Audio
Transcript
Source: Marty M. – Recovery and Responsibility in Winnipeg (Date Unknown).mp3 File: marty-m-recovery-and-responsibility-in-winnipeg-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:59:04
============================================================
That was lovely. There wasn't any time for me to speak. I was also going to remark that I think really the first lady in AA has to be Lois, so I'll be the first woman. And that'll help my humility. This has been a day of highlights for me, and I want to take the last one first, and that was hearing that roll call. When that happens, and it does every now and then when I'm at a meeting such as this, and each time the roll call seems to be longer and the number of people in attendance greater, I'm always reminded all over again of the first meeting that I attended outside of New York City.
In November 1939, AA had its first publicity. At that time there were two groups, Akron and New York, both very small. But a group of men from Cleveland who had been driving down to Akron every week had decided to start the group in Cleveland so they wouldn't have to make that long drive. There were 12 of them, and they thought that was enough to start a group. One of them was a promoter type, which AA's always had a plentiful supply, and he went to the Cleveland press and persuaded them to run a series of articles.
They did it in a very interesting way. The paper came out six days a week. It wasn't a Sunday paper. So they took the 12 steps, and they took two each day, and then wrote something about the people and what they were trying to do at the bottom of it, and they put it in a box in the center of the editorial page. And at the bottom it said, if you want to know more about this, contact box so-and-so. Well, by the end of the week, those 12 men couldn't cope with what had happened. They had literally hundreds of letters in their box.
And they were a little desperate, and they told us about it in New York, and we were scared to death. And they were so desperate that what they did was they'd take a sheaf of letters and a bundle of books, and they'd go out and call on these people, and at the end of talking to them, they'd say, here's a book and here are some addresses. Get up and go see them. Well, this is quite a way of doing 12-step work, and it was kind of alarming. And Bill and Lois and another couple and I decided that we'd go out to Cleveland and see what was happening. Nobody had any money in those days. But Jack, the husband of the other couple, had a very old car, and I had a $10 bill that had belonged to the group for a long while. So I got it back from whoever used it last.
We started out at 4.30 in the morning because we didn't dare stop. We didn't have any money to stop. We had to get to Cleveland in one fell swoop. And in 1939, that was not as easy as it is today, and that car was old then. So we drove all day, and we were good and tired, and we arrived at 11 o'clock at night. And they didn't make us do anything but meet a lot of people that night and drink a lot of coffee. But the next night, they had a meeting.
And a rich friend of some of the new people that had come in had loaned his home, which had a very, very big room in the cellar. I think it was big enough for a ping-pong court. I mean, for a badminton court, because there were over a hundred people in that room, and we'd never seen that many people at any AA meeting anywhere. And Bill and I spoke. And I remember, and I will always remember, standing before what looked to me like an immense mob and saying to them, Won't it be wonderful someday, and I'm sure it'll happen before we die, if we can go all the way across the country and find an AA group in every city where we stopped? And everybody roared with laughter. It just didn't seem possible.
And that was November 1939. So I think you can see why, whenever I hear a roll call like that and see a crowd like this, and I know there are two more rooms full of people, I remember that moment when I prophesied, far too small a prophecy, the spread of AA and how it seemed beyond our imagination at that time.
[00:05:12]
I think it is incredible, the way AA spread. And despite the fact that some cynics every now and then talk about the tiny percentage of alcoholics we've reached, and this is true, we've reached only a small percent of those who need us. Nevertheless, we have reached this great number of people that comprises AA today. And it is steadily and constantly growing almost everywhere. And I emphasize that almost, because I want to talk about that a little bit later.
So that is the last highlight of the day. The first highlight, I think, was listening to the panel of women, and naturally I have a special place in my heart for women alcoholics, which I honestly believe was one of the finest panels I have ever heard, male or female, anywhere at any time, and I've been to thousands of meetings. It was great, and I'm sorry for those of you that missed it, you better get the tapes.
And secondly, I got a real kick out of cease, and I'm told I shouldn't say this, but I love that ceasefire. And finally, and this was really the top, imagine having a psychiatrist give the invocation. This I will never forget. And a very beautiful invocation it was, too. I met Dr. Pintock the first time I came to Winnipeg. Neither of us can remember the date, but it was more than 15 years ago. And I knew what I thought of him then, which was a great deal, and it hasn't changed, it's grown.
Without him, we never could have started what was originally the Winnipeg Committee on Alcoholism, which has developed into the Alcoholism Foundation of Manitoba. And I know that without him, AA could not have taken such solid root and grown so well as it has here. We have always had to have friends like that. We had one in the New York area in Dr. Harry Tebow, and you have your Dr. Pintock, and there are others.
Mrs. Pintock and I were talking at dinner about Dublin, Ireland, where it was also a psychiatrist named Dr. Norman Moore who helped AA get started and take root. We've had very good friends. If we hadn't, we couldn't have grown as we have. I've been privileged, I think, to see much of that growth with my own eyes. I came into AA in April 1939, when we were a tiny, tiny handful. I was not the first woman who had come to AA, but I was the first that made it.
And I must say to all the women here that I was alone for a long time. Women were not easy to reach, and they didn't seem to find it easy to stay sober. And there were many times in that first year when the men looked at me and said, you know, we guess you're a freak. You're just different. Other women aren't like you. And of course there were some men in those days that didn't believe there was such a thing as a woman alcoholic.
And they looked at me very askance. And I had kind of a hard time proving to them that I knew what I was talking about. I made up my mind that tonight I was not going to go into my story, the drinking part of it. You'll have to accept the fact that I am here by right. That I am not an honorary member of AA. That I earned my way in the hard way. That I paid all the initiation fees. And my total possessions at the time I went to my first AA meeting in April 1939 could be put in a very small and battered suitcase.
[00:10:01]
Those were my worldly possessions. The other possessions, family, friends, jobs, were mostly gone. I really had nothing. And AA offered me what I kept hearing as I heard Clara speak this morning. A complete second chance. To start fresh all over again. And build a new life. I have said many times that I consider myself fortunate to be an alcoholic. I'm glad I'm an alcoholic. This doesn't mean that I'd be glad if I was still drinking.
But I'm glad I'm an alcoholic because it led me to AA and gave me that second chance. And I think all of us should think about that a little. Other people don't usually get it. At least I don't know any that do. And it seems to be freely offered to us. Almost as if God had a special place in his heart for us. And having seen and felt our suffering, as I'm sure he did, he felt that maybe we ought to have a second chance.
This is one of the reasons that I think AA is a miracle. Because this miracle doesn't happen to many people. But it happens over and over again to us. To 400,000 of us. Now I'll tell you another reason I think it's a miracle. In 1944 I went into the field of alcoholism professionally. And I had to study a great deal and read a great deal and learn a lot. Because it wasn't going to be enough for my work simply to know of my own experience or even of other people's experience.
I had to know what the scientists knew. What they had discovered, what they were thinking, what they were writing about this. And I have had to follow that constantly since I began this work in 1944. And the more I have read and the more I have heard at professional and other meetings, and the more I have learned, the less I seem to know about alcoholism. For very little is really known. And as I have looked at this problem from that point of view, and seen its infinite complexity, its appalling difficulty, its apparent hopelessness, I have become more and more convinced that every single one of us is a walking miracle.
It's quite incredible. If you look at alcoholism from the outside, that anyone can recover from it. On the face of it, it can't be done. And yet look around you. It is being done. It's being done every day. And while it is true that we don't offer a cure, because a cure would mean that we could resume social drinking and be completely like other people, we do offer complete containment of this illness.
Containment that could be as solid as you want to make it, and last as long as you want to make it last. And we know it's real, because we do see it all around us. And most of us are quite aware that our recovery is not man-made. Our recovery calls into play and gives credit to a power far beyond that of man. I've seen many people come into AA who said they could accept everything in the program except the God bit.
Well, I went through that myself. But when Dr. Thiebaud gave me the manuscript of the book to read, I was terribly excited at first because for the first time I read a description of what was wrong with me, you see, in the third year. I don't know what was wrong with me. You see, in the thirties, the word alcoholism was never used, and very few doctors even knew it, and I didn't really know what I was being treated for, and neither did Dr. Thiebaud, as he was often to say in later years.
[00:15:17]
In fact, he used to call me the victim of his ignorance. Well, I'm a kind of nice kind of victim to be. But here I found a description of what was wrong, and it had a name. And I've always found it difficult to understand those people that disliked the word alcoholism and alcoholic so intensely, because I was so convinced that I was something far worse than that, some nameless thing, that I was tickled to death to find I had something that had a name.
I've never minded it at all, and I might remind all of you, because there may be some among you that still boggle a little at that word, that it's a scientific term. It was coined by a Swedish scientist named Magnus Hus, H-U-S-S, in 1848, because prior to that time, and I think you would have liked this even less, the condition was called chronic or continual drunkenness, and we were called drunkards, and that was that.
I'd rather be an alcoholic than a drunkard. I think it sounds much prettier. Well, at any rate, all of this was lovely, and then I began to trip over this word God. It was everywhere in that book, and I wanted no part of it. I thought of it in all the cliche terms of my teenage period, you know, opiate of the people and self-hypnosis and a lot of nonsense like that. I had, as many alcoholics had, and I've heard this described thousands of times, an arrogance and a pride, particularly an intellectual pride, that would not permit me to believe there was anything greater than I or others like me.
And this stood in my way, and so I dragged my feet through the book. And this went on for about a month, because Dr. Keebo was nothing if not a persistent guy. He would let me argue with him, complain, talk about how poorly the book was written, and a few other little things of no consequence at all that I was trying to build up into great mountains. And then he'd say quietly, now go back and read some more.
Well, I read as slowly as I could. I didn't want to read anymore. And this went on, and it might have gone on much longer, until a crisis occurred in my life. And if you remember the big book, you will remember that it speaks of the need for a crisis. In my case, I don't think it was accidental or coincidental. I think there was a plan. For the crisis came, and it was a great one, and there was no answer to it, and I felt responsible for it.
And I was in a state of anger, almost beyond description. I had always believed that that phrase, seeing red, was a literary phrase. It isn't. I was seeing red. I really wanted to kill. I was in my room, which was a little room on the top floor of an old house that was part of the sanitarium where I was a patient. Under the eaves of the little tiny window. I'd been resentful for a long while when I was put up in that room anyway.
Why would I have a little attic cubbyhole? The great me, you know. And I was raging to myself and thinking about walking down the road, which I was free to do, to a nearby town and buying two bottles. And getting so drunk, I'd break up the place. Curious thing about alcoholics. When they get angry at someone else, they pick up a heavy hammer and beat the hell out of that person. When they get angry at someone else, they pick up a heavy hammer and beat themselves over the head.
Real smart we are. That's what I was going to do. Because who would I have been hurting? Even if I had managed to break up a couple of pieces of furniture, which is quite unlikely. And while I was in this state, my eyes fell on this damn book that I was having to read, which was lying open on the bed.
[00:20:01]
I wasn't looking at it. It was a blur. It was just my eye passed over it. But suddenly, in the middle of the page, there was a line that seemed to stand out as if it were in block letters. Very black and sharp and clear. It's been changed a little since the book went into print. Remember, this was the manuscript copy, multi-list copy, and cardboard covers. But that line read, we cannot live with anger.
And that did it. And I cannot tell you why. I only knew that sometime later, I was on my knees beside my bed, and I hadn't lost my boots under them, see. And I must have been there quite a while, so there was quite a wet spot on the bedspread. Tears were running down my face, and I guess I'd been trying to pray. Not that I knew how. It had been too long since I'd done it. But I lifted my head into a feeling that I can only describe as utter and complete freedom.
I'd been angry for a long while at being in that attic room. It was a tiny little room. Being under the eaves, the ceiling came right down on your head, you walked into it. And suddenly, I realized that that room couldn't imprison me. That institution couldn't imprison me. The Bible couldn't imprison me. Nothing could. I saw the presence of such strength and such power. And it was in me to such an extent that I knew I could walk out of that third-floor window and keep right on walking.
I could not fall. I don't know how long this went on, because time doesn't enter into an experience like this. But gradually, I began to wonder about this certainty I had that I could walk out the window and keep right on walking. Now, I might have tried it if it hadn't been a little tiny window under the eaves that I couldn't get through. I was that certain. But a tiny doubt crept in, and I raced down the stairs.
Dr. Thiebaud's office was on the ground floor. I beat on his door. He had a patient in there, but when he opened the door and saw my face, he scuttled the patient out, took me in, and he said, What's happened? And I told him. He asked me many questions. And I said, Doctor, does this mean that I really, now, really am insane? For I believed this for a long while. And he said, No, it doesn't. He said, I think it means that you've had an authentic spiritual experience.
Many people have had experiences like this. And if it worries you, get a copy of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience and read descriptions of things very like what you just told me. He said, This won't hurt you. You are far better off than you were. Now go back upstairs and read that book. So I went back upstairs like a meek little lamb and picked up the book, and somebody switched books on me.
This was a completely different book. There had been such a profound change in me that it didn't seem the same at all. And I read it from start to finish in one sitting and then started all over again. Well, all of that was fine. I walked around in a pink cloud and people said I looked radiant and it was nice to be near me. And the grass looked greener and the sky looked bluer and everybody looked wonderful and life was just marvelous.
But I didn't want to go and meet the people I'd read about in this book. Not for one minute. They might spoil my beautiful things. They sounded kind of peculiar anyway in those stories, I thought. I didn't know whether they'd be a bunch of praying mantises or a lot of bums off Skid Row. I didn't know what they'd be. And I managed to put it off for almost a month until Dr. Thiebaud finally one day picked up the phone while I was in his office.
He said, she will be in tonight on such and such a train and she'll come straight to your house and you will take her to a meeting. So I went into New York and I went to this house where there was a couple and another man for me. And after we'd had dinner we got on the subway and went to Brooklyn. To Bill and Lois' house where they used to meet once a week on Tuesday nights.
[00:25:04]
But when I walked in there, there weren't an awful lot of people but it looked like a lot of people to me. Like so many of us, all my life I had been afraid of people. Most afraid of strangers. I always felt I was on the outside looking in. I never felt that I could mix or belong unless I'd had several drinks. This was the beginning actually of my dependence on alcohol. Because it made it possible for me to mix with other people and feel comfortable.
And here I was meeting a house full of strangers without a drop. It was miserable. It was miserable. I went upstairs to leave my coat and I didn't come down. And finally Lois came up and put her arms around me and she said, you know we're waiting for you, everybody wants you here. And she led me downstairs. And introduced me to a few of the men. The first question that was asked me was, when did you have your last drink?
And to my horror, I told the truth. Which I hadn't been doing for a long while. I'd had it just over a month ago, just before I had the experience. I'd been sneaking drinks all the time I was under treatment. As most alcoholics do if they can. This isn't very unusual, this is par for the course. Then they asked me some other questions and I found I was telling the truth. I was telling them exactly how I felt about things.
And suddenly I was in conversation, deep conversation with a lot of people who seemed able to finish my sentences for me. Or to know what I was going to say before I said it. And I could do this for them too. I was experiencing for the first time that night one of the rarest things that can happen to a human being and which happens to us all the time. And I think we often take it for granted. If you read very much or get around very much, particularly outside of AA or in business circles or social circles, you'll know that there's a great discussion going on in your country and mine and all over the world about the need for better communication.
About the fact that people don't communicate the way they should and that this may be at the root of a lot of the world's trouble. And I think it probably is. And here we are, from the moment that we walk into an AA group, engaging in a kind of communication that most people never even know of. All of us. We people can communicate with each other at a level so deep that it doesn't require words very often.
We communicate in words too, in a way that other people can't believe. Many years after that first meeting, but in the 40s, I was invited up to Rochester, New York. I'd never been there before. They were having their first open AA meeting, their first AA banquet. I took the overnight train and it got in at 7 o'clock in the morning. And it was in wintertime and the snow was very deep. And as I got off the train, there were two little round figures, all bundled up in furs, on the platform.
Nobody else, just those two. And they came up to me and said, You're Marty? And I said, Yes. He said, I'm Claire P. and this is my wife, Polly. He happened to be the first doctor that came into AA. Well, they took me to the hotel and we had breakfast together. They lived about 25 miles outside of town. And we'd gotten up about 4 o'clock in the morning to meet that train. And we saw a good deal of each other during the day.
And that evening we were driving to the place where the banquet was and I said, We're going to pick up a man we're inviting to this meeting because he's the leading columnist in this area and everybody reads his columns. And if he'll write something nice about AA, it's going to help us. We're going to find more people to help. And he hasn't written anything about it and people have talked to him and he laughs it off and he doesn't believe it.
Remember, this was in the 40s. AA was still not wholly accepted, and not too widely known.
[00:30:07]
So we picked up this gentleman, and we drove to where the dinner was, and Polly and Claire and I were chattering like this, you know. We tried to bring him in on it. He was sitting next to me at dinner. I used to be the speaker. And he said to me, you've known the P. for a long time. I said, no, I met them this morning. Oh, he said, come on. Claire, you're old friends. I said, I met them this morning. They met my train this morning. I'd never seen them before.
He looked at me a long while, and he said, so that's what AA is. He wrote the most beautiful article about AA in his column the next day you've ever read. He got the point. He got the point that there was something going on here at a deeper level and more real and more true and more warm and more loving and more accepting than he'd seen in the world before. And this is part of what I mean by communication.
It is a very great gift. It is the gift we have with which we can often reach another alcoholic who doesn't seem to want to do anything about it. We can often penetrate that resistance partly by words and partly by this communicative bond that we seem able to set up so easily with each other. It's compounded of many things, of real understanding, of real compassion, of a real desire to help, of a willingness to give of ourselves, to go all the way if necessary.
But most of all, I think, it's love. This matter of love. I was one of those, like so many of us, that could neither give nor receive it. Not that I believed that. I'd spent my life, I think, measuring out my love in coffee spoons, waiting until I was absolutely certain that the other person had come 90 percent of the way before I'd take the risk. But I didn't realize that. I just thought these people didn't appreciate me.
When I'd been in AA for eight months, I had a very bad slip. And Bill and Lois took me up to the country. They'd lost their house in Brooklyn. The mortgage had been foreclosed. And one of the AA members' mother had a summer place up in the New Jersey mountains. And that's where they were living, and this was the dead of winter. And it had only a fireplace and a little tiny stove for heat. And old-fashioned facilities.
Outside. And boy, I was sick. It was a miserable time. I was so sick because I developed a severe gallbladder attack that they didn't dare keep me there. And they took me down to a great big old house that belonged to another AA and his family. And they were so poor they could only keep part of the house open or warm. And the rest of it was known as Siberia and was closed off. Well, Bill and Lois were in Siberia.
They put me in a room near the facility if I was that sick. Anybody who's had a gallbladder attack don't know what I mean. And I was lying awake, unable to sleep. And Lois had come downstairs and she had to go through my room. And she realized I was awake and she came over and put her arms around me. And she said, Oh, Marty, I wish you could get a little love in your heart. I didn't know what she meant.
I thought back about all the people I thought I'd loved and how they never loved me enough. And I thought about this. I stayed awake all night thinking about it. And it began to dawn on me that I had never given love with no thought of what I'd get back. Never. And that maybe if I started doing that, it might make a difference. And it has.
[00:35:03]
It is this kind of thing that we begin to learn through our AA experience and context. And as you see, it isn't always another alcoholic that teaches us. In this case, it was Lois, Bill's wife. But Lois knew how to give love. She knew its value and its power. She knew the need of alcoholics to have it, to have the ability to give it. And I remember not long after that being at a meeting and looking around and just feeling overwhelmed with love for everybody in the room.
Not individually. Just a sensation of love. And I realized that that's what that atmosphere was in the room that I'd always noticed. That other people were giving it out that same way. And that when I walked into it, I felt wrapped in it, you know, enveloped in it, warmed by it. I do believe this has something to do with this extraordinary ability to communicate. These things, I think, this acceptance of the fact that there is a God, that he cares about us, that in fact he speaks through us and to us through others, this learning to love and to give and therefore to receive, all of this, I think, lays a solid basis not only for getting but for keeping our sobriety.
And I think it's awfully important that we keep our sobriety. I don't want to run that down. But I agree with what nearly every speaker said on that panel this morning who made it clear that sobriety alone was not enough. And it isn't. So what's so great about sobriety? The rest of the world has it all the time. Doesn't make them any better. I'll grant you it isn't easy for us at first. Gets easier as you go along.
But if you just have sobriety, what have you really got? You have sobriety in order to do something. You can't make any kind of use of your mind or your body if you don't have it, if you're an alcoholic. They both turn on you. Your body falls apart and your mind won't work. You have to have sobriety in order to regain possession of yourself so that you can control your body and use your mind. This is the purpose of sobriety.
It depends on what kind of sobriety it is, too. We used to have a saying in the early days of AA that I think should be resuscitated and used more often. It's the quality of your sobriety that counts, not the length of time you've had it. The longer I've been in AA, the truer that becomes. I know a couple of people where it has been borne in on me very heavily and where another AA made this comment to me.
You know they've been dry a long while, but they're not sober yet. And I think all of you know what I mean. They have sobriety, but the quality is very poor indeed. It's just sobriety. They haven't used it for any good purpose. They haven't used it for the major reason that we need to use it, to become better people. Look at those 12 steps that the girls took this morning and Cease went over this afternoon.
Only one of them mentions alcohol, the first one, and only the twelfth mentions alcoholics, and then it says other alcoholics. Those 12 steps aren't about drinking.
[00:40:01]
They're about what kind of a person are you going to become. I think most of us when we're young, in our teens perhaps, maybe even earlier, begin to create a kind of ideal image of the person we'd like to be. Remember back sometime and see if you didn't. And part of that image, and this has been mentioned too at some of these meetings, is that we should be liked, that we should have approval, be respected in other words.
And certainly we wanted to accomplish certain things, but I think fundamentally most of us wanted to be the kind of person that other people liked and respected and wanted to have around. I know this is part of my ideal image of myself. And then I began to get dependent on the bottle, and it took me over and I turned into the exact opposite of what I wanted to be. Couldn't have been further from it.
But when I came into AA, I had this second chance. I was given the opportunity to try to become the kind of person I had always wanted to be. And the 12 steps, it seems to me, are tools to bring this about. They're excellent tools, they work. But like any other tool, they're no good if you leave them in the bag. You have to take them out and use them. And you have to use them all the time or they'll get rusty.
I couldn't agree more with what I've heard a number of times here in the last two days. You have to surrender every day and sometimes ten times a day, at least I do. You have to take that interview daily. You can't let up for a minute. You see, when we adopt the 12 steps as our way of life, first we decide to stay sober because any one of us with two brains in our heads knows that you couldn't follow the 12 steps if you were drunk, even if you tried.
You couldn't even understand them if you were drunk. So you have to be sober to even try to follow them. That's just a basic requisite. Thereafter, it's up to you how much you do of that. How well you follow them, how hard you work at it, how much effort you put into it, how much of yourself you put into it. You have embarked, whether you know it or not, on a program of growth. That's what those steps are designed to bring about.
Emotional and spiritual growth. Now, I shouldn't have to tell any of you that there is nothing in this universe that stands still. Everything, even a rock, is made up of atoms that are in motion. We can't see them, so is this table. Nothing stands still. If you are not moving forward, if you are not growing, then you are moving backwards, you are retrogressive. This is why we can't afford to let up on it.
As a matter of fact, other people can't either, but they're not lucky enough to know it. Another reason why I'm grateful I'm an alcoholic. I have a great many friends who aren't, who have all kinds of troubles, almost as bad as ours, but there's no single thing that sticks out that gives you a lever you can get hold of. They are not driven to their knees so they have to seek help, as we do, and I'm sorry for them, because they aren't going to seek it and they aren't going to get it.
They're just going to be miserable and unhappy and neurotic people all their lives. In our case, the red flag goes up, we get drunk. You can't deny that, nor can you conceal it very well. A lot of people start out, you know, thinking they can. But it always comes out. We have a lot of aids that will keep us on the road up.
[00:45:05]
Will keep us growing and moving forward. I have a lot of chances to observe this too. Because I travel so much. And I come back to places some years later, sometimes many years later. and meet many of the same people and I can observe the changes, it's easier to see if you haven't seen someone for a long while because growth is a process that if you're very close to it is not too visible in fact a lot of people in AA get very discouraged because they think they aren't growing it happens so slowly sometimes they feel they're standing still if they're even worrying about it they're growing alright if they didn't worry about it they'd probably be flipping backwards and that leads me really to the last point I want to make it's partly the theme of this conference as it was of the 35th anniversary in Toronto Responsibility I thought that was a wonderful statement it was everywhere on every pillar in Toronto and I was happy to see it on your program I am responsible but I'm going to leave the rest of it out if you're a sober person you are now able to be responsible for yourself and for anything else which belongs in your area of responsibility I believe a characteristic of alcoholics is their inability or unwillingness to accept responsibility I'm talking about drinking alcohol I'm not sure that doesn't have something to do with their excessive drinking in the first place their inability or unwillingness to accept responsibility for themselves or for anything else they're concerned about themselves alright they're wrapped up in that concern and I particularly love that phrase this morning that a woman wrapped up in self-concern makes a very small package I'm going to remember that one I'm going to remember that because I get full of self-concern all too often and I have to work to be rid of it and to look outside of my own narrow and selfish little view but we're given means that help us to do this if we're willing to do it becoming sober makes us able to do it you can't be responsible if you're drunk all the time but you can be a responsible person if you're sober and if you're in command of your body and your mind and I don't believe that sobriety is of much use unless we put it to good use I think we have to use it I have been concerned, I said earlier, I was going to mention this later in my travels in some parts of the country because I have seen that certain groups weren't growing I heard of a group only today where the youngest member in the group and the visitor was treating him as a beginner had had five years sobriety what has that group been doing?
clearly they stopped doing 12-step work five years back they hadn't had a new member in five years that was equally clear if this was the youngest member in the group and he'd been sober five years now this doesn't happen, it can't happen if the member of AA takes full responsibility and if he's really growing we need to be helping people in order to grow one of the greatest needs in the human breast not just in alcoholics, in everybody is to be able to help others one of the tragedies of our modern time with their speed and their bigness is that so many people can't find an outlet for this urge, this need they don't know how to reach people to help
[00:50:00]
these are the people that are so neurotic a psychiatrist friend of mine told me that he had never had a patient who was doing something to help someone else that all of his patients who came to him the neurotic and psychiatric problems were people who had not been able or found a way to give of themselves to others they weren't helping anyone and they were of necessity turned in upon themselves eaten up with self-concern and this is the source of many psychiatric problems and here we are, we're given the most wonderful way in which we can find an outlet, an expression for this need and by exercising our ability to help others can help ourselves to grow and develop and become more responsible and I can't understand anyone who has benefited from AA not wanting to pass it on not wanting to give it to others not seeking others to whom they can give it it is a kind of complacency and selfishness that is beyond my comprehension we often speak of AA as enlightened selfishness but in these cases where they happen the enlightened has been wiped out and it's just the good old kind of selfishness we had when we were drinking we've got it, why should we worry about anyone else?
I think we must guard against this apparently it can happen fairly easily I haven't observed it here, so don't think this is a personal statement but I have observed it in some parts of the country and I've heard about it in others and it's clear to me that those people have stopped using the 12 steps on a daily basis they're not taking their inventory every day they're not using the 12th step at all they're retrogressing they're going backwards this does not have to happen it's a pretty easy matter not to have it happen it's made much easier today than it was when I started we had great difficulty in finding alcoholics to work on there was only one hospital in New York that took them a hospital for alcoholics and drug addicts and some of the people in there wouldn't see us and sometimes there weren't very many in there and there were a lot of us all fighting to get at the one that was there it's far easier today there's almost a steady flow of inquiries or calls for help and anyone who wants to be busy at it can be but I don't think we have any right to sit back and say well, if I'm needed, they'll find me if they want it, they can come to me if you'd done that at the beginning, none of you would be here we could easily have sat back and 20 or 25 of us clutched our thing to ourselves and never given it away and we'd have all been drunk and dead and there wouldn't be any of us you've got to be a little bit more careful you've got everything to work with anyone who has accepted AA has accepted God if not immediately, it doesn't usually take very long they have learned that they are one of God's creatures that they have a right to be here they were created beyond doubt for some purpose and one of the purposes is to help their fellow sufferers and this kind of belief makes you realize that you are one with the universe there is a flow with which you can get in harmony I've heard it described so many ways by so many people swimming with the current instead of against it letting good flow through you without stopping letting it express itself through you all these things these are a basis for living beyond price
[00:55:02]
we found love in its biggest and most wonderful self what in the original gospels was called agape the greatest kind of love the love that Saint Paul wrote about we found it it's been freely given to us and we've had to learn how to give it also we have the kind of communication with our fellow man that the whole world desperately needs and we've been fortunate enough to have it given to us and we've had the opportunity to learn the full meaning of being responsible human beings using our humanity to its best advantage and to its utmost indeed we who have found AA have rejoined the human race and if we recognize it fully we can make the human race a lot better for our being a part of it thank you I'll ask Miss Barbara B. to say a few words please Barbara Miss Barbara Marty Mr. Chairman honored guests and friends hundreds of friends I have the honor of expressing gratitude and appreciation to you, Marty, for speaking to us tonight but the feeling by means of which you have communicated with us is love this same love and fellowship which surrounds all of us tonight here and round up and this is the feeling that I want to thank you for most of all, Marty which has been so deepened and strengthened by your words and so on behalf of all of us here I want to thank you for your contribution of love to our banquet and to our roundup thank you, Marty thank you