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Source: John P – SE NY Conv 1961 – Reel 0805-62 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: john-p-se-ny-conv-1961-reel-0805-62-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:57:00
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I thought I'd depart from my own story a little bit at this point for a few minutes. Some of my friends in the audience are aware of the fact that for the past four or five years I've made a very intensive study of Eugene O'Neill, who was an alcoholic, who didn't know it. He kept a diary when he was living in Bermuda, which I was privileged to see. And one of the most pettiest entries that I have ever seen in English literature was for December 31st, 1924, New Year's Eve afternoon of the year 1925.
My last drink, I pray. Oh, I pray. This was not his last drink. My being so fascinated with this fellow has more to do with the human story that surrounds him than it does with the plays that he wrote. And sort of came at the end of an inquiry into a great many disturbed artists in the world. There have been books about most of them, the Jonathan Swift's and the Verlaine's and the Baudelaire's and the Brambo's.
A few years ago an interesting book, a few excerpts of which I wish to mention now, was published. I think it was called The Bitter Cup. This was written by one of the most original American writers that we ever had. And this book that he wrote in 1913, ironically called John Barleycorn and out of print now, contains a sentence that I think is the most tortured that I ever read without it being realized as such by the man who wrote it.
This man was an alcoholic and a great writer and the sentence that I want to quote is this. I have decided coolly and deliberately that I shall continue to do what I have been trained to want to do. I will drink but oh more skillfully, more discreetly than ever before. That was in 1913. Those words are in his book called John Barleycorn. For three years after that he drank more skillfully and more discreetly than he ever had before.
Then on the morning of November the 16th, 1916, he was found unconscious in his bedroom. Two small bottles were found beside him. Both were empty. They had contained morphine sulfate. On a pad on a night table were penciled calculations of dosages of these drugs large enough to kill him and at 7 o'clock that night he was dead. This was Jack London. This was the way he died. He was 40. You are all familiar with the drinking history of O. Henry, of William Sidney Porter. This man hated liquor and he missed a great many deadlines fighting his way back to sobriety so he could write. One of the most conscientious script men we ever had.
Another man whose work among the American writers that I admire had said publicly many times that life isn't fit to live after you're 35. He wanted to check out before he was 35. He was a Syracuse fellow and the most exciting shortstop that American baseball has ever provided the collegiate ranks with. He became a famous war correspondent in the Spanish-American War. He was a fraternity brother of mine.
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He tried to get himself killed in Cuba a couple of times by standing up in the trenches. He dragged himself to death in England. He wrote 26 books. He died of drink on his 29th birthday in London. He was the author of The Red Badge of Courage and 25 other books. In my opinion, the most authentic creative genius that American letters has provided us with so far. Stephen Crane was dead from liquor when he was 29. Liquor destroyed the skills of Peter Finley Dunn. I used to see him around this town.
A year ago, I had a book come out and I was interviewed on WEBV and half a dozen other stations. You've heard of the station. It's astonishing, it's almost comical to discover that liquor destroyed one of the few true saints that has ever been produced by American politics. We've had a few, we've only had a few. In his private life, this man was one of the purest in conduct and thought that I know anything about. Liquor killed him. It was Eugene V. Debs.
That's what EVD stands for. Drink ended the dancing of Isadora Duncan. Drink ended the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It finally destroyed Douglas Fairbanks. I mentioned Eugene O'Neill a bit earlier. I'll mention him again in a moment. His talents were first authentically discovered and recognized for their enormity by a fellow named George Cram Cook, one of the most beautiful human beings that I've ever beheld physically, white-haired and statuesque.
An exciting fellow that was known to his friends as Jake. He was married to the famous American playwright, Susan Glaspell. These were all terribly exciting people when I was just a high school kid coming into New York to see the Provincetown stuff in the Greenwich Village Theater in the late teens and 1920-21, during those years. George Cram Cook had one overbearing desire. He wanted to be a Greek. He studied Greek. He had the Greek idea. He believed in the Greek way. He went to Greece, finally. He wanted to climb Mount Parnassus.
He lived to do all these things. The first time he saw Mount Parnassus, he turned to Susan, his wife, and he said, OK, let's get the hell out of here and get a drink. This poor man did not know he was an alcoholic, and he expired on the island that he'd spent his life dreaming about four months after he arrived there. Almost everyone in this room has read some of the work of Sinclair Lewis. I spent a couple of happy hours with his former wife just last week.
Liquor ruined the last six books that he did. Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson messed up their work with whiskey. Whiskey killed Ring Lardner. Hart Crane destroyed both his work and his own life by drinking. One of the best poets we ever had in the book History of American Poets that came out in 1940, this sentence appears. Of all the poets who came into prominence during the 1930s in America, none is more likely to achieve immortality than Hart Crane. Hart Crane, at the age of 30, coming back from South America, jumped off a ship. His body was never even found.
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Speaking of suicide, one of the most brilliant of our contemporary psychiatrists, Eric Fromm, has written, suicide and alcoholism figures largely coincide. All of us saw how Dylan Thomas died here. Some of us saw it happening. Now let me turn a moment to some of the distresses that went on in the O'Neill family because of Eugene's drinking. First, the overwhelming separation of himself from people around him that he should have loved.
I was the custodian of the correspondence that was maintained between Eugene O'Neill and his second wife, a marriage that lasted for ten years. The first marriage that produced Eugene Jr. lasted for only three months. But I became a close friend of Agnes Bolton Kaufman, who was Mrs. O'Neill from 1918 to 1928, and she gave me the correspondence to study 326 letters exchanged between those two people.
No one had ever read these letters before. Agnes is the mother of Una, who was married to Charlie Chaplin, and she is the mother of Shane O'Neill, who is the sad derelict whose picture and stories about him you see in the papers every few months. I saw this beleaguered ghost only four days ago. In doing the intensive research that this took, in digging up all the people that were still around and who would talk or whose confidence I could win, I met a number of thrilling old guys and gals, a great number of eccentrics, a few happy frauds, a lot of nimble-witted people that wanted me to believe they remembered more than they had.
One of the most interesting to me, because I had previously known him at CBS, was Eugene O'Neill Jr. The father abandoned the mother the minute he discovered he had impregnated her, and he never saw, Eugene, the playwright, never saw his first wife again in his entire life. Eugene O'Neill Jr. grew up thinking that his name was something else, and didn't know who his real father was until he was 12.
He made piteous and repeated efforts to relate to his father. Many of you know from the pieces that appeared about him in Time magazine that he became one of the most brilliant scholars of Greek that the Yale faculty has ever had. I own some of his translations. I became acquainted with him at CBS. He was a big, boomy, masculine, happy, bearded, 215 pounds, 6 feet 3, all muscle and a very pacific nature inside, a dreadfully hurt person because he could never see his father, and a pretty heavy drinker.
And I think that I witnessed some of the development of this man's drinking toward the end when it threatened to destroy him, and a little bit before it actually did. He was in love with a girl that he met in the New School for Social Research. He was engaged to her. He lived out in Woodstock in Elster County in the Catskills, in a small but lovable little place. He was always broke. He was brilliant, lecturing, perplexed, frightened of how to pay bills.
The only bill he consistently paid all through his life was the premiums on an insurance policy for $4,000 for whom his own mother, Kathleen Jenkins, was the beneficiary. This man was confronted with an overwhelming problem that would have thrown even the most
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sober of us. In the inn in Woodstock, one noon, he and his fiancée and a group of friends were celebrating the engagement, and he was pretty high. He did not know that his fiancée was keeping company with somebody else. This man materialized. He was an extremely successful operator of cleaning and dyeing establishments up and down the west side of the Hudson River. He was an unwholesome fellow, but he was rich. He heard that his girl was going to marry Eugene O'Neill, Jr., and he showed up in a limousine and broke into this party and walked up to these two people at the bar, and he slapped $25,000 in cash on the bar and said, Ruth, pick it up and come with me. And she did. I've seen her. That day, he went back to his house and drank an entire bottle of gin and turned on the hot water in the upstairs bathtub and opened his wrists and a vein in his ankle. After bleeding for about 20 minutes, he decided all of a sudden that he didn't want to die after all. He wanted to live.
He sprang out of the tub, weak with the loss of blood, stumbled down and fell down the first flight of stairs to the landing where there was one of those wall-crank telephones that they have in the country. He hadn't paid the phone bill, and the service was disconnected. With the last bit of strength that he had, which was rage, he tore the phone off the wall. Then he tumbled down the rest of the flight of stairs into the living room where, about 20 minutes later, he expired.
I went into this house. I know a lot of the state troopers. I asked them to send me a report of that suicide. Here it is. I just want to read a fragment of it. The date is September 26, 1950. Investigator with Trooper R.J. Dunn met Coronator Kelly at Woodstock, New York, and with him conducted investigation. As a result of SEMA, it was learned that Eugene O'Neill, Jr., son of the playwright Eugene O'Neill, Sr., resided alone in the O'Neill home at Woodstock. That of late, he had been drinking heavily due to his engagement having been recently broken, and that on this date, Elsie Meyer, a neighbor, called at the O'Neill home and found the door unlocked, and after receiving no response to her calls, entered the house and found the body lying on the floor just inside the door. She in turn notified Dr. Hans Cohen of Woodstock, who responded and pronounced Eugene O'Neill, Jr. dead. A track of blood led to the bathroom on the upper floor, where also was found a straight razor covered with blood. Also a note, which read as follows, never let it be said of O'Neill that he failed to empty a bottle. Case closed by investigation. I have one more sad memento from this tortured, amazing family. Eugene O'Neill became affluent about 1920. About 1923, he bought a beautiful home in Fairfield, Connecticut. When he first met his then-wife, Agnes Bolton, he, he, uh… I'll be finished in just a moment. He had been living off earnings that she made as a writer. When he took her out to the country, he encouraged her to resume her work as a writer. She was in the middle of her first novel. He was drinking hard, intermittently. He came home drunk from New York one night, after a rehearsal of Welded,
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and was infuriated with her over nothing, and picked her up, shook her, tore the manuscript that she was working on out of her hands, and flung it into the fire, and held her while it was totally consumed. And this is not a photostat. This is a true page of Mrs. O'Neill's manuscript as of that time. You'll be happy to hear that Eugene conquered this before he died, that the last 25 years of his life were reasonably free of the torment of liquor. I wonder what would have happened to Eugene Jr. if he had been allowed to become acquainted with his own father.
Before I close my own remarks, I just wish to say that as an alcoholic of longstanding, the kinship that I feel with you people, I, I feel that we're turbulent people, trying to be calm, frightened people trying to get our nerve back, that we're complex people trying to be simple. I think I've learned some of these things in AA, and that you taught them to me. Our next speaker, a Princeton graduate, I was delighted to hear was in the school at the same time that my brother Philip was, and they were on the same magazine at the same time for a couple of years. I've heard a great deal about him. I have never had the honor to hear him speak. He's been in AA since 1938. He found his way into AA a year and a half before he found his way into, he found his way to an arrested, an arrestment of his drinking before he found his way into AA, and has been a conscientious member of our fellowship since 1940. I'm proud to present now as our last speaker, John Parks Lee.
Thank you, Max. One of the things that amazes and interests people who look at our country coming to us from abroad is our obsession with youth. We like to think of ourselves as the young people in a young country, and yet as a matter of cold hard fact, we are one of the oldest nations in continuous existence in the world today. Compared with other nations which are coming into being and which have come into being in the last few years, we are really a rather old people, and we have an old and long-established way of doing things. Unfortunately, there are those who feel that our emotional attitudes as a nation have not kept pace with our chronological age.
We as a group, too, still think of ourselves as a young group and a new group, and yet there were many of us who had a very happy time in Long Beach last summer when we celebrated 25 years of Alcoholics Anonymous. Many of us are the happy possessors of a book which our founder wrote called A.H. Comes of Age, and here tonight are many who have been in Alcoholics Anonymous for many, many years. We have the problems, then, which come to any group of individuals and to the individuals who make up the group, because we must, if we are to be successful in our program of helping other alcoholics mature, as well as merely mark the passage of time.
Maturity for the individual isn't determined other than legally by the passage of time. It is true under our system of government that when a boy or a girl reaches the ages of 21, maturity is assumed and certain rights become inherent. The individual can vote, can sign
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contracts, so forth and so on. But those of us who have gone through this experience are also aware that there is a great difference between genuine maturity and chronological maturity. We judge a person to be mature when certain things become obvious in his life, and it's about some of these things I would like to talk with you tonight as we consider our coming of age in AA. The first mark of maturity is responsibility.
As we look back on our alcoholic days, the days when we were drinking, we recognize that we were almost completely irresponsible. The term most frequently used to describe me was John Lee is a good fellow, but you can't depend on. It wasn't I who met the payments on my life insurance. It wasn't I who made sure that things which I was supposed to do got done. And in this, I was no different from the great run of the mine of most alcoholics. We slough off responsibility with the greatest of ease, and on the shoulders of our long-suffering wives or husbands, depends the mantle of responsibility which he should be wearing. But as we come into AA and start to grow up and mature in AA, if we are really doing so, we begin to become responsible people again.
And this is one of the great tests which we, as we look around among our AA friends, apply to them. And you and I know the people we select for leadership in our groups. In our state assemblies and in our national agencies are those who give evidence of being responsible people. First of all, being willing and capable of being responsible for ourselves, standing on our own two feet, accepting the criticism which is ours for the mistakes we make, and learning to accept with grace. And then, of course, we have to learn to such praise and credit as may be due us. We realize that we cannot be merely responsible for ourselves. We have responsibilities for others. And this, again, is one of the first lessons we are taught in AA, and one of which I hope we will never forget.
And yet this does happen, doesn't it? It happens to too many of us in AA. For a while, we were full of zeal and concern for others. Even in our earliest days, as Ruth had pointed out, when we didn't know much about the program ourselves, we did feel this urgency to be of assistance to others. But as time passes, for some mysterious reason, we begin to think that we are doing our job if we just keep ourselves sober.
Some months ago, at the request of the editorial staff, I ventured a piece which was published in The Grapevine on the care and nurture of the old-timer, in which I suggested that we were not making our programs of sufficient interest and stimulating to keep the old-timers interested in coming back. And you should have seen the mail that came in. The effect was, who cares about the old-timer? If he wants to go out and get drunk, let him. He knows better.
This is not AA responsibility, my friends. Nowhere in the Twelve Steps or in the Twelve Traditions does it say because a man has been sober for ten years, you and I have lost our sense of responsibility for it. And yet this is what's going on all over the country. You and I have an inescapable responsibility. We've got to become part of the solution to alcoholism or continue to be part of the problem.
We have many wonderful friends, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, relatives, and just friends, who don't have to do anything about alcoholism. They don't have to go through the heartache and the trouble and the frustration and the vexation that is the common lot of anybody who works in this field. They choose to do so, and we can never be grateful enough to them for so doing. But you and I have no choice.
to them for so doing, but you and I have no choice. This is a responsibility that is thrust upon us.
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We have to be part of the answer, or we're going to continue to be part of the problem. And this is a responsibility which we must be aware of, my friends, as long as we live, and there's the creasing burden of this responsibility that weighs ever heavier on our shoulders the longer we stay in AA. It doesn't become lighter. We become more conscious of how much there is to do and how little time is left to us to do it.
Another sign of maturity in AA is the courage, the courage we pray for in our 12th, in our wonderful AA prayer, the courage to change what we can. And here again sometimes there is more courage at the beginning than there is after some time in AA. We become, don't we, a little content with what we are. We can rationalize that we're doing pretty well. Oh yes, there are still those things that we're supposed to consider as we continue to take our inventory, and we're supposed to ask the good Lord's help in getting rid of these defects of character, but this takes a little more effort perhaps, and it's not so important, we think, in view of other demands being made upon us.
Somehow some of us get the idea that in AA we mustn't ever disagree with anybody. We know there are those who practice a polite form of blackmail in our group, who in fact can say, if you disagree with me, I'll go out and get drunk. And so we hold still for the most stupid and outrageous and absurd attitudes in AA, because we haven't got the courage to stand up and say what we believe. There is infinite room in AA for a difference of opinion, but we must never drop the courage to hold opinion while, of course, we remain understanding and sympathetic and tolerant for the views of those who disagree with us. But too frequently, through lack of courage, we permit opinions to prevail in AA, which we know in our hearts of hearts are destructive of the movement and in complete violation of the traditions, yes, and of the steps themselves. Courage is also linked to the responsibility.
It takes courage to assume responsibility at certain times, to carry a load which others are unwilling to assume. It's too bad that it isn't true that the mere passage of time brings wisdom, but it is true that for many of us a bit of wisdom does come as a result of just living a little bit longer. And here again, wisdom is one of the gifts of maturity. Again, it's a gift for which we pray, the wisdom to know the difference we ask between the things which we must change and the things which we must change.
We cannot change the fact that we are alcoholic. We cannot change the fact that we are one drink away from trouble. We cannot change anything that has happened in the past. For good or for ill, everything we have done is there, irrevocable. We waste our time futilely mourning over the past. We do not waste our time when we think about the past. We do not waste our time when we think about it, remind ourselves how far we have come.
But it's not only wisdom to know the difference between the things that we can and must change and things we can't. We must also at times have the wisdom to know the difference between what's important and what's unimportant. How many AA groups would benefit by a little bit more of this wisdom, so that the endless bickering which goes on in some of our groups about the most trivial things might be forgotten? Of course, sometimes trivial things produce earth-shaking results. I was elected president of the AA of Philadelphia, I discovered on a five-cent coffee program. I didn't know anything about this at the time, but after I got elected, my supporters were rightly dismayed to find out the price went up 10 cents immediately in the club. But this is the kind of trivia which I have seen too much of in the years in which I have been in AA, and we beat each other's brains out about utter nonsense. As we mature in AA, we gain wisdom about ourselves.
We learn to see ourselves honestly, to appraise our strengths, to recognize our weaknesses,
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to see each day how we fall on our face in one way or another, and yet how at the same time in a very queer but very really way we do get better if we try. And as we come to know ourselves, we then gain wisdom about others. And being able to stand ourselves, to live with ourselves, we gain the wisdom to understand and live with and accept other people. But the gift I think that I covered for myself and I would cover for all of you as we grow older in AA is the basic gift of understanding. You may remember the wonderful story about King Solomon and his dream when the Lord appeared to him and promised him anything he wanted, old age, riches, so forth. Solomon had somehow the underlying wisdom of all to ask for an understanding heart. And this of course is the basis of everything that is worthwhile, which is good, which is noble, which is effective, which has made our fellowship what it is today. It is understanding, or even simpler, it is simply love.
Those of us who have been in AA for some time and who can never be, as Ruth says, grateful enough to all it has meant to us, cannot help but try to think what makes AA so successful. Each of us is entitled to his own idea. This is the wonderful thing about AA. I have my own as to the reasons why AA has been successful as it is and continues to be successful. And it is simply that it meets the needs of the alcoholic at the point where he is in a way in which he can avail himself of the help.
The first thing that the alcoholic needs, and I'm sure as you think back into your own experience, you will know this will be true, the first thing he needs above all else is hope. For many years, many, many years, alcoholism has been known by those who knew nothing about it at all as the hopeless disease. In fact, for a long time in medical schools, young medicos were told by their professors, you and your practice will run into fine men and women, men and women who cannot seem to stop drinking. You'll want to help them, but you can't. They are, quote, hopeless, end quote. The hospitals stopped caring for alcoholics not because their board of trustees or their medical staffs were callous or cruel. They stopped caring for alcoholics because they thought they were hopeless and they needed their beds for people whom they could help.
Industry came to think that alcoholics were hopeless, and as one fan said, we don't have any problem with alcoholics in our firm, we just fire them. Our families thought we were hopeless, our friends thought the same, and you and I didn't live in vacuum. We heard people saying this about us, hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, and we began to believe it, particularly when we tried to stop drinking and found we couldn't. And when this happened to us, we know the despair that comes into a man's heart. If a man is to struggle back to sobriety, he will never do it as long as he thinks the cards are stacked against him.
It is in human nature to bang your head against the wall. And so hope, hope that he can recover is the essential in any help for the alcoholic, and this AA has had the wisdom and the insight to grant in the beginning. We come to our first AA meeting, oftentimes we're not quite aware of what's going on, but we see people like us, and we see them sober, and the spark of hope is lit in our hearts, and the possibility of recovery is thereby planted. Sometimes you and I who should know better, having failed or have been unable to help alcoholics, have sometimes used those dreadful words ourselves and have said, don't try to help Joe Blow, he's hopeless. This is heresy of the highest order for Alcoholics Anonymous, because no case of alcoholism is hopeless, and if you and I don't believe this, how can we expect the rest of the world to? It may not be that you
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or I is the person who can help this alcoholic. It may not be that he even will recover. But the only scientific fact which has been recently established beyond every shadow of doubt is simply that no case is hopeless. So by giving the alcoholic hope, we meet his first, his basic need. Secondly, he needs very much what Ruth pointed out. He needs to be welcomed back into the human race again. Along with the experience of being condemned as hopeless, the alcoholic has this constant round of experience of closing doors. Rejection is the psychiatric jargon for that experience. The doors of his friend's house close against him naturally.
We're not the kind of people who are enjoyable at a party. And after we have created scenes and made gaffes and created infinite faux pas, our long-suffering hostesses no longer put up with us. Opportunities to employment close rapidly. Men not only lose jobs, they become blacklisted. Professional men are stricken from the roles, barred from the practice of their profession. Too often the doors of our own homes close against us. Many people have it seemed as Many people have it seemed as though the church door was closed as well.
The alcoholic comes to feel that nobody, but nobody, cares whether he lives or dies. And this infinite loneliness constitutes a living hell which many of us know full well and which few non-alcoholics can appreciate. And we hope they will never experience it. But Alcoholics Anonymous provides an instantaneous acceptance. Nobody asks the man or woman when they come, where have you been? Aren't you sorry?
Aren't you ashamed of yourself? When AA is functioning correctly, the only question is, do you want to stop? Come on in. I've talked to many men about their first experiences in AA, and this was the thing that stuck in their minds as it did in Ruth's. They'll say, John, I went to a meeting, I remember staggering up a flight of stairs, I had the shakes, the sweat was pouring down my face, I don't remember much what happened, a couple of guys met me at the door and took me over and sat me down, and one of them got me a cup of coffee and the other fellow put his arm around me. Somebody up front was talking, I didn't know what he said, but I do know that for the first time in years I felt that these people cared about me and were glad to see me. This ordinary experience of being welcomed as a human being again does amazing things for the bruised, rejected, and dejected alcoholic.
And this is one of our priceless gifts to the alcoholic. The alcoholic has another basic need of which we become aware as we work in the group, and that is just as we didn't understand what was wrong with us and couldn't get well, we did so the average alcoholic still today doesn't understand what's wrong and needs to come to not only a knowledge but an acceptance of his disease. And here again the AAs have a magnificent way, in a frank but loving way, confronting the alcoholic with the nature of his problem, dismissing his rationalizations of his reasons for drinking, pointing out that he doesn't drink because it's hot or it's cold, or his mother-in-law came or his mother-in-law left, or he got a job, or he got fired, or the Democrats won or the Republicans won, but they confront him bluntly the fact that he drinks because he is an alcoholic and no matter what goes on in the world around him he is never going to be able to drink again. I don't care who's working with the alcoholic, whether it's Alcoholics Anonymous, or an internist, or a psychiatrist, or a clinical psychologist, or a pastor, or a priest, or just a good friend, they all agree that no therapy, no help, no recovery is possible until the alcoholic knows what's wrong with him and settles for it.
The alcoholic has another need, it's linked with his… The alcoholic has another need, it's linked with his question of maturity about which I was talking. Not all alcoholics are emotionally immature, of course,
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but many are, and particularly they're immature in the conception of what it's like to be a human being. I've heard people in AA say, as I'm sure many of you had, before I came in AA, the man will say I was an idealist. The implication is that once he got in AA, he got rid of such silly things as ideals. Well, this is a problem in semantics. What the speaker means was, I was a utopian, which is something quite different.
A utopian is a person with a childlike view of life who thinks that human beings can be a hundred percent. And finding it impossible to be a hundred percent perfect himself and finding that other people are not a hundred percent, he becomes disillusioned and slightly cynical in a childish way about life. But he must learn what it means to be a human being, an exciting, wonderful, exasperating, frustrating, vexing, annoying, but constantly wonderful experience of being a queer, marvelous, perplexing mixture of good and evil, strength and weakness, capacity and incapacity.
He begins to find out this about himself, and as long as he lives, he will never be perfect. But every day, if he reads the scriptures, he will agree with St. Paul that he falls short of the glory of God, that he doesn't attain to the level that he knows he should, the level he would like to reach. But by the same token, he realizes that he can improve, and he learns to accept himself as a human being, never content, mind you, with what he is, but mindful that for human beings, success is always accompanied by a certain amount of failure, and strength arises out of weakness.
This makes it possible for him to accept himself and then to accept other human beings, and relationships with other people again become possible. Now, in a very real, subtle way, this is one of the great educational processes that is constantly going on in Alcoholics Anonymous. Most AA people would disclaim this. Nobody ever gets up in AA meetings and talks to people the way I'm talking tonight. But this is what is going on.
As the new man listens to other people describing their experiences, he begins to get an idea of what humanity is. And as he listens to these people able to accept and discuss their failures, their shortcomings, he begins to see that you don't have to make claims of perfection all the time to be a good and a capable and a strong person. We all believe in AA that the alcoholic must have help from outside.
The AA program points, nudges, suggests, pushes, pulls, prods toward developing a relationship with something outside yourself. We preach no creed, of course. We have no theological image which the new person is required to accept. We use the expression, first, of power greater than ourselves. And many of us know the stories about men who began with this power higher than themselves as a Fifth Avenue bus, or a clanking, steaming radiator in a hotel room at midnight, or a tree growing in the backyard.
But we progress through the steps, don't we, until we begin to use the word which frightened us so terribly at first, God, as we understand it. The amazing thing is, literally amazing, that the alcoholic can come to accept this as essential for his recovery. Now, there are some of us who are very blessed. Max and I grew up with a background where the structure of religion was not strange to us, where the words, the language were familiar.
But many people come into AA with no formal concepts at all. And yet they come to equate themselves with this problem relating to a power greater than themselves,
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to the word God, in terms of which almost all people understand deity. Omnipotence. Omniscience. Righteousness. Now, if you have been drunk for 20 years, as many of us have, and if your behavior has been as most of our behavior has been, not of a kind that stands up particularly well in the light of day, it is not easy to relate ourselves to a God who knows everything that's going on, who is totally righteous himself, and who has the power to destroy.
And yet this relationship begins to develop. But fortunately, it doesn't stop there. And as the man or woman continues in AA, they begin again, not by being formally taught, but by observing and by listening. By a kind of a queer spiritual osmosis, they begin to discover something else that most AA's seem to understand and sense about the God as they describe him in their talks. The new man in AA often wonders when the gimmick is going to develop.
He can't understand this process going on. Here, for no reason, he can figure out a group of people have suddenly been wonderfully kind. Kindness that he never deserved. Kindness not because he deserved it, but simply apparently because he needed it. And as this begins to work in his mind, he simply can't understand it. He's totally un-American because we are taught in this country you pay for everything you get, and nothing's for free.
And yet here he has been given one of the greatest gifts of all, and nobody has asked him for anything. But then perhaps, or I don't think perhaps, but then slowly and subtly, it begins to dawn on him that what these AA people have been doing for him reflects in a faint human way what God, as they understand him, has done for them. And he begins to recognize that it may be that God, as he understands him, is omnipotent and omniscient and all-righteous, but accompanied with it, he is also able to accept them as they are.
And that he wants to help them not because of what they have been or what they have done, but in spite of it, he wants to do it because he loves them. And when this begins to come through our hearts and minds, then our relationship with God, as we understand him, makes what has been going on in Alcoholics Anonymous these 26 years crystal clear. Ruth said it beautifully. It's not possible for us to love this way until we have been first loved.
And this is the priceless gift, greatest gift, that AA provides for all of us. We are first loved in this way because those who love us this way were themselves loved, and having been loved this way ourselves, we can, in turn, love others. I'd like to conclude with a favorite story of mine, and I'm sure it's familiar to all of you. It's a story of the boy who got tired of life on the farm. And he went to his father and he said, Now, someday you're going to die and I'll get my share of what you're going to leave.
Let me have it now. I'd like to go up to the city and develop a program of my own. His father said, Very well. So he gave him his share and off he goes. Well, like many young men, like many of us, he lived high, wide, and handsome. His great dreams didn't bear fruit.
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Father knows what's going on. Fathers usually do. If they don't, the neighbors tell him. But the father just waited. He didn't chase up the city and say, Come home. He didn't send messengers telling the boy to stop what he was doing. He just waited. And the boy finally runs through everything he has and finally ends up in a very unhappy and miserable situation. Suddenly dawns on him, What a fool I am to hang around here.
I'll go home and at least father will give me a job. Tell him I'm sorry. Now when we read this story and we've heard it, you and I always identify with the boy because this is our story. But the important part in this story is not the boy at all. The important person in this story is the father. Now look what happened. The boy starts home. And in the language of the story, while he was yet a great way off, his father had compassion and ran and threw his arms about him and kissed him.
The greatest thing AA does for us is to show us, to demonstrate to us, to prove to us that when we start home, our father comes out to meet us. Thank you.