium deposit that the doctor said within five years I wouldn't be able to move my head. I had a blood count of 38 which is of course pernicious anemia and I had a spastic colon which is no more romantic than it sounds. I don't think I'm really supposed to mention my colon from pulpits but oh boy do I. Christians have gotten so cold, have gotten so nasty nice that it makes me sick at my stomach.
I had spent half of my life in Europe but I had never been to the Holy Land. What would I be doing going to the Holy Land? This last fall I conned somebody into taking me. You should see that country. What have we done to Jesus Christ? We have whittled him down until he's a little, meek and mild panty waist. This is the toughest country you ever saw in your life. Great big tractless deserts and great grim, terrible steep mountains, volcanic type.
And that young man was all over the place. A friend and I went together. She paid the bills. It took us an hour and 40 minutes to get from the city of Jerusalem to the city of Jericho where the Jordan River is. In an air conditioned car and on a good motor road. And Jesus Christ was all over it on foot. He must have been the strongest, the most virile, the most vital, the most attracting human being that ever strode the face of the earth.
Now we've got him whittled down to where he's a little bit of a sickly panty waist. I wonder if we can't sell him to kids. We don't even buy them ourselves. What could a forlorn little guy like that do? Well, he could make a country like the United States call itself Christian because there wouldn't be anything to live up to. Oh, I was astonished at what vitality, presence this young man must have had.
A glorious young man, only 33 years old when he died. Just as different as it would be possible to be than the figure we are told about from the religions. But what they've done in churches, of course, and we'd better watch it in AA too, they've exchanged good manners for love. It's respectable to be a member of a church. Well, it is not respectable to be a Christian. To be a Christian is to be a follower of a man who got spit on.
Made plenty fun of him and said, oh, you're so smart, take yourself down to a cross. You're such a great guy, why don't you crash through with some of the promises you made? It is not respectable to be a Christian. It is extremely foolhardy and dangerous and wrong. It Is Extremely Foolhardy and Dangerous and Rare, It Is a Challenge so Great that God Could Even Enlist Us Drunks Who Need Knowledge More Than Any Group of People on the Face of the Earth, Because We Are Not Willing to Settle for Nothingness, And This Is One of Our Greatest Qualities,
[00:45:18]
When I got back from California, sick inside, sick out, total mess, I went to a small sanitarium, at the end of two weeks the doctor in charge of the other doctor's reports on me, told me that I was a very sick woman and that there was nothing the matter with me, it was against low tyrosine, you can't even have a disease, the word psychosomatic had just come in and I was pleased I knew when to use it, so I said this is all psychosomatically induced then and he said yes, but he then said something even I couldn't try to be cute about, he tapped his forehead and said but make no mistake you are mentally a borderline case, nobody can be funny about our own impending insanity, then handed me a piece of paper on which were written two names, he said these are two Chicago psychiatrists and we all think that you should see one of them immediately, I then did a very strange thing, I pushed my chair back and stood up and said I don't need a psychiatrist, what I need is God, I had no idea where this came from, I do know that it was the first time in my entire life I had ever used the word God seriously, blasphemously you bet, all the time, but never seriously, now that I'm a Christian I know something else, I know that somebody is so deceived, more unlikely soil than I was you can scarcely imagine, but blessedly that has nothing to do with it, there's a short story in the New Testament about a sower who goes forth to sow, talks about the different kind of soil on which the seed lands, but whether the seed takes root or not is the soil's business and God's business, the sower's business is to sow.
I've been glad that I've known that in the almost 18 years that I've been dry, because people are always saying to me, oh don't fuss about her, don't pay attention to him, they're impossible, no nobody's impossible, nobody, if God could hook me, he can hook anybody, nobody's impossible. Before I went to the Holy Land I thought that the Hebrew word Golgotha, meaning place of the skull, was used for Calvary because the terrain was in the shape of a skull, no that isn't it at all, it's because it was a place for dead things, it was the town refuse stuff.
Over there there's extraordinary excavations, excavating is incredible, I don't go for excavations very much, but these were just remarkable, whole sections of villages almost intact, and they would say to me now this whole area is 11,000 years ago, that over there is 9,000 years ago, 7,000, so suddenly 2,000 years ago is not so very long ago. And I thought if you get 20 people each 100 years old, which would not be difficult, and lined them up you would have a span of 2,000 years.
So not so very long ago on the town garbage dump there were three crosses. The two outside crosses were occupied by thieves and there was a man in the center. One of the thieves said to the man in the center, when you get wherever it is you're going would you remember me? The man in the center said today will you be with me where everything is perfect. That thief made it by the last words he ever uttered. It's never too late and nobody's impossible. Maybe you're not the proper pipeline to reach somebody, maybe I'm not. In our arrogance does that make the person impossible?
A week or so after I left the sanitarium I got in my Lincoln Continental Convertible, went back to New York City, which had been my former home, and I was drunk for six weeks. Preparatory to motoring back to the Midwest I went to visit friends who came from Connecticut and I'd only been there an hour or so and my hostess said to me, Kurt before you go back there's a couple I'd like to have you meet.
Well as you know when we drunks are really working at it we live in a very tight closed world and we're the only person who's really in that world and we already know too many people. So I said why do you want me to meet them? She said their lives used to be rather like yours and a few years back something happened to change their lives and I said what happened? She said they were converted. I said converted to what? I had a convertible top on my car, that's all the word meant for me.
[00:50:01]
She then got a little embarrassed and said they were converted to God, then I was embarrassed. I thought this was very bad taste. God didn't have any social standing. He wasn't in Dun & Bradstreet. I'd never met anybody who called himself a Christian, I just thought this was pretty crass. My host and hostess were anything but crass. They were Charlie and Helen M. of Merrill Lynch Company. So I thought well I wouldn't have anything to lose. So I said I'd meet them and I got as drunk as it's humanly possible to get to meet my first two Christians.
Well now that I too am a Christian I know that's a slap at us Christians and not at us drunks. This lovely young man, Jesus Christ, spent most of his time with the bombs. You know that don't you? He made a flat statement saying that that was the reason he came here was to find out which was lost. If we who call ourselves after him are so far off his track, the people who he came to find are so afraid of us they have to get drunk to meet us, maybe we'd better re-evaluate what we mean when we call ourselves Christians.
Oh in the last 17 years in churches of all denominations I've met quite a few of these people. I think it might be a very sound idea to get drunk before you met them. People with cold eyes and sad jaws. People without love. These are not Christians. These are pew sitters. This big cement block in the center of every church that doesn't move an inch. These are the people who crucified him 2,000 years ago and are crucifying him right up to date in 1965.
People without love. These are the people who don't know him. I, by far, myself look at these people and say well that's what it means to be a Christian, I want no part of it. And so throw out the baby with the bathwater. I might have heard two Christians were out there just like anybody else except a little nicer. They ate their dinner and I drank mine. First half hour I tried to make fun of God. Well that's quite a job.
I said I thought it was just fine that they'd found God. Well now I get this thrown back to me. I have some very fancy pagan friends who think it's just lovely now that I'm old and dopey. Now it's nice for them to have something. A man stood my yakking for a while and thought he said, Gert, you have a lot of problems, why don't you turn them over to God. It stopped me cold. That will be 18 years at 20 years old.
And I still haven't the slightest idea of why it stopped me. The only reason I could think of was that he meant it. When people mean things, people know they mean them. And here sat this sophisticated New York businessman who actually believed there was someone to whom I could turn over my problems. I looked at him and after a while I said, Gert, you have a lot of problems, why don't you turn them over to God.
He said, you make it sound as though I had luggage that was too heavy for me to carry and I needed a porter. He said that's about it. Well I hope you know how blessed I was. If he had reared back and said, well no, we hardly want to call our Lord Jesus Christ red cap. Or if he'd been one of these awful Bible quoters. Now I quote the Bible all the time, what else, but these people who sidle up to you and say I just can't stand these people.
I just can't stand these people. What arrogance to think that everybody's memorized the Bible. They say that and you're supposed to go. First we in AA have to watch it. I've heard people in AA quoting the sixth step say to some poor old bloke who's hanging on the ropes and can't count to six. When we run down to churches we must try and remember what man can do in 2,000 years. We'll probably have bitched up AA in 2,000 years so that we have a pope.
We've already got a few bleeding deacons. I want to tell you it's all right to run something down but at the same time you've got to see how glassy your own walls are.
[00:55:02]
About 10 days later I drove back home. Praise went with me, didn't mean anything but it rode right along with me. Why don't you turn your problems over to God? I got in my house and I found a note from this couple welcoming me home. They didn't care. They'd only seen me once and I'd been a drunken mess. Why'd they care? It couldn't be that they were invested in my money because they had this in mind.
This was my introduction to the love of God, the love and concern that we all find in God's love for us. They were sitting down to pray for me. Nobody had ever prayed for me as far as I know and God knows I've never prayed for anyone. And I remember these people weren't fools. They weren't Mother's Day card bluebird for happiness people. If I had time, they wished I'd look at it. I had time, all right.
Found a little magazine, opened it up. On the first page was a one-page article entitled It's Never Too Late to Start Over. Our one Samuel M. Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest who died a year ago October and Bill W., the co-founder of AA says, had more to do with the founding of AA than any human being who ever lived. I read the article, stood up, dropped the book and did something I've never done.
I went over to my bed and got down on my knees and I said, if you're anywhere around, I wish you'd please help me because I sure need it. And in about 20 minutes, it was all over. There are no words, of course, there never are. There are no words why John P. express how he loves his brand new little baby daughter. And there are no words for this. All I know is, it was more like a spiritual shower bath than anything. I felt cleansed.
I also felt welcomed. I'd never had a home and I'd never made one. And I felt forgiven. I knew exactly what this was. I had never known anything about God in my whole life. I knew exactly what this was. And after a while, I stood up and I said, thank you very much, sir. I don't know anything about this and I'm going to have to start from scratch. But I'll tell you one thing, I'll never take another drop of liquor again because I don't have any character. It just does not make sense to me that a woman of 53 should get down on her knees and 20 minutes later get up with character.
Something had been added, all right. We of the Western world call him God, call him Jesus Christ, same thing. The Father and I are one, he said. You better believe I started from scratch. I went to college and I'd gotten as far as our father who art. And I thought, wait a minute. Wait a minute, our father, not mine, not theirs, ours. And this was true and it was true, all right. This made me sister to every human being on the face of the earth.
Black, brown, red, yellow, white, the words. All with it, one father, our father, brother and sister. Every just a fleeting moment I thought about my own sex, the women in the world. Things they'd always taken for granted they should do that I'd never once dreamt of doing. And I went to the phone, called my book man in Chicago and I said, Mr. C., I want two books. I want the Holy Bible and the joy of cooking.
And he said, my God, what's happened to you? And he said, my God, what's happened to you? I've never known whether Mr. C. ever picked himself up off the floor or not. First thing, prayer. Second thing, Bible. Word of God.
[01:00:02]
Third thing I wanted was a minister, man of God. Fourth thing I wanted was a church, house of God. Now, I don't believe in any of these four things, because anybody tells me I should, or because I took a course in it, or because I was brought up that way. I believe in these four things because they were my own automatic needs within one hour. I called a friend of mine, I just thought I might have bumped into a minister someplace.
She kind of shocked me by saying, you want to go get her, or a man of God? Well, of course, now I know what she meant. I've seen quite a few of these ministers who were pretty Charlie Martini, go-getters. Oh yes, I've seen quite a few of them. What a horrid sight. I told her I wanted a man of God. Well, I got him. No great shakes as a preacher, but the love that pours out of him, the gut-level love, tough love.
You can warm your hands after. He just happened to be Episcopal. I couldn't care less, and I couldn't have cared less then. If God is the tent-pole of all denominations, we're all equally good. If he isn't, then none of us is any good. The love was the point. I told him what had happened to me that morning, and he just beamed. He said, oh yes, wait till you get your Bible, you'll meet Paul. Same thing happened to Paul on the road to Damascus.
In your day, Damascus sounds like Fredericksburg. The next bus stop. So here, so now, so real. Which of course it is, where it's a lot of bologna, and let's all forget that. Let's forget the Bible, let's forget Thomas Akempa's Imitation of Christ, let's forget the spiritual program of Napoleon's Anonymous. Burn down all the churches and pull up all the stop signs on the corner that are put there by the power of the United Church.
Let's just forget it. Because if Jesus Christ isn't as living today as he was when he walked the earth in person 2,000 years ago, then obviously the Jews are right, this is not the Messiah. I said to this man, can I come to your church? He said, yes, there isn't much of a church, and there are many people in it. I said, God will be there, won't he? And he said, yes, he'll be there. So the first service I could go to, I was at, and I was the only person there except the priest.
It was the first time I ever heard the words, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have powered too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We've offended against thy holy laws. We've left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done. And there is no help in us but thou, O Lord. I thought, wow, those words were written for me.
And I still think so. It was a kind of a scrawny little church. Behind the altar was a stained glass window so big as to be really out of place. It was of a man kneeling in the garden. By now I had my Bible. I'd read Matthew, so I knew what this was. This was a young Jew, a young man by the name of Jesus Christ who had died for an old woman by the name of Gertrude B.. And I still think so. I began now to pray my knees off that maybe I might be allowed to make something at least decent and friendly out of one marriage.
Well, prayers are answered all right, but very often the answer is no. This thing had happened to me. It hadn't happened to Bill B.. He thought I was nuts. So I got royally kicked out, and I royally deserved it, and I landed on the Mojave Desert in Southern California. There I found two more great things. I found alcoholics anonymous, and I found that money belongs to God. And when God hits you in the wallet, you're hit.
More often I said, Our Father. Our Father, which I said and do say all the time. Sometimes even now I can hardly believe that I too am included, this bad self-centered old woman.
[01:05:02]
Sometimes I say, Me too, Lord. He says, Yes, you bet. You are my children. Who else do I have? Who else do I have to spread my kingdom? What other ears to hear for me? What other eyes to see for me? What other vocal cords to speak for me? What other hands to give and to receive for me? What other feet to run for me? More often I said, Our Father, the closer I became to my brothers and sisters I saw colors all over the world and in my own land.
And the more I realized the things they'd never heard of that I'd never been one second without. It was my father's brain that had made this money, and the brain had been a gift from God. Science is greatly advanced, but it's never yet the root of a brain. My nan decided that the money the brain had made better go back to the donor of the brain. Decided that if everybody in the world, everybody, the blackest man you ever saw, the yellow babies who die nightly with bloated bellies on the sidewalks of Hong Kong, everybody, had a house and a car, free and clear, $200 a month, everybody would have enough and above all, nobody would have too much.
I believed it, I had to act on it, and so I did. There have been times that I wish I'd held out on God for inflation. My $200 a month is now $113, and you can't live on that. But I don't have to. It's just the strangest thing. That lovely young man makes some very fancy promises, and when you take your luck on them, he delivers. He said, if you cast your bread upon the borders, it would return to you.
Return, it comes back a club sandwich. He says, your father knows what you have made of. Well, he does. Everything I have is a gift. Everything. This, my pants, my shoes, my purse and whatever's in it. I used to think I gave this money for other people. I didn't give it for other people at all. I gave it for Gert B.. It's a cinch to give money when you have it. You know, all you do is write a check.
But it's a very special, gracious art to learn how to accept, and we Americans are lousy about this. We go running around saying we're beholden to no man. We're the masters of our fate, and the very bread we're using to say it, and the earth we're walking on, it gives. I was so struck when I went back to Europe this fall that every other so-called Christian country, when friends separate, they consign one another to the care of God.
In Spain, they say adios. In France, they say adieu. In Germany, they say grüß Gott. And we say, well, chum, take care of yourself. Well, you know we're not doing so good. United States of America never had it so good. Never had it so rich. Never had higher education even approximate what it does now. If we could take such good care of ourselves, why don't we when we've got it so good? We're not taking very good care of ourselves.
The statistics on escapism have never been so astronomical as they now are. Alcoholism, pill addiction, drug addiction, suicide, suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, mental breakdowns, divorce, crime on high levels, delinquent kids. So if we can take such good care of ourselves, why are we running from ourselves so fast? Because everybody everywhere is searching for something to live by. Good level down where we live, people came to see me.
I had nothing to give them but God. When people with a liquor problem came and God didn't mean anything, I would say, go to AA. I hear it's just the greatest. I had read Jack Alexander's article. And I would always say, go. I just hear wonderful things about it, but I didn't go with them. In 1952, I was in New York and Connecticut to be near my publisher and agent while I was writing my book. And this began to bother me because I realized
[01:10:01]
that these people had had some trust in me or they wouldn't have come to me. And I didn't go with them the way I had in some way broken the chain. I got back to the desert in January of 1953. And I went to a longtime AA friend of mine, Henry C., long dead. And I said, Henry, how do you join AA? He said, well, it's a pretty big deal. You walk in and sit down. So I walked in and I said, now lest you think I might not have a right to belong to your group, I would be glad to tell you that shortly thereafter, the 20 questions came out.
And for you poor squares who don't know about this, 20 questions, if you answer yes to one, you might be an alcoholic. If you answer yes to two, the chances are you are an alcoholic. If you answer yes to three, you are one. I answered yes to 19 and the only reason I didn't answer yes to 20 was I never had a job to lose. So I walked into AA and I sat down. It was the first time I ever saw the big books It was the first time I ever saw chapter five and how it works and the 12 steps.
And the tears ran down my face. I won't tell you why this thing works, if we will let it. It works because it is the truth. There are many things that are true, but there are very few things which are the truth. Maybe this is pride, but I don't think so. Sometimes I wonder if those of us who did not get our actual sobriety from Alcoholics Anonymous don't have a better perspective on it. I think it is the greatest thing without any possible doubt operating in the world today.
The reason I know that those steps are the truth is because and I read them, I saw that they were exactly what I had for five and a half very lonely years been doing with my God. Sometimes they were in the same order even. Now and then they were in the same order. I could not believe my eyes. I believe that this is the greatest, the truth that is inherent in Alcoholics Anonymous, the spiritual truth for healing of minds and hearts and bodies just might be God's greatest gift to the 26th.
I believe that Dr. Bob and Bill W. are apostles for this age. Always God has taken the most foolish and given them the greatest wisdom. Always he has taken the last and made them first. He took a band of illiterate fishermen and gave them the truths that changed the very calendar we live by. I believe again he has given this wisdom to us foolish ones. It's too bad we're so afraid of the New Testament because we find ourselves on every page with the baguettes.
Who do you think it was who was blind and now sees? We in AA. Who do you think it was who was deaf and now hears? We. Who do you think it was who was lost and is now found? We. Who do you think it was who was dead and now lives? We. Who do you think that guy in the gutter was when the Good Samaritan crossed to take him out of the gutter? That was us drunks and the Good Samaritan was God operating in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Who do you think the prodigal son was? It's us. And who do you think the father was who ran the media? It's the higher power in AA. We find ourselves on every page if we just take the trouble and the patience to translate it a little into the language of today. Because if he's God, he can speak our language. He can speak our language, if we'll take the trouble to make it real. I cannot tell you the love that I find in all you people everywhere.
[01:15:01]
It doesn't make any difference whether you walk into an AA meeting in Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. You find this strange, almost chemical, imponderable of love that is out there. I've never heard the word love used so much as I hear it used in AA meetings and conventions. Big tough men with their arms around each other saying, Indeed, I just love you. This is what will save our souls. Not so far as heaven is concerned. What's heaven?
So far as living here is concerned. Life. Now. Save us from ourselves. And health. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from fear. I'm a 71-year-old woman and past. I have speaking dates through November of 1966 when I'll be almost 73. Sometimes I think God's giving one old woman quite a pushing around. There are times when I get tired and times when I get bored. And I will say to him, Would you let me off the hook for the weekend maybe?
And he says, No, keep going. You got on this very late. So I said, Keep going. And of course I would not have it otherwise. I cannot believe it that he can use any old thing. Any old leftover thing. And don't come and tell me that, Well, you're not a writer or you're not a speaker and neither was I. It took me six years to write a book. And I wrote it with my own blood and the help of God. I turned down the presidency of the freshman class at Smith because I couldn't speak in public.
And for 11 years I went around shaking and throwing up. I was so terrified. And then I spoke at Yale University Chapel and you can only get so scared. So since then I'm said to hell with it. I cannot believe though, even now, I have used life. And now maybe I am of a little use. Imagine that. All my life I've contributed to life's problems. Maybe in some tiny fashion, I might now be contributing a little to the solution of life's problems.
Oh, me Lord? Sure are you, he says. Who else do I have? Now that I've graduated from the sins of the flesh to the nasty little Christian sins, I find them so much more difficult than the sins of the flesh. When you commit adultery, you know it. When you steal from somebody, you know it. When you fall down and find your face drunk, you know it or somebody's always charmed to tell you. But I've now graduated to sins that I'll never get anywhere on.
Sins like this. Gert, are you by any chance getting proud of not being proud? Try that some weekend and see how far you get. I'm not a few years back and I'm not most disgusting of all things. I am a snob. I am a snob about snobs. I look down on people who look down on people. And with all you Southerners, I find out that I'm a bigot about bigotry. I spent the month of October in Alabama and I came out as bigoted.
If there's anything you don't know, that I was bigoted about the bigoted. They were bigoted about the black and I was bigoted about them. We had a hell of a time. Now these sins that I've got now are the doozies. They're the sins of the mind and the heart and the spirit. The part of me that's eternal. These aren't acceptable to my boss. So I've got two questions that I ask myself over and over and over every day of my life and neither one has to do with anybody else's sins.
Mine are a full-time job. The first question is, Gert, how are you doing with Jesus Christ? How are you doing with him? What's the score? The second question is, is this for God or is this for Gert? If it's for God, we try to do it. If it's for God, we try to do it. If it's for Gert, we try not to do it. If we don't know, and that's most of the time, we just wait. I will close now with a prayer I always close with.
Don't buy your head. It's the prayer of a long-dead slave. Oh Lord, I ain't what I want to be. Oh Lord, I ain't what I ought to be.
[01:20:00]
Oh Lord, I ain't what I'm going to be. But thanks Lord, I ain't what I used to be. Amen. Bless you. Well Gert, you used the word love and I love you. I love the way you say it too. You sound as pronounced as it's always spelled with two U's. The only Q in the Q would be the I do. Well I do, and I think everybody here knows why. Are there any announcers? I don't know. I want to tell our people here that when Texas is lost, we are gained.
Dr. S., Dr. John, Dr. F., myself, Carol and Kirsten Jim. I think most of you know me. Thank you. Oh yeah. Warn all the drunks in Central and South Texas what a rough, tough cookie he is. Ted, anything else? No, of course I want to welcome all the guests that come here tonight from as far away as Shreveport, Louisiana just for this one meeting to see Dr. Jim and to hear Gert. About 35 up here from Suburban Club in Austin.
And of course there are many here from San Antonio and from all over. I know I've missed a few. But from Parkhurst, Christie, just all over. And we love you all, and please come back. Hell devil you be. Well I've enjoyed it very, very much. Let's rise and be dismissed. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory, forever and ever. Amen.