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Source: DICOBE-00276 – Lynn C – STEP 2-THE BEGINNING OF HOPE.mp3 File: dicobe-00276-lynn-c-step-2-the-beginning-of-hope.mp3 Duration: 00:44:16
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Mr. C. was one of the first counselors to use the recovery principles you're hearing in a therapeutic recovery situation. On this tape, he presents his application of the principles of step number two of AA, entitled The Beginning of Hope. Mr. C.. The second step of our program is we came to believe that a power greater than ourself could restore us to sanity. I think most of us, at the extreme of our drinking, had lost a belief in almost anything.
And God is a real and vital factor in our lives, in our fellow men, our suspicion and distrust of them, in ourselves, in our own self-respect and self-confidence and our own ability. It's either been lost or damaged or at least stultified to some degree. And we fail in gratitude for the gifts that God has given us, the physical and mental health. And the lack of gratitude is one of the most marked things in AA.
We seem to forget our beginning. And of course, the only way you can make progress in life is to compare the present with the past or the end of the beginning. And true belief requires obedience. That's a thing that we don't like to hear. If we truly love, we are obedient to the laws of love, which is to deny yourself so that others may benefit. And that's the demand or choice that love always makes on anyone.
Many men have trouble with faith. I've seen men come in who claim to be agnostic or atheistic. Actually, I've never met a true atheist because they will inevitably say, thank God I'm an atheist or I'm an atheist, thank God, which doesn't make sense. They, in most cases, are people who early in life, in their childhood, have been forced into church a great deal. And I know what they do. They just think when I get my own, the heck with this business.
But this requires true humility, the recognition that there is some power greater than ourselves. And that should be evident. One of my definitions of the alcoholic is a person whose drinking pattern indicates a need for a power greater than himself. That was evident with me. I needed something outside myself to give me the charges of sparkle in life, which we all would like to have. And sure, at one time, it did provide a great feeling of elation and euphoria.
But what became, or what started out as a social, acceptable course became an all-consuming evil. One of the classical or theological definitions of humility is man's acceptance, man's acceptance of his responsibility to Almighty God and to his fellow man. And that's sadly looking in many of us. The Hebrew definition of faith, which Paul used, was faith is the substance of the things hoped for and evidence of the things not seen.
That contains every human aspiration, every desire in life, the substance of our existence. And always the question back in our mind, is there something after this place? And certainly it's the evidence of the things not seen. You can see the beauty of a sunrise or a sunset, if your mind and heart is right. You can see beauty all around you here. But if you haven't a recognition of the divine creation that's behind it, then I don't think it means any more to any of us than a glance in the mirror that disappears the minute we turn away our eyes.
Start with the little things regardless of your present doubt. Lay aside any prejudices that you have concerning denomination of faith. It isn't a denomination of faith in AA. It's simply a belief in some power greater than yourself. And to me there's something a little bit ludicrous and yet vastly pathetic about some man standing in a bar,
[00:05:00]
not in possession of his faculties, his mind has been stultified by the chemical drug of alcohol, saying there's no power greater than me. It's ridiculous. I know a lot of people have doubts about faith simply because they've never been educated to it. I was raised in a faith which I disregarded in the last years of my drinking. And yet the early values of life never leave your mind. The values of decency, honor, self-respect and all those things, they're there, even though they've been badly damaged by the use of any chemical drug.
This picture that you see is a picture of Stallman. It's Christ in the garden knocking at the door and it's symbolic. That picture has helped a lot of people develop a realistic faith. You see there's no latch on the outside of that door. It has to be open within. And that is true of our faith. A person with a locked mind cannot learn. You have to open up your mind and think there is a possibility of it and practice the habit of prayer.
To some of you that may have trouble and doubt very much the efficacy of AA, all we ask of you is to do some of these things that all of us are obligated to do if we're to find a happy and contented life. This great prayer on page 63. God, I offer myself to thee to build with me and do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties.
The victory over them may be evidence of those that I would help with thy love, thy power, thy way of life. Let me do thy will always. I make no pretense of what I am or what I do. I don't live up to that too well. I don't think any of us do. The only thing you can do is to try to get some control over your emotional life. There is a will to believe and a will not to believe. And I think this world today is very confusing.
I know here that most of you will form some plan by which you're going to live. And to hold that out, to hold it in your mind, and all the confusion and the disruption that's going on in the world today is very, very difficult. I recall so many things. Once Sir Henry Gray, at the start of World War I, said the lamps are going out all over the world. They'll never be lighted again in our time. And that's true.
Some of the old values have gone. We see it so much in this picture today with the people coming in to this treatment business with a lot of ideas that are completely foreign to what you and I need, which is AA, the only thing that's ever been known to help the alcoholic. I love this statement of Soren Kierkegaard. It's one of those things that I wish I had thought of that. He said the devil being quite busy at the moment has turned his job over to the intellectuals, and they, in their academic way, are doing quite nicely at his work.
And certainly that's true with some of the tripe that you read today. Now I'd like to explain that I have no prejudice for the degree people. Many of them use it rightly. I have a degree, but that didn't prevent me from going through more difficulty than nine people should be in a lifetime. Mental difficulty. I never got in any legal difficulty. An intellectual is a person who can point out to you the difference between the possible and the impossible.
A theologian can tell you about the possibility of being a creator and the impossibility of then not being one. The scientist can tell you the possibility of radar working and the impossibility of it not working. The intelligent person recognizes the difference between the sensible and the senseless. And to the vast credit of most alcoholics, they eventually realize the senselessness of taking any kind of a toxic drug and the sensible way of life to live.
I know it's difficult for a lot of men. A man who has been starved physically for a long period of time can't sit down to a meal of steak and potatoes and gravy. He has to take a little bland food until his system is accustomed to more.
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That is true of our mind, which has to be fed the same as our body. And it comes very slowly. Keep an open mind. That's all we ask of you. Be willing to start with prayer, which will be the start of the long journey home. Sometimes think of Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light. Lead kindly light, lead thou me on. The night is dark, and I am far from home. And all of us, we're a long way from home. We still are.
And to recognize what faith is, it must be more than a belief. We believe in many things. We believe in marriage. How many of us live up to the full commitment of marriage, which calls for the outgoingness of love? There's so many crazy ideas today. You hear it so frequently. Marriage is a 50-50 proposition. It isn't. That's percentage playing, which the alcoholic is a master at. Marriage truly, altruistically, and idealistically is 100% giving.
You come before me with me. I come before you with you. That's true love. What is true love? Your pain and my heart. And I don't think anyone will know true love until he thinks, acts, and feels for another. And you have to live according to the rules. People do not understand that the moral and civil laws just have one purpose, and one purpose alone. That's to make men free. If you live according to those laws, you will be free.
Any violation of any of the moral or civil laws is going to result in disaster. How deep our faith is, I question myself a lot. I'd like to think that I had true faith, which I haven't. I'm struggling for it. Like one man who claimed to be agnostic when he came to AEA said, even though I struggle to have faith itself, I have faith in faith. And perhaps that pays me. I would like to think that someday I would reach the point where I could live, as Brian points out in his Thanatopsis.
So live that when thy summons comes to join, that innumerable thong where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death, thou goest not like a galley slave, scourged to his dungeon, but soothed and sustained by an unfaltering trust, that I go to thy grave, and like one who wraps the draperies of his couch about him, lies down to pleasant dreams. I would like to think I could die that way.
I have fears like everyone else. Like Dostoevsky said that his one dread in life was that he would not be worthy of his suffering. I've had good health all my life. I've had a good family. There's a certain amount of fear of losing my mind or being crippled in mind or body. And I think that is present in a lot of people. We have to give other people credit for the same faith that we have. And we'll respect your faith.
I don't care what faith you are. That's your business. You're usually born with it. But whatever you do from now on, do it well. Be a good member of your church. Be a good member of your family. Be a good member of any service or civic groups that you belong to. That's the only thing that's going to give you the satisfactions in life which we all need. Any job that is done and done well is a source of a great satisfaction.
I know that if you even cut your lawn and do a good job and trim it and put everything away, you'll have a sense of satisfaction that you cannot get in any other way. But there again, we have to rid ourselves of this selfishness and self-centeredness that's blocked us off from true relationship with God and our fellow man. Yes, we think we're very generous, and most alcoholics are. In a different kind of a way, we give people the material things of life, but we don't give of ourselves very readily.
We're too selfish and self-centered. I think that that is true of all of us. And a certain amount of selfishness is not… A certain amount of selfishness is not bad. This is a selfish, unselfish program. Paradoxical as it may seem.
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You have to put AA ahead of anything else. You may think your family, your church, or anything else is ahead of AA, but if you don't have sobriety, the possibility is you won't have your family, you won't have your job, and you won't have your life. And yet it sounds paradoxical that we have to put this ahead of anything else in life. Until we realize that everything depends upon our complete abstinence from pills of any sort, or the evasion that we try to avoid the realities of life.
Life isn't an easy thing. I don't think any of us have had the perfect life, and that's what we'd like to have, the perfect wife, perfect friends, perfect job, perfect world to live in. But the world isn't like that. It's tough sometimes. It's very, very cruel to some people. But to understand life at all, you have to realize that life is a journey. That's all life is, a journey from God to God. You've all taken journeys to different places or gone to different parts of the country.
The minute you leave your home, back in your mind is always, I will return here. And certainly in this journey to God, we know that someday we're going to die. They have a sign over St. Michael's Cemetery in Venice. You are what we were. We are what you will be. And that isn't a discomforting thought at all. I think it teaches you to make use of your time, to make use of every day. Because sometime in your life, you're going to recognize that you can't love or hope or possess anything very long without the certainty that someday you're going to leave it.
And therefore, we should make use of our time, make use of every day. Our job in life is to seek truth. Our destiny is never going to be settled at our own level. I try to do that in the use of alcohol. It can't be settled at that level. Our life is going to be settled either below our capabilities or above. Well, you and I have had some experience of trying to settle life below the use of pills or booze.
It didn't work. Let's try it above. Let's try this way of life. Practice these principles every day. This isn't just for the alcoholic. The alcoholic isn't the only one that believes that one crowded hour of joyous life is worth an age without a name. That's the thing that confronts us all the time. We want to get out of life. I sometimes think more than actually is in it. We'd like to live in this state of euphoria or numbness.
Oh, what does it profit you? You have to face this world. And I think in AA, you re-educate yourself and get a tremendous thrill out of the ordinary things of life. A good night's sleep, a good association, the love of your fellow man. And again, I want to stress that the first choice or demand that love always makes upon anyone, I don't care who it is, is the changing of your thinking away from self and self-centeredness to others in the service to them.
The more outgoing you are, the happier you're going to be. And certainly you can see here all around you people coming in that are less fortunate than you. Some have lost families, some are in a great deal of difficulty financially and otherwise. And perhaps you reach a stage where I didn't, where I thought, what hope is there for me? When I realized that life isn't a battle or a warfare, it's a siege where the attacks of the day are going to be repeated tomorrow and perhaps every day the rest of my life.
What possible hope is there that I can hold out for myself when I realize that? Well, the first thing you have to do is to boldly acknowledge none of us have the assurance of any span of life. Tonight might end it all for me or for all of us or any one of us. But even if we have that assurance, there's only one way that you can live life and that's a day at a time. We know the story of the rich fool who built barns for his hoarded grain and that night his soul was required of him.
Many a man has sown and never lived to reap. So it's altogether without reason that we build these barriers in our mind, bogies that we've created in our mind and put them ahead of us.
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Take today, live it, live it well and be grateful to God that you have the equipment to live it because I know in every hospital, in every town, in every city in this country there are people who at this moment are sweating it out on a bed of pain. I'm not and I'm deeply grateful for. And gratitude isn't a quality that you get out of thin air. You earn it by the practice of it. And you have to do that in AA.
The character of truth, again, is its capacity to endure the test of universal experience and come out unchanged from any reasonable form of discussion. And we have to discover the truth about ourselves. Whether we're alcoholic or addicted to pills, review your own experience. That's the basic principle involved. If you still want to continue, you can do that. I know that many, many alcoholics are going to die an alcoholic death simply because they will not recognize the seriousness of their addiction and think that they can avoid it.
They don't think that they're alcoholic or addicted to pills because their conduct doesn't make the headline. But don't wait too long. Life is shorter than you think. You can also use that test of the truth in discovering whether your life is unmanageable. Whether you have the proper faith. It only comes through the practice of certain principles. The prayer, serenity prayer, the great prayer of Francis of Assisi, the third-step prayer, the seven-step prayer.
Actually, there are only two prayers, or three prayers in AA. The serenity prayer, the third-step prayer, and the seven-step prayer. You have them on the cards that we have here. Practice them. We don't do anything well until we practice them many times. And it's a long, slow process of discovering yourself and to become a contented person. AA is simply the magnifying glass by which you can discover the truths of life.
The truth about yourself, the truth of the way you've been living. And that isn't anything new. Dr. Jung, who is this great Swiss psychiatrist and a deeply spiritual man, he died two or three years ago, made this statement. And he knew the human mind as few other men have ever known. He parted from Freud and Adler and some of their theories. Of course, most of them left Freud because of the radical extent of his theories.
And he said, among my patients is the second half of life. That would be the age all 35 onward. He said, there has been not one, not one of the hundreds of patients that he treated whose problem as the last resort has not been that of finding religious values. Well, don't be confused by that word religious. He doesn't use spiritual values, which we use in AA. A belief in some power greater than yourself.
Religion simply means regularity. The regularity of going to church, the regularity of prayer. And certainly we ought to give up some of these definitions of faith and call ourselves Christians instead. Living according to the rules. But our faith has to have deep meaning. In other words, it's just so many words. And we repeat prayer as a matter of rote. And going to church can be a social habit, which many people have.
But it hasn't deep meaning in their lives. I've often thought of the faith that I've seen. And of course, mine was the same way at a time like the old family parlor down in the country years ago. You remember they had double doors. This was before central heating. And to conserve heat in the wintertime, those doors were closed during the week. And then on Sunday, they'd hoop up the base burner and you'd go in and look at some of your bequiskered ancestors or the stereoscopic slides.
Sunday night, it was closed again. And that's the way we treated our faith, something to parade out on a Sunday. And a lot of people believe that if a person goes to church, they're Christian people, and that isn't true. There's an old bit. He goes to church on Sunday and passes around the contribution box.
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He's in his office on Monday as cunning and as crooked as a fox. On Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, he's robbing everybody that he can. But he goes to church on Sunday, so they say that he's an honest man. And there's a lot of truth to that, because unless our faith is something that we live, not just a mouth or make the gestures, like so many men do in AA. You can comply with AA. You can go to meetings.
You can read the book in the morning. Has it meaning to you? And unless our faith has meaning, we're then unable to enter into rewarding and obligating relationships with other human beings. You and I have been taught usually that we're working towards God. We have to find the love of God. Very few of us can visualize a power greater than ourself. I suppose everyone has a different opinion of it. Kids sometimes have a vision of God as an old gentleman on a golden throne, counting sparrows as they fall.
Some only can conceive a divine intelligence. Some of you have seen this picture on faith, put out by the Moody Institute. And it staggers the imagination that there are over a hundred million, over a hundred million, they don't know exactly how many, universes larger than ours, and stars far bigger than the sun. Well, you just can't imagine that. But to believe that that just is a hodgepodge mess that has been thrown together or mysteriously appeared is beyond my conception.
There has to be a divine intelligence. Nothing could be as orderly as it is in nature and not have some divine intelligence behind it. For instance, they can predict the hour, the minute, that an eclipse is going to come a hundred or a thousand years from now. Could anything like that be just a happenstance or coincidence? It couldn't be. That's why this old expression, order is the first law of heaven.
So we have to establish some order in our life to restore us to sanity. Well, I've had men object to this term, restore us to sanity. What do you mean, I'm insane? Any deviation from normal behavior is considered some type of mental aberration or insanity. Driving a car when you're not in possession of your faculties and endangering the lives of the people on the street or your family, is that insanity?
What do you call it? Call it what you will. It's certainly not normal behavior. Disappearing from home for two or three days, is that normal? Normal people just simply don't do that. Some form of mental aberration has taken place. The power greater than ourself in this restoration to sanity is simply following the principles of A.A. which are as old as time. People think that A.A. was brought into being in 1935.
That's when A.A. started. That isn't true. The men and women who contributed to making up the Twelve Steps must have been divinely inspired because they embraced all the true principles and the wisdom of the ages. A.A. is written in the marble halls of time. Not as an A.A. program, as a living program. And this must be a living program in your own mind. We all do it differently, I know that. But we have to rid ourselves of this selfishness and self-centeredness before we can even begin to understand the principles behind this way of life.
It's a great deal more than giving up drinking. None of us were drunk all the time. Sometimes we were in full p- Sliding the sign Written in the marble halls of time. Not as an A.A. program, as a living program. And this must be a living program in your own mind. We all do it differently, I know that. But we have to rid ourselves of this selfishness and self-centeredness before we can even begin to understand the principles behind this way of life.
This way of life. It's a great deal more than giving up drinking. None of us were drunk all the time. Sometimes we were in full possession of our faculties. I think the insanity of the thing is when a person, after a period of years of living this, goes back to what he should know, from bitter experience, is going to destroy his life. What do you call it? We get wrapped up in the semantics of AA all the time.
[00:30:25]
And we don't recognize that it's the behavior that we went through that determined how we live. But a lot of people never grow up spiritually or emotionally. That's what we refer to when we refer to immaturity as the wide new swings of the alcoholic. Now, some of us make this decision to turn our lives over to God as we understood Him, and came to believe that a power greater than ourself, but we limit it to certain areas of our life.
And I know it's very easy for me to, you know, have great faith when the sun is shining, God's in His high heaven, everything's going fine. But that is no test of my character or anyone else's character. I don't perform too well when the chips are down and I feel a little bit oddly at times, which we all do. But reason and judgment finally takes you out of it. And you're going to have bad days in AA. Don't expect that just because you know this program that everything is going to be milk and honey and you're going to live in a paradise.
Life isn't supposed to be that way. You're going to have to have trouble at times, tragedies, which I've had many in my life. But you learn the efficacy of time. And the only way to live this life is a day at a time, which is very easy for me to say and one of the most difficult things that I ever trained myself to do. But without faith, some kind of faith. We have a lot of faith and I have faith that the light is going on when I press that button.
But to have faith in a power that none of us have seen, that we cannot understand, but certainly in AA, when you see the miraculous recovery, that is when men become deeply spiritual. I know I've seen men come in complete absence of faith. When they see that this thing works the way it does, then faith develops. And where I find people who sometimes object to what they call a spiritual part of AA, what other part is there?
Read those 12 steps. Every one of them are spiritual. When a person admits that he's powerless over anything and his life has become unmanageable, that's a spiritual act. You don't have to mention the word God in it. The power greater than ourself can restore us to a sane and sensible and enjoyable life if we live up to the principles of AA. That is true of all human nature. When any one of us turn away from what we know is the best within ourself or the expectation of a born, as I did so many times in the euphoria of alcoholism or the fear of punishment, that person is in trouble with himself and he's badly stained by this world. Use prayer constantly. Pray that you will be shown some way to help yourself, which none of us knew.
Pray for guidance. That's what I have to do every day of my life. And as I say, I don't hold myself out to be any criterion of what AA should be. I know what I am. Pray for those that you resent. That's the only way you'll rid yourself of some of the resentments. And that's a tough thing to do. I know one man, when he realized in the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
When he realized what he was saying, he cut out that part of the Lord's Prayer for some time until he grew up a little bit. Because he wasn't willing to forgive other people. And the only rights that we have in life with other people are the same rights that we have for ourself. I like the good things of life. I'd like to see it come to everyone. Because I haven't any more rights than anyone else in this room.
But without faith, men have only the rock of their own pride to build on, and that is building a nothing on nothing. Because unless we lose this pride, we're going to end up an idiot. A man who lives in isolation and pride isn't going to live a miserable life and eventually end up an idiot.
[00:35:03]
You have to lose part of your heart or be willing to give it, or you're going to lose your life. And that certainly is proven true in AA. I don't think many of us, even today, have this deep faith that is so necessary for a happy and contented life. It requires a sincere effort, some self-denial, to achieve the greatest thing that you'll know in life, and that is a disciplined, orderly way of life.
As I mentioned, order is the first law of heaven. That's one of the oldest actions in life. And look how we run our life, without regard to the rules at all. Looking back over my life, I frequently think of an old story they told about a railroad wreck. Two trains met head-on. There was only one witness, a farmer, and they called him in the resulting lawsuits as a witness. Said, well, Mr. Brown, tell what you saw and what you did. Just use your own terms.
Well, he said, I was walking down this track, and I heard a whistle, and I looked behind me, and here's number 11 coming down the track, 70 miles an hour. Well, go on, what happened after that? Well, then I heard another whistle, and I looked ahead, and here's 212 coming down the same track, 70 miles an hour. Well, what did you see and what did you do? Well, he said, I stepped off that track, and I said, that's a hell of a way to run a railroad.
And when I look back on my life, with the lack of order and the selfishness and self-centeredness, it was one hell of a way to run a life. Eventually, we know that we must believe in other people, and I think it starts with learning to love your fellow man, which is awfully tough. I don't think that this is a Pollyannish program. There's a lot of people that I don't like, but I have to love them. I wish they would improve, particularly the gossips, the vicious people.
You know, gossip is one of the worst things, and we're all guilty of it. I am, every one of us here. Oh, we do it in a kind way, we want to help people, but I often think of the rumors that are started in AA, and you hear them all the time. Rumors about this one or that, he's doing this or that, the other thing, without any valid evidence behind. I always think of a rumor, that ugly bird of ill omen that neither lights nor flies but hovers.
There's no way to stop it. There's too much of that in AA, I know that. There's a lot of defiance in this thing. Dr. Thiebaud said that we're defiant people. We think that we can live as we see fit, regardless of the rights and the obligations and responsibilities to other people. And with that frame of mind, you're going to continue to dig the ditch deeper and deeper, into which you're ultimately going to fall.
We all like to be liked, but you have to like yourself before anyone can like you. These things must be taken into consideration, and in AA we have to think. Recovery is going to come when you lose this sickness, that horrible mental sickness of all the remorse and regret that comes from living the wrong way of life or using drugs of any kind, and turn to the world around you and find out what a marvelous place it can be, if your mind and your heart is right.
I maintain that if we could hold on to it, that every night's sleep is a thing to be deeply grateful for. It's one of God's greatest gifts. That every meal is a banquet. That a lot of people that cannot eat would give anything for our ability to eat. That every person is a person well worth knowing, provided you understand them and are big enough to accept their faults, which I'm not in a great many cases.
There are a lot of people I don't want sitting in my lap and don't want around me. But I don't hate anybody. I despise some of them. You know, that is why I use this semantics too. But it's easy to do these things for a short period of time, but to sustain yourself and to discipline yourself day after day is a very, very hard thing to do. And you're going to find as you grow older, the years go all too quickly.
It's only the days that go so wrong and hang in our hands so heavily. If you learn to use the days and take them, some of them go very badly, but look back on it.
[00:40:07]
You've had bad days before, you've had troubles before, and probably at the time they looked insurmountable. Where are those things now? I spent a lot of time and time in meditating and thinking about the 101 times where I'd reached a point where I didn't think that life was worth living. Where are those things now? They're behind me. I have problems. I have as many as anybody here. But you cannot do it on your own basis. I tried that for years, trying to build my way through life, and you can't do it.
Nor can you play percentages with life. That's part of our complicated alibi system. But if you have trouble with a spiritual step, be willing to wait until you're in a better frame of mind and can understand some of the things that we're trying to get across here, which we do, I know, so poorly. But we're either sick or insane to destroy all the things that are worthwhile in life, the love and affection of the people that are close to you, your respect in the community, the love of yourself.
We have to love ourselves or no one else can love us, and to be loved you have to be lovable. And boy, we miss the mark a great deal. But it's our thinking that gets us back to drinking, and we have to guard ourself at all times and discipline our mind. It's easy to discipline yourself physically, or not easy, but that can be done. But to discipline your mind is one of the hardest things that I know.
Be willing to prove yourself. Don't expect too much too soon. When you have proven yourself and the people recognize the change in you, then you're going to be accepted. But I think men have to, sometime, sooner or later, realize that there must be a change in life. We all strike a crossroads sometimes. Sometimes you don't know which way to turn. But use the serenity prayer. Grant me, almighty God, the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change.
There are a lot of things I would like to change in life I can't change. The courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It takes a great deal of courage to live in this world today. Use this term, this will pass when you're disturbed. And I don't know of any problem that won't be better after a good night's sleep. And we're all trying to get the same thing in life, regardless of what faith we have, or no matter how badly at times we perform.
We'd like to have some degree of serenity and peace of mind. And I think we, alcoholics, are forced to it, or addicts, at some time. If you've wondered what this thing is on the board, Kaktaboka, taktaboka, it's an old Russian proverb that I think proves so too in AA. And the interpretation is, in dire extremity, man remembers his God. And I think it was in the dire extremity, a loneliness, despair, frustration, anxiety, that comes an excessive use of any drug, that some of us remember the God of our early years.
I hope you all do. We'll close with the Lord's Prayer. 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, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.