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Source: DICOBE-00517 – Terry R – VALLEY CONF – 1976-01-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00517-terry-r-valley-conf-1976-01-15.mp3 Duration: 01:02:07
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Says the leader may qualify. I'd like to qualify. I can hardly resist qualifying. As I said, I'm an alcoholic. I'm very grateful to be sober today. This is called the spiritual meeting, and that kind of put me in mind, of course, the way alcohol affected me spiritually. I'm personally convinced that being high from alcohol is the closest thing to a spiritual experience that isn't. It's just about touching God, but not. My sponsor asked me one time, have you ever felt close to God? And I wasn't going to answer him real fast, because I thought this was going to be another one of his traps. And the nerve of him, anyway, a fallen away Catholic asking me if I'd ever been close to God. But after giving it some thought, I said, yeah, I think I felt close to God at times. And he said, would it be fair to describe that experience by saying that you had a feeling everything was all right? Said, yeah, I think it'd be fair to say that. A feeling of transcendence, and that's very close to a description of what it's like to be half in the bag. It's kind of a transcendence that all those little things that bug me, and that feeling in my stomach, and so that kind of… In fact, the first time I drank, that knot in my stomach dissolved in alcohol, and I didn't even know I had a knot until it dissolved in alcohol. And it's very much like it. Those little things don't bug me. I still know that life isn't perfect, I'm not perfect, the world isn't perfect, but somehow it doesn't matter so much when I've had a few fast doubles of scotch.
And the tragedy is that being high under the influence of a chemical, although it's a chemical imitation of a spiritual experience, it's just about as far away from one as anything can be, as far as I could figure. Because when I drank, I would lie. I mean, I don't mean sometimes I'd lie to get more to drink. I'd lie all the time. I'd lie getting ready, I'd lie while I drank, and I'd lie after I drank. Every time I drank, and if it wasn't necessary, I'd do it just to keep in practice, I think. I would lie before I drank by never ever letting you know how important it was for me to have a drink. I don't know about you, but it was important for me to have the drink that I was anticipating. I spent twelve years in the seminary where they didn't have any drinking. So when I got to where I could drink when I wanted to, I had a lot of practice at not being able to have a drink at times.
That didn't bother me particularly. But when I figured there was a possibility of one, I would work at it. And the basic thing at working at having a drink is just like, we all know it, no one has to teach us, it's kind of alcoholic instinct. My alcoholic instincts were in full working order on day one. And that is never let them know. And if we think about it a bit, it's quite sensible. You know, if we let them know our true attitude, true feeling about having a drink, it would alarm the host. If I went to your house and I figured
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that there was going to be a drink offered there, well, I was going to get that drink. If I was honest, completely honest, I'd walk in and say, well, I hear you got booze here, would you please give it to me fast? Because if you don't, if you wait just a few more minutes, I will go in and steal it. And if I wasn't absolutely sure you had booze here, there's no way I would be here. And if I can't find it and steal it, I will leave in the next five minutes and find some place where they have it. That's a, you know, kind of a rough description of my attitude towards getting the drink. And when you would ask me if I, in fact, when it would actually take place, say, would you like a drink? You know, if some honest reaction to that question would be to jump up and say, yeah. No, I'd never say that.
I'd say, why not? I had a speaker already who triggered off some memories and feelings, and it, not that I completely forgot it, but it just kind of freshened it up for me, that I always could drink, I thought, with a great amount of casualness and aplomb and a certain, you know, maintain my poise, if I was absolutely sure of the next 20 drinks. But if there was some doubt about drink 10, I would worry, and I couldn't really be too casual handling that one I had in my hand. If there was some question about the availability of the 10th drink, because I would be plotting. Whenever I drank, I worked at it. It was an engineering project. It was kind of program planning plus, and I would never let you know.
And I would also do my best to lie while I was drinking. We are noted, we alcoholics, for having, developing a tremendous capacity. And, you know, we got that reputation in the early days, in the early phase, of being able to drink them under the table. And doctors have gone into this, and they've had tests and experiments, and seeing what kind of a chemical difference in the metabolism and all that. And they may find, you know, that maybe they found it, I don't know. But I have my own theory that I like. I think we develop a tremendous capacity because we try harder. That's all. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that if you can still stand up and say, another one, please, you've got a lot better chance of getting another drink that way. Now, social drinkers don't have that kind of determination. I do. It's very important to me to get another drink, and I will put all of my power of concentration, willpower, prayers, into being able to stand up and say, another one, please. Pronounce it well. Or if I got my own bottle, I will concentrate, you know, get that muscular, maintain that muscular coordination so I can unscrew the top. Now, social drinkers are noted for saying things like this when they've had a little too much to drink. I think I'm drunk. If any one of us is capable of properly enunciating that sentence, we know we're not drunk yet. And I would lie after I drank by trying not to look quite as bad as I felt. I'd be in a zombie state the next day
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and get a little, you know, weak smile out and keep kind of some motion going so you wouldn't suspect that I was near death inside. So I would lie all the time. And when you lie all the time, this sense of communion that goes along with a spiritual experience, you know that, that's, to my, in my book, spiritual experience is a sense of transcendence of being at one, at one with my higher power and my brothers and sisters. And I lie so relentlessly when I drink or even think I might get a drink, I start lying, that everything going on inside of me, all the real action inside of me, is classified material. I can't let anybody know about it because it'll give it away, give away the game. And if I've got ninety-five percent of the action inside of me is classified material, there ain't much to talk about that's for real. And so when I'm drinking, I've got to talk only about things I'm not interested in and bore you and bore myself and complain about things that don't really bother me and rhapsodize about things that I really don't like and never ever let you know how I feel. Because if I let you know how I feel, you might want to help me. And you know what that means when someone wants to help you.
You might not know entirely what it means, but we know one thing about it, it's probably going to be harder to get a drink when they're trying to help you. And so I'm absolutely cut off from my fellow man, and I'm lying, and I understand it's rather difficult to maintain a conscious contact with God while I'm lying to everybody else. So much for the spiritual experience of drinking booze. It's a teasing imitation. And yet in my life, I'm an alcoholic right now. I'm more of an alcoholic now, it is my belief, than I've ever been in my life. My disease is progressing. And I value being high. I value it.
If it's near me, I pick it. I prefer it. To you, my mother, the Pope, anybody. I never, at any time that I can remember, ever sat in a bar or sat in my own room and twirled a glass of scotch, looking through the amber color, saying, boy, do I ever like this more than I like self-respect. No, I mean, I've never done that. I don't make the comparison directly while I'm drinking. Just observing my own drinking, it seems that when I drink, when a conflict arises, you know, I want to have self-respect and I want to love my brothers and sisters, I want to tell the truth, and I want to be loyal to my friends. I'm all for that stuff.
Except when I'm drinking and the conflict develops between my drinking and one of those other values, guess what I pick. Now I'm all for you, I've nothing against you, it's just that if you're going to get in the way of a drink, you lose. That's how I value drinking. It seems that some of us just get something out of a drink of alcohol or pills, and it's not so much what we get, I think, it's what it promises. Booze never made me happy, but it always made me feel like I was going to be happy in about 15 minutes. Booze promised, it always promised me the thing, it always promised me the breakthrough. And after I drank enough and was promised I'd never get a job on my line of work again, and after I was removed from the next parish, and was being detoxed in a locked ward for the sixth time, and after I knew and read the books, and had talked to, been in individual therapy twice, and talked to expert alcoholic counselors, I don't know how many times, and after I was a…
I don't know how many times, and after I was agreeing for two and a half, three years that I was an alcoholic, and after the evidence was in, that's one of my private definitions of an alcoholic, someone who gets drunk after the evidence is in,
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after all that, when I knew there was no doubt in my mind that when I drink it's disaster, it seemed to me in here that a drink would help. Seemed to me that I, I think I'd like that disaster better than this disaster. And that's my, one of my ways of describing why this is a disease. And I don't know, that's, that's a double bind that I don't know how anybody can get out of, except with the help of a power greater than ourselves.
And then we, we get in, we get struck by this program. I was dumped into it. And I looked at the twelve steps and I thought I'd seen these someplace before. It looked like the table of contents of an ascetical theology book. I took a course in that. Ascetical theology is the department that teaches you how to be a saint. And it's only in this program that the most basic, the most basic message of my own faith started to become clear and related to real life. I don't see AA, the program, being in any sense in competition with any religion that I know of.
It's just that for certain of us alcoholics, that the basic message of most faiths is hidden until we can look at it with the glasses, through the lens of Alcoholics Anonymous. I myself will run riot in the pursuit of the Lord. I wanted to be good, thinking that, well maybe being good will make me happy. Got that? I'd pray for God's help to make me a good priest. And in the back of my mind I knew that I could tell if he was going to answer that prayer when I noticed that I was better than the other ones. I'd ask him to help me be sober, and I knew that he was answering my prayer when I felt just like I wanted to feel.
A lot of self there. In this program, we walk in here and we say, please help me, will you give me what I always wanted? And we say, no. No, in fact, not only will we not give you what you always wanted, we'd suggest you just, I know you don't have anything, you look kind of desperate, and the only thing I see you got clutching there in your sweaty little hand is a resentment that you don't have what you want.
That last little thing you got clutching in your sweaty hand, that resentment, for starters, why don't you drop that as well? To give up all hope of ever being happy the way you wanted to be happy, of being good the way you wanted to be good, and accept a gift of being happy the way your higher power wants to be happy. Developing is the way he wants. And that's kind of heavy. It really sounds crazy right off the bat, but it introduces us to a life of deep freedom. I'm grateful to be sober today. I'm a bad drunk. I should be dead.
That's what I call overdoing it by qualifying. Two and a half, I think it was two and a half, three and a half years ago, Paul, I was going up to try to look the enemy in the eye, that is, the people who work in the field of alcoholism, at Berkeley, Berkeley Center of Alcohol Studies. It was a program for clergy. It was an intensive summer school, and there were four Roman Catholic priests among the clergy, and I think about 40 of my brother and sister, ministers of the Lord and other religions. I think there were four recovering alcoholics among the group, three of the priests.
And word was that one of them was a recovering alcoholic. It took me about five seconds to find Paul. We were in chow line, and I just, I knew he was it.
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And we hit it off right from the start as brother alcoholics. And it is a real privilege for me to introduce Pastor Paul Seay from Richmond Hill, which is in Queens, in New York. My name is Paul. I'm a United Presbyterian minister, and I'm a very grateful alcoholic. It's good to be with all of you today, although I feel somewhat the way I felt that day in the chow line up at Berkeley. I didn't know anyone. I was scared, and I needed to meet another AA. And there's something about those of us in the program that we must have antennae where we can just seek one another out.
And a great wave of calmness came over me as I met Terry for the first time. Short time after that, Terry came east, preached in my pulpit, stayed overnight in our home, and through that I met your good friend Herb Seay. And so things seemed to run in progression. I met Terry, then Herb, and here I am today. And I'm awfully glad and very grateful to be with you this morning here in California. I'm not going to keep you too long, because I am kind of nerved up. And more than that, I think I have to go to the bathroom.
Now, there have always been three things I've wanted to do, and I've never been able to do as a preacher. And the first one is to light up a cigarette while I'm speaking. Second thing that I would have done this morning at this hour back in New York would have been to mount the pulpit in my clerical garb. And so I've always wanted to wear a preaching coat like the one I have on this morning. And the third thing I've wanted to do with a group this size is to take up a collection.
And if I can't do that, Mayor Beam has asked if any of you would like to buy Big Mac Bonds. Well, you can't get a preacher up to preach without a text, so I have my text this morning. Only it's in this book called How to Overcome the Fear of Flying. So I'm going to read you my text. Alcohol can help you during a flight if you don't panic too much. It's in the book. You can obtain at least two drinks of liquor on most commercial flights.
If you desire, you can order additional drinks at the airport before your departure.
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Isn't that sweet? It's in the book. Basically, says the author, what happens when you drink on a plane is that your thinking apparatus becomes somewhat dulled. You tend to worry less about possible dangers. Now, when Herb See invited me to address this spiritual meeting this morning, I said, Sure, because he awakened me out of a sound sleep at midnight Eastern Standard Time. However, I had nightmares for the rest of the night when I was reminded that I would have to fly.
But then I was also reminded that everyone says in AA, if your boss makes you drink, give up your job. If your wife makes you drink, well. At any rate, I thought I'd tell her that I couldn't make it after all because flying inevitably led to a drunk. On second thought, I told him that my wife wasn't feeling too well, which all goes to prove that someday I may get the honesty part of the program. So out went the letter and out I went to handle press relations for a major religious gathering in Philadelphia.
And there I was in the midst of conducting a news conference for Senator Lowell Weicker of Watergate fame when suddenly the phone rang in the press room and that voice on the other end growled at me. Where are you, you bum, in the bar room? And Herb Chapin was on the other end of the line. And Herb would tell you this morning that when a super salesman goes out to soften up a client, he really works on them until he goes in for what they call the closing.
And so Herb went to work on me and he stuck in the shiv and he twisted it good. He compared me to his pious grandmother. Then he went ahead and asked me about my faith. But you know, I had gone through all of this so many times before, and so I was prepared for that one and I solemnly intoned, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. However, as you can see, Herb won out and here I am this morning, grateful to be with you here on the West Coast, grateful for a safe and a comfortable flight, and most of all, grateful to be in the program.
And I'd like to say something here and now. We heard a very moving address last night by Jack B., a man who had come by way of New York to Kansas to California. And Jack B., whom we New Yorkers know so well by reputation, also shared with you some of his fears of flying. Now the story I'm going to tell this morning is so much different from that of Jack B., but the beautiful thing about our fellowship is simply this, that we do not compare, we rather try to identify with one another.
And on that point I was able to identify with Jack. And as we say in AA, it's not what you drink or how much you drink, it's what drinking does to you. Drinking does to you. Now let me qualify as an alcoholic. I think that I only took one
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social drink in my life. Jo last night said that she took her first drink about the same time I did, about age five. And she claimed that that wasn't a social drink. But I have to admit that my first drink at age five was definitely my first and last only social drink. I had gone with my Uncle Shorty into a bar room in New York City, and Uncle Shorty perched me up on a bar stool and he said to the bartender, I'll have a ham and cheese on rye and a beer. And five-year-old Paul looked at that bartender and he said, I'll have the same. That was my first and my last social drink. And then I remember that about age ten, I spent one summer with Uncle Shorty and his family, and down in that cold cellar he had a case of beer. And one night I tapped it and I had one can. Then I had two cans. And before you know it, I was off to the land of Nod and I didn't even need my teddy bear. I think all of the black sheep in our family came from my mother's side. Of course there was Uncle Shorty, but then there was that Civil War grandfather of mine who chased women until he was in his nineties. And one day he gave me an Italian stogie, and I'll tell you, I liked Uncle Shorty's beer more than I did that Ferroti. On my dad's side it was a different story. They were all righteous and upright Swedes who thought that there was a special spot in heaven reserved for anyone by the name of Carlson, Olson, or Janssen. On the other hand, my dad, whom I dearly loved, was a man of great compassion toward the suffering alcoholic. And I can remember dad, rightly or wrongly, going out and getting a couple quarts of beer for a man who was terribly crippled and needed a drink. And dad somehow knew that that man needed to drink in order to live. But dad didn't know much about AA. So few of his generation did, nor did he know that someday his son would be standing here this morning before this very beautiful group of people and identify himself as a grateful member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
After high school I went into the newspaper game, and I can remember that one night I went to the 8th Ward. There was a bar there owned by the 8th Ward Councilman, and I sat there drinking until closing time and then past closing time. And the next morning I awakened in my room. I was fully clothed. I had my hat on my head. I had my glasses precariously perched on my nose. I was filled with remorse. I was filled with guilt. And you know, I made a promise to myself that morning. I swore off of booze for a lifetime. I went on to college, met my wife.
We just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary last August. No problems with alcohol in college. Went on to work for two years on a radio station in New England. No problems. But then I went to Pennsylvania to work on another newspaper. And I had been there about three days when a terrible hurricane devastated the Pocono Mountains.
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Before it was all over, more than 80 people had lost their lives. I was the reporter who got the first death list, crossing Broadheads Creek on a helicopter in order to get that list of the first known dead. We worked around the clock. I was the only reporter able to file out to the papers in New York City and in Philadelphia. One night, so terribly exhausted, I walked into Bill Quick's bar. And I wasn't much of an authority on these kind of things, so I just asked for a beer. And out of the smoke-filled room, I heard a voice say to the barkender, Give the skinny one a drink. It was my managing editor. And little did I know that my Emmy would die an alcoholic's death, nor did I realize myself that I was on the way to alcoholism.
But I took that drink that night. And folks, I have to say this. I was skinny, always have been. I was so unsure of myself. And that drink made me feel ten feet tall. And I swore that I would never be without this elixir of the gods another day of my life. But during those two years in Pennsylvania, I could see in that short period of time, my wife could see it, that I didn't drink like normal people.
One drink inevitably led to a drunk. One drink was too many, and a thousand wasn't enough. And so I embarked on my first geographical cure. When a drunk is having problems with booze, what does he do? He schleps off to seminary, of course. And that's exactly what I did. The vision of ivy walls. The vision of a pious setting. But I want to tell you something. That first night on campus, I knew the location of our friendly gin mill.
And I'll tell you something else. In one sense, my drinking was as bad as it ever was during those three years in seminary. And much of my senior thesis, written on the exalted topic of ancient Greek and Latin Christian poetry, was written on a bar stool in that gin mill. And about a week before graduation, there were a couple of fellow seminarians in our apartment. They were sticking to a beer, and I had a ball and a beer right in my hand, when suddenly there was an ominous knock at the door.
And there stood the vice president of our seminary. And the two fellow seminarians hastily excused themselves. And I was caught red-handed with a ball and a beer. And Jar of Cotton, God bless him, he wasn't in our program. He wasn't an alcoholic. But as a non-alcoholic, he tried as best as he could to tell me that alcohol could lead for me only to insanity or death. But you know how many defense mechanisms we alcoholics raise. And I assured him that the reason for my heavy drinking was because I had worked too hard, worked too long, in order to get through school, and that once I got into my first parish, everything would be all right.
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And we had one of the most lovely parishes in western Pennsylvania. They couldn't do enough for the young preacher and his wife and their two children, but I'd go out on a hospital call and I'd end up at the State Store. I'd bring home gallon jugs of wine because that's the way I could only be assured of a sufficient supply. I remember going out nightly after my congregation was tucked in bed in order to belt down enough so that I could get to sleep for the night.
And I also remember those Saturday evenings when I'd be working at last on my sermon for Sunday morning with a bottle right on my desk. Well, things like this can't last forever, and they don't. We talk about a gracious God in our program, and I think that God at that point was watching over that congregation, watching over that community as much as he was watching over me. Because one morning, five months, five months after I arrived in that town, I received a call asking me to join the press relations staff of an ecumenical organization, an international ecumenical organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
And I went upstairs and I told my beloved Mert that we were bound for Switzerland, and we rationalized the situation. We could say, well, maybe they don't deserve us here. You know, maybe where we belong is in international work. And that congregation was bitterly disappointed, and someday I want to go back there and tell them my story and tell them why we had to leave and how God had led on their behalf as well as ours.
When we arrived in Geneva, I didn't know a word of French when we arrived there, but I was an alcoholic and I needed a drink. And the first words I learned in French, and I kid you not, were, Encore une si vous plaît, another one, please. My life depended upon it. We spent our year there. It was a miserable year. I went on to New Delhi, India, to handle the English-speaking press operation for our Third Assembly, and I found out that New Delhi was dry.
But that didn't stop an alcoholic. I found that there were Indians, too, who liked to drink. And I don't know what I drank, but I guessed that it was pure grain alcohol spiced with a little flavoring and a little coloring. I got back to the United States after that one-year assignment. I joined our own denomination's press relations staff in New York City, and I was on the merry-go-round and I couldn't catch the brass ring.
I might say that while I was in Geneva, my normal intake, alcoholically each day, was two liters of wine and a fifth of gin. And that did not count the pick-me-ups that I had going to work in the morning, the pick-me-ups I had coming home for lunch, going back to work, and at the end of the work day. I was in mighty sad shape. And I joined the staff of our own PR department in January. January, and toward the end of March of that year, 1962, I was kneeling in an alcoholic
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fog at the end of our sofa and I said to Mert, Honey, I'll do anything. And she said, Can I call AA? I won't go into all the details of that call, except to say that the next afternoon an impeccably dressed gentleman appeared at our door and Mert was transfixed. And she said, You're from AA? And he said, What did you expect, a Bowery bum? But that's how I met my sponsor, John T., a roaming Catholic layman and the dearest friend I've ever known outside my own family. John looked at me, he told me his story, he made a good identification, but as he continued to watch my movements and see what a sorry shape I was in, John said to me, You think you need a little help? And I said, Yeah. He said, Well, we have a great hospital in Patterson, New Jersey called the Mount Carmel Guild. And Mert said, Well, we're $2,000 in debt, we sure can't afford anything like that. And he said, Well, it just so happens that I collected an insurance premium from my dopey uncle, and I'll take care of the bill until you can repay me. John was there every night that I was in detox at Mount Carmel. He was assuring me that my family was safe, that my job was secure. And beloved, this is what the spiritual part of our program is all about.
So many of my Protestant brethren had passed over on the other side, but this dear Roman Catholic friend played the part of a modern Good Samaritan. He bound up my wounds, he took me to an inn, and he said to the innkeeper, Whatsoever thou spendest, I will repay. I'm sorry to say that the program didn't take immediately. There were slips right along the line. But then came the day when I did make the program.
And in that regard, it seems to me that A. A. has taught me during these years of sobriety the depth and breadth of the love of God. You heard Father Terry talking a few moments ago about the fact of studying in seminary, learning the theology, but there wasn't that depth of personal experience that we have found in A. A. To me, when I came into the program, I did so as a man who was not only holding so many deep-seated personal resentments, but I must confess, I had been brought up in a home where bigotry flourished at times.
Somehow Protestants were supposed to be a little better than other people, and the Church of Rome represented the apostate Church of the book of Revelation. And then I met my Roman Catholic brethren, people like John T. Herb C., Father Terry. And I too can share with what Terry said this morning, that the embodiments of our respective faiths in their best form are found within the fellowship of A. A. And I also share the testimony of
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one of A. A.'s earliest non-alcoholic supporters, a great preacher of a previous generation. You'll find his testimony in one of our A. A. books. And there he says, I have listened to many learned arguments about God, but for an honest-to-goodness experiential evidence of God, his power personally appropriated and his reality indubitably assured, give me a good meeting of A. A. Secondly, I've also learned in A. A. that people must learn to accept other people with all of their strengths and with all of their weaknesses. John T.
accepted me, and soon I was overwhelmed by a love that I had never known before. As I entered into my first smoke-filled room at an A. A. meeting, I was surrounded by brothers and sisters who understood, by brothers and sisters who cared. And when I made my first thirty days, it was their victory. And when I now celebrate an anniversary, it's a cause for their celebration, too. I'll never forget one night in my home group in New York City, when a gay spoke to our fellowship. And after the meeting was over, a tough guy from the mobs approached me, hit me on the arm and growled, You know, Pastor Paul, I don't dig that guy's style, but I've got to give him credit that he's staying away from a drink.
That's A. A. And A. A. cannot help but remain strong. A. A. cannot help but continue to grow if you and I don't forget the spiritual legacies bequeathed to us by our founders. May we never become overly comfortable. May we never become complacent. May we always remember that there is on the streets of every city and every town, within so many homes, that alcoholic, that family that still suffers. In that regard, I'd like to make an observation of my own, that we're living in a day when institutional religion seems to have reached its nadir.
My own denomination within ten years has lost a half million members. And I just wonder if the reason for this disenchantment lies in the fact that so many of our churches have failed to practice what they preach. And today, as we consider the spiritual bedrock of our program, let us learn a lesson from others who have failed to practice what they preach. And then finally, I've learned in A. A. that life can be changed. Life can be changed in a redemptive fellowship.
It is true that A. A. promises you and me nothing more than our sobriety. But there are hundreds of people in this auditorium this morning who could testify to the fact that they've received so much more. As I said earlier, Mert and I were a couple thousand dollars in debt. Today we've got a few
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in the bank. I've learned not only to accept other people, but I've learned to accept myself. You know, I look at people with a great deal more vitality than I have and I wonder how they do it. I wonder how they have such stamina. I know my limitations. I know what I can do and what I can't do. And slowly, day by day, I'm learning to accept myself. And to me, this is one of the marks of maturity that we receive in our program. Very quickly, in coming to a conclusion, I would like to tell you what's happened in less than five years. Today I serve on an alcoholism task force for the city of New York. Within the next two or three months, we'll be blitzing the city with media exposure to the problem of alcoholism. And yet, in our first meeting in the boardroom of CBS, we began our luncheon meeting with them pouring drinks. And I'd say in that regard that all of my drinking history, or so much of it, was indeed related to flying, to living in strange hotels, being without my family weeks on end. And suddenly I gave up drinking one day at a time. But the old neurosis was still there. I didn't like flying. And every time I boarded a plane, they poured me on. And so I've had to learn bit by bit to overcome this kind of irrational fear. And I thank Herb C. and his lovely wife Mildred today for seeing to it that I did get out here this morning to face this kind of a problem in my own life. Because we go from faith to faith and from strength to strength. Another thing that's happened in my life in five short years, it may not be your bag, but as I say in AA, we don't compare, we identify. In five years, I've earned two more master's degrees, I have finished the coursework on my doctorate, and I have written four books, including one you may know, The Thirteenth American, which deals with alcoholism. But in conclusion, I've got to tell you the most important thing in my life. It's part of my story. I can't do otherwise. I do not presume to speak for AA on this point, because AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, or cause. But I went from a somewhat bigoted Protestant to that point in my life where I saw that the breath of God's love was immense, that it encompassed all. And soon there were people like John T. and Herb C., Father Terry, who are now within my circle of friendship. And from that, the most amazing thing has occurred in my doctoral work, for I am writing my dissertation now on the destruction of European Jewry. AA doesn't leave us only with the problem of alcoholism. From finding our sobriety within the program.
Variety within the program, we find new areas of life. And in my case, I am now intimately involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue.
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I feel as much at home in the synagogue as in the church. And I say this reverently, the Holocaust was an event so obscene that it defies meaning or rational language. But as a Gentile, perhaps, just perhaps, having known the hell of going without food for two weeks at a time, for knowing how it felt to be on fire inside and out, perhaps this is the reason a gracious God has allowed me to identify with the Jewish people in their own struggle for survival.
You know, folks, not only did I receive a Brotherhood Award in New York last year, but there are some times that some of my Jewish brethren don't know whether to call me Father, Reverend or Rabbi. And with that, I say, God love you all. It's been great to be with you. I want to thank Herb and Mildred. I want to thank Father Terry for leading the meeting this morning. I want to thank all of you good people, my brothers and sisters in our beloved program.
And I'd like to end, if I might, by speaking in the language I love so much. Would you mind? I'd just like to say, Baruch Hashem, praise His name, v'etodah rabbah. Thank you very much.