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Source: DICOBE-00317 – Dick G – ARKANSAS STATE CONV – 1980-08-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00317-dick-g-arkansas-state-conv-1980-08-15.mp3 Duration: 01:20:16
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Hi, my name is Dick G. and I am an alcoholic. Before I get all wound up in my favorite subject, I would like to thank the committee for having me here, and I am particularly sorry for the fact that originally I am still managing my life so well that my wife and I were going to come in yesterday morning and try to straighten out Franklin and Eloise and a few people, but I had a business emergency come up and so I couldn't come in until last evening.
I called my wife and told her what she was missing, which wasn't the smartest thing I've done all weekend, but this has just really been a delight. Every speaker generally gets up and always thanks the committee and says that they really appreciate it, but rarely do they tell you why, and I have some very specific reasons for enjoying the fact that I am here today, and it has to do with this thing that happens among us whenever we get together that has become so vital and so important in my life.
I'd like to give you just one example of that, of the delight that I have found in being a full-fledged, 100 percent committed member of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was not a full-fledged, 100 percent committed member of Alcoholics Anonymous for some time after I was going to meetings, and not many nice things happened to me, I might add. I was very unhappy in Alcoholics Anonymous as long as I wasn't committed to being here, but once I decided I was here because I wanted to, nice things have begun to happen.
I'd like to give you just one example of that and to tell you why I really am grateful for being here. About two years ago I had the opportunity to speak in your state up at the Eureka Springs thing, which if you all haven't been there, you ought to go. I had the opportunity then, a young lady was chairing the meeting, and I met her and we got together early that day and we got to talking and we found out that our spirits kind of had something to communicate with one another, and it was an absolutely delightful experience.
It's also very nice for me now that I can meet and have a nice friendship with a woman without going through all that other stuff. Well, I hadn't heard from her in the time and I felt like we'd really had some meaningful time and I got here and sure enough she was here, and this was a young lady upon whom the dignity of the Alcoholics Anonymous had been bestowed because I think sometimes the fact that the ladies seem to bear the scars a little tougher than the men, but also their recovery seems to be that much more lovely on the outside than in some of ours.
I got here and she had just married in the program and her life was coming together and we talked this morning. I had an opportunity for two and a half hours this morning to talk to a friend, a real deep and meaningful friend, and that's Alcoholics Anonymous to me. I think there's something kind of special about a marriage in the program. I think there's something about the excitement of two people who are on the same kind of track.
So I wish that you all would join me and let's give them kind of a wish. Where are Billy and Valerie? Where are they? Are they here? There they are. That's the well wishes from all of us. Well, to get going here, I got here by drinking. I didn't realize that, though, when I came. I thought I arrived at my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting as a result of the fact that I had been experiencing a fifteen-year run of bad luck.
If my luck had been better, everything would have been all right. I started drinking when I was fifteen years of age, and I had my last drink when I was thirty. I never got it right. I never did it well. There are some people who don't know when they became alcoholic. I'm one of the fortunate ones who do. I can tell you the circumstances and the place and all the things that happened the night I became an alcoholic.
I stole the booze, I drank it in a silly place, I got sick, threw up, passed out, woke up and planned the next one, got in trouble trying to get home through a vehicular accident, arrived at home and got into what began to be a series of discussions with authority figures in my life. That happens to have been the first time I ever drank alcohol.
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That was the night I became alcoholic.
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I know there are two schools that you start drinking and one day you're on a bar stool and you suddenly come down with it. In my case, I was the other school. I was an alcoholic waiting for their first drink. My wife recently said something, too, that she realized that she had been an Al-Anon waiting to happen. That was the end of my successful drinking and from there it went downhill. I was the kind of alcoholic who always protected their drinking by not drinking too often.
I was a periodic alcoholic. I drank only at times when things were in good condition and the pressure was off. I never drank when I was under pressure and when there was trouble because I was afraid that I would ruin my source, that I would lose my right to drink. When things really got going tough, I would clean my act up and I would endure. That's the only way you can state how I lived between drunks, was that I endured from drunk to drunk.
That's how I got here. I had all the usual silly, stupid, sick kind of things happen during my drinking career. I spent a lot of time discussing my behavior with authority figures, from my father to school officials to college officials to the United States Navy, an organization with which I never did agree. I was one of those guys, like another person I've heard, who didn't see on the recruiting posters that they were going to put all that emphasis on showing up.
My commanding officer used to feel that it really was incumbent upon me to be there when my airplane left or the ship left. The only successful periods I had in the Navy during that time, as far as drinking was, one time I spent several weeks under the ocean in an atomic submarine and there wasn't any liquor aboard. That was probably the best time that I had during the Navy in terms of feeling well.
That period of my life was characterized by as much drinking as I could safely get away with. I knew deep down inside of me all my life that there was something wrong with me. I had always had that tremendous sense of separateness and being different. I had always had that feeling of not belonging, that feeling of being separated from the rest of the world by a pane of glass, and that distinct feeling that other people had read a chapter in the Book of Living that I had missed and that they had some secret that I lacked.
I tried to carry out the façade that I was getting by, even though I knew there was something wrong with me, by hiding behind a shell, and I'll just describe my shell to you and maybe that will describe my alcoholism to you. I knew what alcoholics were like and I had vowed never to be one because I had grown up in a family of two alcoholic parents. So I could describe alcoholism to you and I knew exactly what it looked like, I knew what it smelled like.
As a child of alcoholic parents, my strongest memories are of smells. Not sights and not sounds, but smells. The smells of the three-week binges, the pyraldehyde, the rotten food in the kitchen, and all those smells that are associated with it. And that's my strongest recollection of alcoholism, and so I knew exactly what I was not going to become. I was very aware of how alcoholics acted because I had seen it right up close.
It never occurred to me that I was on a behavior pattern that was exactly the same as my father's and much like my mother's, and I didn't know that. I had become, like many of us, so good at lying to ourselves that I had believed the lies. I had told myself those lies about me so long that I had begun believing them and begun playing them out. Now my shell went this way. On the very outer surface, what you saw was a misunderstood, misplaced intellectual genius that was, for some cruel reason known only to the fates—I was very big with the fates in those days—had been put in this unthinking, unfeeling world and was forced to cope with this group of insensitive people.
And naturally you drank when you had to live like that. It was really a letdown to me when Hemingway blew his brains out.
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I had to pick a new idol. The next layer was the shiny, bright, young college graduate come out of the nice upper middle class country club existence—college in four years, I'll have you know, despite some attendance problems—who was still playing out that sort of F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of image about doing all those clever pranks and running around with people doing all those funny things, and every once in a while this cloddish, jealous world would take their petty revenge out on us by making us pay for some of those pranks.
So that was the next level, if you could get by the first one. And the third and the real one was that I was absolutely incapable of understanding how to deal with reality on a daily basis. I was aware that I was an emotional cripple. I knew that my mental and emotional state was not like what most people were experiencing, and I had absolutely no idea why. I had no idea why I had been made this way and why I was going to have to go on living this way.
So I hit upon a not-too-unusual and Alcoholics Anonymous answer to that was, obviously, suicide. And I had, too, what I feel to be as honest a suicide attempt as I could possibly do. You may notice that they didn't work, which spoke to my sense of failure in those days. I remember, though, that the second one and the most serious was that I stuffed rags in all the cracks and closed all the windows and turned on the gas and laid down and went to sleep.
And, you know, when I woke up two hours later with a splitting headache, I was awfully glad because I had not been happy with the note I'd written. It really wasn't up to the level that it should have been so that the world would understand what they had lost. Little vignettes of my life at this point were little incidents like the pregnant young lady that showed up at the squadron one day and pointed her finger at me, being locked up in the bachelor officer's quarters for two weeks with a copy of the Bible and a copy of Navy regulations, and within one day having an absolute inexhaustible supply of alcohol available.
My father coming to visit me and sitting down across the table and looking at me, and he said, what in God's name is the matter with you? And my looking at him and thinking, I wish I could tell you that I don't have any idea. From time to time when I would make a mistake of letting people get to know me too well, they would stop at times and look at me and say, what's wrong? What is wrong? Oh, I hated those conversations.
I was rarely around for the end of them. And that's the way it went—suicide, self-disgust, hangovers that were incredible. I am not a periodic alcoholic, particularly by choice. I would have been a maintenance drinker if I could have figured out how to suffer that much that often. I was blessed with a low threshold of pain. I had the kind of hangovers that if you put your hand over your mouth and nose, you felt like the noise was coming out your ears.
I think one of the real dangers in telling a person that they don't have to drink anymore but not giving them any way to go is really a cruel thing, because if somebody had done that to me, I would have been very resentful, because with me by this time, hangovers were a way of life. Now I didn't have much of a way to live, but at least when I had a hangover, I knew what my day was going to be like.
I would get up and try to start sipping ice water by about the middle of the morning, and if that would stay down, then I was into Campbell's vegetable soup by about noon, and if that stayed down, then about two or three in the afternoon I was on a chocolate mall.
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I picked this, you think I was pregnant the way I ate. And then late that night, if everything went well and I was okay, before I went out for a couple of drinks, I would have craft dinner, you know, that macaroni and cheese dinner, because that would stay down. Now, you know, that's not much of a way of life, but at least I knew what my day was going to be like. So if you newcomers are coming around, if they don't tell you what you're supposed to do with your day, and all they do is say, you've got to stop drinking, stay away from those people.
A couple of elements of my life at this point included having tried to solve my immaturity problem by getting married. It's maybe not a good reason, but if it weren't for, you know, weren't for us, they wouldn't have an Ellen on. I desperately made a last-ditch effort to clean up my act and make a career out of the Navy, but somehow the Navy didn't seem enormously impressed with that. So I got out of the service, and now I was married, and despite the fact that I fundamentally knew that I had married the right woman, I couldn't imagine why I'd gotten married, because it was beginning to chafe at my lifestyle.
Somebody asked me, what are you going to do when you get out, and I thought it was kind of strange that now I was roughly twenty-seven years old, and I didn't have the faintest idea what I was going to do when I got out of the Navy, and I frankly didn't care, because by that point I had already become convinced of something that I used to talk about when I was eighteen, was that I honestly did not believe, I deep down honestly did not believe that I would be alive past age thirty, and I didn't care, and I just didn't care.
I figured thirty years of this stuff is more than anybody should be required to take. When I viewed life as something which must be endured, and as time that it was something that must be killed, life past age thirty looked pretty sick to me, and I saw absolutely no reason for it. By the time I was thirty years of age, I was continuing to live out shell number two, and I was that bright young corporation executive who was being promoted and doing well, and had a lovely wife, and she was teaching school.
We were living in Santa Barbara, California, out in the back end of a large estate in Montecito, and if you're familiar with that area, that's about as beautiful as any place you can live, and everybody's telling us, isn't it wonderful, you've got your life together, and it's going so well. My wife by this time was suffering from Al-Anon-ism to a point that she didn't even know she was married to an alcoholic, because my mother offered to have her get together with some AA women and some Al-Anon women, and my wife was incensed.
She could not believe that my mother would suggest such a thing. My wife and I have had a lot of fun discussions about that. Why did we pick each other? We soon realized, as lucky as we did, we saved two others. I don't know where they got it, but the Al-Anons up in Denver, as my wife likes to say, the horns on the AA's heads are uniquely filed to fit the holes in the Al-Anons. Looking back, we kind of figured we deserved each other, but we've often wondered what it was about each other that attracted.
Our mutually compensating and our mutually inclusive illnesses just meshed very nicely. If you'll be sick your way and let me be sick my way, we'll get along okay, despite frequent shouting matches. I would like to share with you what happened after that, because I believe that's what we're here for. Someone said this morning that we share a common problem, and I don't believe that's why we're here.
I believe we share a common solution, and that's why we stay. I was a hopeless and chronic alcoholic at age 30, just because I didn't drink very often. At that point, I was only drinking about once a month or so, because the act was getting
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harder to hold together. I was willing to pay the price of not drinking very often in order to protect the privilege of getting drunk at least sometime. I was 30 years of age. I had only been in jail and little overnight drunken escapade things. I did not have a prison record. I had no checks outstanding. I had not been fired from any jobs. I had a wife who was seemingly interested in staying around a day at a time.
I had a lot of people that I worked for and that I knew who were talking about my potential, which was one of my favorite subjects. Thirty years of age, I was still a mass of unrealized potential. And yet I woke up one Sunday morning and decided that I was so hopeless that I would do something as foul and as degrading as making a phone call to Alcoholics Anonymous, that I would deign to lower myself to such levels.
I, like many, came in here with the humility of a Prussian general, hating you, hating every one of you, and bitter, terribly bitter about the fact that I had to go through this humiliating experience. That Sunday started by my waking up and stumbling down the stairs to the living room of this little place that we were living in and beginning to shake and beginning to be so full of remorse and fear, a terrible, terrible sensation of, My God, what did I do last night?
And I sat down and a few visions went through my head. Just before that, my wife had begun going to a sensitivity group. Those were very big back in those days. She still hadn't identified her problem. But somebody at her sensitivity group had, and they'd given her a book called Just One More by a man named James Lamfrey. It's a book that's out of publication now, and it's a book by an alcoholic. And she read that, and it just was one of those aha experiences for her.
And she left the book around, and one night I sat down when she was off to her sensitivity group and I, in my intellectual splendor and superiority, had made fun of her dutifully on her way out. She was going out the door. I was also making fun of the fact that she was on tranquilizers by this time from having been blessed with the marriage. And of course, I was forgetting to tell her that I was stealing those during the hangovers, because I, by this time, had to steal tranquilizers from my wife, of which I made fun in order to be able to endure the hangovers.
I began reading some of the book, and needless to say, I did not read that book from cover to cover. I did not discover the meaning of my life and zealously attack it at that point. But I did go in and sit down and turn on the television set and started drinking a quart of port wine from a silver cup. And we all know you don't have a problem if you drink out of a silver cup, even after you finish the whole quart.
I remember sitting there, and something in that book ran through my mind, and I started crying, and I said, Oh my God, I didn't mean to turn out like this. A few weeks later, I got up on this Sunday morning, and I said the same thing, My God, I didn't mean to be like this. And at that moment, the fact that we were having lunch that afternoon with my mother and my sister, who were driving up from Los Angeles, reminded me that my mother had been sober in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for about eight years.
And that was the first conscious time I had of associating my problem with Alcoholics Anonymous. We went and had lunch that day, and I absolutely refused to talk to my mother about anything. Finally, she caught me out in the parking lot afterwards, and she said, What's the matter with you? And I said, I don't know, but I'm going to an AA meeting tonight. And as soon as I said it, I was sorry, because then I figured I had to go through with it.
And by this time, I was losing my resolve and remembering that it was a good movie on television that night. But I went to that first AA meeting, and I could not go alone. My wife had to take me. I was in that firm a grasp of my masculinity at this point. I was intellectually superior to most of the Western Hemisphere, but I could not go to an AA meeting by myself. I'd asked my wife to call AA because I was afraid they'd recognize my voice on the phone.
And I walked into that meeting, and a little lady walked up to me who looked like about
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40 miles of bad road. And I thought to myself, Yeah, see, I knew that's what they were going to look like. Because I had envisioned you, despite the fact that my mother had been marvelously sober in the program. And I mean sober in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. It had taken her 20 years to do it, but she had now had 20 years of being in the program and working steps and all those things. Yet I still envisioned you as a bunch of old men in a basement in dirty raincoats.
And I walked in there, and this little lady walked up to me, and I immediately set up all my prejudices. And, of course, I immediately did that thing, which has continued to curse me whenever I enter any group of people, which is I have a sick need to compare myself to other people. And I don't know about you, but when I compare myself to other people, we do not tie. I became such an active, zealous, enthusiastic, dedicated, hard-working member of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that after four months, I made a mistake of going to a meeting one night where they went around the room and introduced themselves as an alcoholic.
They should hang the format outside the door so that people like me don't get caught in meetings like that. And that was the first time I had allowed myself to get trapped into a meeting like that because I had been going to the speaker meetings and coming late and leaving early. And so they got around to me, and I said, I'm Dick, and I'm a dim-a-dum. And I had now been so active in the program. They came up to me afterwards, and they said, we're glad to hear you're here for yourself.
We thought you were a student doing a paper. Soon after that, I moved to Los Angeles, and when you want to be a half-assed member of AA, that's a great place to do it. They have nice big meetings that you can hide out in the back of, and they do have one bad thing there, though. They have breaks in the meeting. They have hour-and-a-half meetings, which I considered an endurance contest beyond belief.
And they take a break in the middle, and that's the tough time for flaky members because people have a disgusting tendency of walking up to you during those breaks and saying things like, how are you? What is your name? Why are you here? Can we help you? Well, there are ways. For those of you who haven't figured it out, your best refuge is the men's room. And the parking lot is a good place to do that, too.
And that's how I began working the program of Alcoholics and Ones. After a year of not having drunk and having absolutely done nothing to replace that in my life, I was in the middle of what I now realize as one of the better—not the only by a long shot, but one of the better—dry drunks that I've ever been on. A dry drunk is when you're absolutely and thoroughly convinced that you're the only person in the world that knows what's going on.
I had a temper tamper at work one day, which was not unusual, but I stormed out on a Friday afternoon and I went out to a movie in Pasadena, and the only thing unusual about that, it wasn't a dirty movie. And it happened to be a movie with Jack Lemmon called April Fool's. In this movie, Jack Lemmon portrays a guy who is a really nifty guy. He's really a pretty nifty guy, and he's clever, and he's quite bright, and he has an enormous amount of potential in life.
But he's married to this whiny, negative woman, and he's got this crummy, meaningless job where he's vastly underemployed, and he's locked into this senseless, meaningless existence of commuting to work and back and all this kind of thing. But he goes to a cocktail party one night, and he meets the woman who understands. The end of the movie is that he's racing down a concourse at Kennedy Airport to catch the plane where they are going to fly away together into the beautiful and rosy future.
I was the only person in the movie theater who stood up and cheered at this point. And I walked out of there and I went over and had a cup of coffee across the street, and I decided, and I thought this over, I thought, something significant has happened in my life and I ought to think this over. I was capable of sustained serious thought for up to 30 seconds at this point. What had occurred to me was that the God in whom I did not believe and did not accept the fact…
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should act on it, even though I didn't believe in him and he didn't really exist. So I did. I went home and announced to my wife I was leaving. No warning. In fact, she was beginning to talk about having children, which had heightened my sense of unease anyway. And I left. And I didn't mean to, but I forgot something. There was an extra element operating in our marriage at this point that I had forgotten might affect this whole situation. She had begun going to those other meetings that they hold where I thought they were making cookies and things like that. And she was obviously distressed a bit at first, but then her training took hold, which is when I knew I was in trouble. And she turned to me and said, Do you want the color TV? And I thought, Oh damn, now I've got to go through with it. And I did, because you've got to save face, right? When you're an Alky, you've got to save face at all costs. So I gathered my intellectual dignity about me and strode forth into the world.
Woke up the next morning wondering what had happened and why was my life coming apart worse than it ever did when I was drinking? This began the parade of people, and this is how I came to understand God. Because at this point, the parade of you all through my life began. And that's a parade that's going on now. And it's that parade of people that I think characterizes to me Alcoholics Anonymous and what it's done for this sick, self-centered, terribly, terribly frightened alcoholic who at age 30 came to you and with all the bitterness and the hate that had come out of a 30-year life of emotional and mental illness was allowed to be around you, to stay sober on the fallout of your programs long enough to have made that fundamental decision that I wanted to be here more than I wanted anything else in the world.
The parade of people began after my going to a lot of AA meetings, a saturation campaign of AA meetings, because I knew I was in trouble and I was scared. I was living in this crummy little tiny apartment in this huge big apartment complex full of pretty weird people. And they don't call that the land of fruit and nuts for nothing out there. And I was going to be there. And it was hard to tell who was dating whom in that one. Now, I cannot say that I was looking down from a moral standpoint, because I was one of those alcoholics that woke up in some pretty funny situations. But I was scared. I was deeply and thoroughly scared that I was way in over my head and I had absolutely no resources to draw upon and I knew that.
You see, I had made a decision that I was an emotional and mental cripple. I didn't expect to get well. I was just looking for a way to get along like that. So I was operating from the point of view that I was crippled and all I was looking for was some way to get by. And I didn't have any way to get by. And I proved something to myself at this point that you can go to 111 million AA meetings and you will never once work the program at a meeting. You cannot work this program in meetings, in my opinion. What you can do is going to meetings and working with your sponsor and reading the big book. You can learn the elements of a program and then you can work your program when you're out there among them.
The big they, you know? Remember how I used to worry about how they were thinking about you? Did you ever have an obsession that people were talking about you behind your back? That they were saying, gosh, you could just be dynamite, you know? If that guy ever gets it together, he's going to be dynamite. You know, that kind of thing. That's a mild form of paranoia. I have a friend in AA in Denver who I think is a sheer genius on this subject of paranoia because he came up with what I think is one of the most profound statements I've ever heard in my life. Do you know it's difficult not to be paranoid when everyone's out to get you? The first person in my parade came one night when I had gone to an AA meeting and I had walked out before it left because I was so upset and I was so angry and I was so frustrated and I was so frightened because I knew that I had nothing and they had something
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and I couldn't make the gap. I couldn't get the spark to jump between us. And I was angry at those people because they were not helping me. The fact that I wouldn't talk to them didn't seem to affect my opinion of it. And if they ever did catch me by mistake and catch my eye and said, how you doing? I would say, fine. What a horrible way to live. But I got outside in a dark park in Beverly Hills and as I was leaving the meeting I was standing all alone in that park and I've never been more frightened in my life because I knew where I was headed. I was headed for the topless bars and the dirty movies and the sick people and drinking eventually. And so I turned around and I walked back in that meeting and I sat down in the back of it and I began to pray to something I'd made fun of all my life.
And I said, oh God help me and I don't know what to do. And the format of the meeting was they would call at random about 15 out of the 50 odd fellas that were there up to the podium and you could speak for up to five minutes. And all I could do was get up there and say, my name is Dick, I'm an alcoholic and I think I'm flunking AA. And after the meeting a man walked up to me and he said, my name is Hal, I think you better stick with me. And at that point, for the first time in my life, I made a commitment to another human being unreservedly. I didn't care what kind of a person he was, I didn't care what his background was, I didn't care if he was up to my standards. I was just so grateful that somebody with a knowing look in their eye walked up to me and said, you better stick with me. And I knew I had better. And that was my first sponsor.
My first sponsor was a man who had had an enormous amount of training in leading young men to some type of a spiritual or religious life. He was an actor and whenever his career would go well and get going very well, he would drop out and he would go and walk around campuses, UCLA and USC and places like that, and he would hang around the fraternity houses because he seemed to be able to relate to those kind of guys. And he would get to know those guys and he would try to lead them to God and to help them find a spiritual way of life. And there are many men who are in the ministry now as a result of that man.
But yet, you know, it's interesting that he had been sober and AA for two years at that point and he didn't have any kind of a program going for himself. But yet he took time with me and he tried to share with me what he knew from his own background and experience. And what we did was we went on a saturation campaign. And he was a bachelor out of work and I would spend every evening with him. We'd go out to dinner and we'd go to a meeting and we'd go out afterwards. And then on weekends we'd get in my car and we would drive all over California on the weekends, didn't care where we were going. And we would just talk and talk and talk. And he would tell me about his life and I would tell him about my life.
And then he finally got me to write a four-step. And of course, like we intellectuals who come in here, I wrote my four-step in an hour and a half. Woke him up about one o'clock in the morning, called him and said, well, it's done. And he said, no, it's not. Wake up in the morning and read it over and see how many things you left out. He said, that's the worst kind of lie. And he was right. So I sat down and I got out some guide to a four-step or something that somebody had given me. And I sat down and I wrote out a narrative of my life. And in that narrative I talked about every crummy, dirty, dishonest, amoral, immoral thing that I had ever done. And I didn't know why I was doing it. All I knew was I prayed a lot before I did it and I sat down and wrote it. And I wanted to get that down on paper because I sensed there was a value to having it written down. I understand now that the human mind can only hold one thought at a time. But if it's down and written then you can see the perspective of it, you can see it in its wholeness, and you can also most importantly see the patterns that appear through a thorough and written inventory. And then he came over one night and I was going to do my fifth step. And with the understanding that he had, he made me sit and wait while the Academy Awards were on. That's justifiable homicide in any jurisdiction in the United States. But he made me wait and read it over and isn't it interesting, there were a few additions that I made during that time. And I took out a few things too because I lied. I lied on my own fourth step because I was not capable. You know, you newcomers, if you feel uneasy that we're asking you to do something that's a little bit alien to your lifestyle when you come into AA, we understand that.
We really don't expect that you brought anything here that's going to successfully work the program of Alcoholics in Honor. So don't worry. You don't have any problems. If you're a newcomer
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and you really want to be here, I really believe you only have one problem. You don't ever have to drink again, that's not your problem. You don't have to worry about whether your life will straighten out, that's not your problem. Because there's irrefutable evidence here tonight for you that you don't have to drink again and that your life will straighten out. I really honestly believe that whatever group you attend, you've only got one problem.
And that's whether or not there are enough people in that group who have read and studied the program as written in the big book that they have something to share with you. That's the only problem you've got and there will be some and you're going to have to dig a little bit for them. You will have to dig a little bit for them. Do not assume. You know why I know that? It's because for several years I tried to offer people something I didn't have. I tried very hard to offer people something I didn't have because I thought it was about time I got about that. I was one of those who wanted to be an instant old-timer.
At this point I was transferred to Seattle and another phase came into my life and that was my next sponsor. We moved to Seattle. My wife was now regularly attending Al-Anon meetings. Oh, she always tells me I forget to mention that we got back together. We must have, we have two children. We got back together and we started all over again. And I'm very grateful for the fact that I have had the opportunity through Alcoholics Anonymous to make a conscious decision to remarry that woman because I wanted to. And I'm very grateful for that. That's one of the fringe benefits that you've given me. Now it has not been necessarily tiptoeing through the tulips since then because she still has Al-Anonism and I still have alcoholism just because I don't drink and she doesn't break things over my head anymore. That doesn't mean that we're not capable of acting out sick roles. We are.
Any day that I don't work the program or pray and meditate I begin to suffer from untreated alcoholism. And so I've got to do something about it every day. But we got up there and we were back together again and she had our first child, a real AA baby. One of God's many, many blessings to me. I remember the night that she was born and I went to an AA meeting that night and I tried to thank Alcoholics Anonymous for my first child. Well, my second child because by this time the lady back at the squadron had also sired one. You know, yesterday was an anniversary in my life. I just completed 18 years of a month at a time paying child support. You know, and I can look back now, I've never become a compulsive child support payer. But you know, I look back now and realize that God put that in my life for a very good reason. I needed to have that responsibility in my life in order to keep my sanity together before and after I came in the program. And I thank God for the opportunity to have walked that walk for 18 years. And one of the great freedoms is that I can now pay child support out of choice. And that's a great benefit. I owe that to you all. Because left to my own, I would have run and hidden and dodged the child support payments and changed my name and done everything because that's unfair for the world to do something like that to somebody like me.
So there we were in Seattle. A bright, shiny young couple working the program together. A new baby. All the outward signs of a spiritual life bearing fruition. So cute to parade at meetings, that is a couple speaking together. And just kind of put up on that little special niche that we sometimes do to people in the program. And aren't they, God, we were so cute you couldn't stand it. And we would let you know how wonderful it was that we at our young age were working this program and fulfilling our destinies and then we would go home and try to kill each other. And we couldn't understand why we were back to playing the facade on the outside and the reality on the inside. And we thought there was something terribly, terribly wrong with us that we couldn't.
Terribly, terribly wrong with us that we couldn't quit acting the way we acted before AA, now that we'd been in the program for two or three years. And that was a terrible frustration
[00:45:03]
to us, and it was a terrible frustration to me. The fact that I could, I could understand a program much better than I could live it. I could really by this time understand a spiritual way of life so much better than I could live it. And needless to say, I could speak it better than I could understand it. Those were the periods, during those years, were my time when I would go to a discussion group and I would spend the first part up to me thinking about what I was going to say, say my piece, and then spend the rest of the meeting evaluating your reaction to it. Until some kind old-timer told me one night, you know if you leave a meeting and you only remember what you said, you're in trouble. A man came into my life at that point who became my sponsor, and he was one of those terribly frustrating sponsors.
He was the kind that when you asked him a direct question would not give you a direct answer. Now when you are somewhere up here into spirituality and intellectualism, and you're moving through life playing this role, you need quick answers so you can move on to the next thing. And somehow he understood that, so I would ask him a direct question on some profound spiritual or program point, and he'd start talking about his Aunt Susie who back in Spokane did something or other, and ten minutes later I realized he's giving me my answer. And he taught me everything by example. He taught me everything I learned from him and am continuing to learn from him because I've tried to stay in as close a contact with each and every one of these people as I possibly can, without being frivolous. And I think there's a real thing of that too. I, for a while, was what I would refer to as an AA butterfly. I was flitting from person to person and having no meaningful relationships with anybody. But that's okay when you have a deep down fear of what you're really like anyway, it's best to do that because nobody gets to know you, right? But Jim taught me everything by example. This is a man that when they started the detox centers in Seattle, he would go down to the detox center every Sunday night and sit in the lounge with a copy of the big book and just sit there. And if anybody came by and said, who are you and what do you got, and he'd say, if you'd like to learn something about how to stay sober, I'd sure like to share with you what I found. And even the staff at that place tried to drive him off. They would lock the doors early and they would do everything they could to keep that guy out of that detox center. But somehow or other he'd come in through the back door or down the fire escape or something and every Sunday night for three years Jim sat there all by himself with a copy of the big book and never asked anybody to help him.
All he did was he helped a few people find the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the God of their understanding. And see, I had to watch him. I couldn't listen to him and I couldn't brainstorm it. I had to watch him to learn that. We were transferred again to Columbus, Ohio. It was the only time I lived in that part of the country. I arrived there now with three plus years of sobriety. I was promoted, I might add, because I was in Alcoholics Anonymous. That's kind of an interesting thing too. I was promoted several times with that company because I was in AA. You might wonder about the company. But every time they had a guy who got in trouble somewhere and one of their managers would get things all screwed up and drinking was involved, they'd promote me and send me there to clean it up. So if you're a newcomer and you're worried about your employer finding out you're in AA, I really wouldn't worry about it very much.
I know as an employer, at one point of a great number of people, I would have given anything for a couple of AAs in that organization. We moved there and my wife and I had been blessed beyond our wildest expectations and we sat there and bitched and moaned the whole time. Didn't do the program right there. People weren't friendly. Lousy climate. Silly format in the meetings. Bunch of cliques. Bleeding old deaconesses and deacons. We mumbled and grumbled the whole time. We got out of the program exactly what we put into it.
I got a phone call one day and they said, would you like to go to Denver? That happens to be where I grew up and I went. We moved to Denver and right away we found out that they did it differently in Denver than they did in Columbus, but they didn't do it right in Denver either. They weren't very friendly and there were a bunch of cliques and a bunch
[00:50:00]
of old bleeding deacons and deaconesses. So we proceeded to get out of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous exactly what we put into it. I am fundamentally a loner. It is my instinctive reaction to any situation to go off on my own. I will do that when I move to a new town or when I am in a pressure packed situation of any kind. I will instinctively withdraw. I have done that in the program despite the fact that it is not necessary.
Coincidentally the couple who lived in the house behind us were in AA, both of them. Coincidentally that man's sponsor was the man who spoke at the first AA meeting I ever attended five years before that in Santa Barbara, California. My wife was now pregnant with our second child and so we had him over for dinner. I tried to tell that man thank you for what had happened in those five years because I did sense that what had come through him, what I had been introduced to that night in Santa Barbara despite the fact that I felt arrogant and superior to everyone there, that I had found something far beyond meaning and something well beyond my grasp.
I began to look for a way to integrate myself into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and it was at this point that I became aware of something. For you newcomers, if somebody tells you there is a place waiting for you here, in my opinion that is a lie. I don't believe we have a place all made ready for you. I believe you have to come in here and make a place for yourself. I believe that you are going to have to do a few things that are hard for you and difficult to do, like you are going to have to ask us for help and you are going to have to admit that you aren't in full and absolute and total control of your life. And that no matter how much money you have in the bank and how many degrees you have and how well things are going and what an image and a fine figure you cut in your community, that we are not terribly impressed and you are going to have to deal with that.
So I began to work to try to find a way to make a place for myself in Alcoholics Anonymous in Denver. And I found it in a disappointingly simple way. Because by this time, of course having been five years sober, I told this fellow and his wife one night, on my birthday in fact, when we had this guy, the fellow who had spoken the thing five years earlier over to dinner, I told him, I said, you know, I have always kind of held in the back of my mind the fact that after I had been sober five years, I would probably be ready to step out into some new big thing in my life. And they smiled and they said, well, what did you have in mind, Dick? And I said, well, I have got it narrowed down between some sort of spiritual work and counseling. And this old gal in her whiskey voice said, do you know what five years of sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous has prepared you for? And I said, no, but I'll bet I'm going to hear. And she said, five years of staying sober in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous qualifies you for staying sober one more day.
There seems to be a misunderstanding that we are putting across to you newcomers, and I would like to get rid of that to take the pressure off of you. There seems to be an image now that we are presenting that when you have been sober six months, you have to make a decision about Alcoholics Anonymous, that that is a crossroads in your life. And many people are acting as though the decision lies between going out and getting drunk or becoming a counselor. I would like to tell you there is a third option. I would like to tell you that it works. It really does. We began to make friends. We began to feel a part of things. And at this point in our life, we had done the steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous as well as we possibly could to that point. For me had happened that magical time that I was promised by an old-timer would happen, and that was that if I would work the first nine steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous to the best of my ability, that one day I would wake up, one morning, even with the world again for the first time in my adult life. And that had happened for me. I was not the best step-worker and I was not the best student of the Big Book. I was still given to temper tantrums after five years of sobriety. At this point in my life, with all of these many blessings that I had been given, and with the awareness that I had of the potential of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was still, like many people in the program, I think, after many years of sobriety sometimes, like the guy who is standing in the middle of the cafeteria
[00:55:02]
starving to death, because I didn't know how to go up and order the food. I hit what I consider my real AA bottom at this point. And I have a very strong belief that when you take your last drink, you have not hit your bottom. That's your drinking stop. I believe that the emotional and mental illnesses, and particularly the spiritual illness that we bring into this program, continues well beyond that last drink. That the momentum of those illnesses is so strong that we don't stop it just by not drinking. And that at some point after sobriety, after not drinking, that we're going to have to start to deal with those issues as though we were at a hopeless and irretrievable point in our lives. And I reached that when I was five years sober. And I thank God every day for the awareness that I came, that I had one day, because my wife had done something so heinous and so awful as to paper the walls with paper which I had not approved. And that was the little tiny straw that set me off. And I went into a violent rage. She left. I found myself after five years of working in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and not having drunk, I found myself down on my bedroom floor, pounding on the floor, crying and cursing God. And I thank Him every day for that period. I thank God that I had to get down on my hands and knees and scream at Him in my frustration and my fear and my loneliness and my terrible, terrible sense of illness and that God-awful nine that I had. That there was so much around me and I couldn't make the connection. Now I had a good surface program going and I was one of the wittier and clever talkers at discussion meetings and all those kinds of things. And yet I had that deep, down, awful fear. I know that I am in the right home group because we have a continuing discussion in that group that we're able to talk about. We've been getting together and having dinner together for six years and studying the big book after dinner. Somebody asked me today, what do you suggest as a format for the meeting, for a new meeting? And I said, if you can find a better format for a meeting than the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, I want to hear about it. So I had reached that bottom. And I looked around and of course I immediately wanted to know, my first instinct was, did anybody see me? And then I got back down on my hands and knees and I prayed to God and I said words that I didn't even know were in the big book. I said, God, I am sick and tired of being the way I am. I don't care what you make out of me. I don't care what you do with me. If you want me to be poor and syphilitic, I'll be that in order to find peace in this life.
And all I had done is paraphrased the third step and the six step prayers. That then began my real journey in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's when the parade of people sped up. That's when the faces started appearing with much greater frequency and much greater meaning. And I began to make deep and meaningful relationships with people. I began to be able to have a healthy relationship with another woman. I began to put to rest all those awful fears that I had had all my life. This group of mine, we have a discussion that comes up from time to time, particularly in the course of reading and working on steps six and seven.
I don't know if you identify with this, but I sure did. I was so grateful to hear these guys talk about it. I said, I am home. I belong here. And this is when we have what we call now our fatal flaw theory discussion. The fatal flaw theory is that we can come into the program of AA and we can get sober and not drink and we can be relatively comfortable not drinking and really have the obsession to leave. And for you newcomers, it really does go. And we can have our lives start to be put back in order and we can believe in a God of our understanding and we can work the steps of the program of AA. But deep down, deep deep down, we can harbor a secret and terrible fear that we have some kind of a fatal flaw which will get us in the end. And that nothing we will ever do will ever cover up that fatal flaw coming out some days. Now the guys in my group will talk about how they fear that fatal flaw being manifested. And one guy, it's a fear of being a latent homosexual.
Another guy, it's a fear of being broken and having to live, you know, off welfare or something. For another guy, it's a fear of being dominated by a woman. All those kinds of fears and we're able to deal with that. And that to me, ladies and gentlemen, is a real Alcoholics Anonymous. When you can find a group of people with whom When you can find a group of people with whom through the practice and the working of those steps together, and I don't mean discussing the theological implications of Step 3, I mean taking and working Step 3 together.
[01:00:00]
When you're able to deal with issues like that, then I believe you've found a home and you've found a way to live that will never desert you, because that's what I've found. And I know now that I am sustained by the program of AA far beyond my comprehension, that I have been allowed to participate in a process which is eternal, which has always existed, which is not new some hip, slick, theological or philosophical technique that was invented in 1935.
These are eternal truths in my opinion that have been for some reason for 45 years specifically applied to the program of alcoholism and alanonism. And we offer you that and I offer you the opportunity tonight that no matter where you are in the program, whether you've been sober one day, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years or whatever it is, I believe that each and every day that we have the opportunity through working these steps to realize a greater way of life, to realize a greater reality than anything we could have ever imagined even yesterday.
I don't know what you were looking for in life when you came in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know what you thought you would find when you came here, but if it was something better than that, I would sure like to know what it is and I'll join your group. Because that's what I found. I believe that the program of Alcoholics Anonymous works because it's spiritual. I do not believe that it would work if it were not spiritual.
Therefore I disagree with the concept of it being a spiritual part of the AA program. That's a personal opinion. I would like to refer you to our source in which it says the reason we're writing this book is that you will find a spiritual life of your own if you feel that it's a separate part of the program. I believe that everything I will ever need is here. I believe that the answer to any question or any situation that I will ever have to face, realizing that I am an alcoholic, that I am unequipped every morning when I wake up of having certain and sure answers out of my own frame of reference, that despite that fact that I've been given a way to go, that despite the fact that I cannot predict it and I cannot control it, will still continue to work in my life in a healthy and constructive way.
I believe that this thing fits together perfectly because if you will stop and step back for a moment and look at what you're participating in, I think it helps once in a while. I think it helps for us to take a group inventory in terms of AA as a whole. I think we ought to talk about what our input, what if we were all, all the AAs in the world were to sit down and hold a group inventory, what would you say is right and what would you say is wrong with Alcoholics Anonymous?
Has it ever occurred to you that it's odd that with all of the treatment programs and that with all of the pills and the fact that the medical society has seemingly come up with the concept that what we're suffering from is a valium deficiency, that in spite of all those mechanical and external things, do you know that the only successful method of dealing with our disease is by the written and spoken word?
Do you know that's all we have is the written and spoken word? Would that not seem then to imply that there is a power at work through that written and spoken word? Because written and spoken words of themselves have no power. They are either vibrations in the air or ink on paper. And that's what's working here. We're here tonight, however many of us there are, through the power that works through the written and spoken word.
They gave me a program here through Twelve Steps that allow me to learn how to first of all understand who and what I am, to understand the relationship of that who and what I am to the Almighty God who created heaven and earth, and to give me a way of life where daily I can live with me and with Him. But you know it doesn't stop there. Do you know that they've also given us just as complete and just as thorough a way to get along with other people?
I don't know about you, but I have always had problems with people. Now mine was not the kind of problems where I was getting in fights and arguing with people all the time. My problem with people manifested itself by the fact that I just simply withdrew from everybody. And that's as bad a problem with people as you can possibly have. Did it ever occur to you that the infinite wisdom behind this thing also gave us an exact and perfect way to work and deal with other people and are called the Twelve Traditions?
I can tell you that my wife and I have had more sense of joy and hope in our marriage since that awareness came to us than at any other time. If we will understand that those traditions were not just meant to keep the Hot Springs
[01:05:01]
group from killing the Little Rock group, that they were to teach me, little Dick G. from out of nowhere, that they were designed to teach me how to get along with my wife and my children and the people at my job and the Cretan ahead of me on the freeway, the clerk in the store that used to intimidate the hell out of me, all those waitresses I used to worry about whether or not they liked me, that I have Twelve Traditions that perfectly teach me how to get along with each and every one of those people.
If I will simply take the time, instead of being eleven years sober in all its glory, if I will take the time to sit down and study the principles involved in those traditions, I can apply that to any situation I have with another human being. I'll give you a couple of examples. In my home there is now only one ultimate authority, and it's not me, which is a great sense of relief to much of them. I am the head of the family.
I have a spiritual responsibility to feed my family spiritually as well as physically. I have a responsibility and the opportunity to love them as though they were my own flesh. But there is only one ultimate authority in our family, and when we come to an impasse, all we have to do in my family is to ask the ultimate authority. And I have never had an unanswered prayer in the program of AA. Just as an aside, I would like to share something else with you.
I don't know about you, but throughout my years of sobriety I have had fears and worried about things. You know that I stopped and tried to remember all of those, and to the best of my recollection there is not one thing I have ever feared in eleven years' sobriety that has ever come true. I don't know what you're looking for, but we have that to offer you. Another one of the traditions says each group is independent.
Now you ask yourself, how is your wife independent from you? What that means to me is that I can disagree with that other group. That group can do things their way, and my group can do things differently. And that means that everybody has the right to be wrong, even my wife. It occurred to me one day that I was a child of alcoholic parents that would qualify me for membership in Revenge Anonymous. That was a cute rhetorical trick that was not fitting the occasion, and I apologize for that.
Al-Anon is too dear and too sweet to me, and I shouldn't do that. The program of Al-Anon came to me in the form of a lady who had married a man after he had been sober in the program of AA, and she had to go to two Al-Anon meetings and then report back to his sponsor. And the sponsor said, Well, what did you find there? And she said, I found the way of life that I've been looking for all my life. And he said, You can marry him.
It came to me in the form of one night I was at a conference and I had given possibly the worst AA talk I've ever heard. It was because I went there with nothing to give. I'd had an argument with my wife and I was full of self-pity and a lot of other things. So I sat next to her at dinner that night and I said, I really need help. I am reacting to situations the same way I reacted all my life. And she shared the program of Al-Anon with me.
And now I will have to admit that I am a closet ODET reader. Isn't that interesting that this program that is so complete and so thorough has given me that? And I really love Al-Anon for the way it addresses itself so beautifully to today's problems. It seems to me that the AAs that I have known generally tend to deal with the big picture. That's not true. And I know every case and it hasn't been completely true.
But I do think that Al-Anon has an especially beautiful way of dealing with little day-to-day things like how do you live with them without killing them? And I'm very grateful for that. So there it is again in its entirety, this thing that I've been given that's been bestowed upon me. The only requirement for AA membership is the desire to stop drinking. That means we belong here if we want to be. That's true in my marriage too.
My wife and I have had as many marital problems I think as any couple that come in bearing
[01:10:02]
the scars of active alcoholism. And yet somehow we have always deep down known that we wanted to be married and that it would probably be okay. This is a marriage that has had my running away from home for six months at age thirty-one. It has had screaming matches. It has had arguments. It has had cold withdrawal. It has had bitter recrimination over the past, bitter rehashing of things in the past.
It has had all those sick and terrible things that we brought in here. And yet because we wanted to, we have stayed married. And it occurs to me that I believe very deeply that as long as I want to do God's will, He will always provide me with the means to do it. And I believe that God's will for me is to stay married to my wife. The traditions about money speak very heavily to me because I was cursed with that upper middle class image of success as a young man.
And I have had to deal with that and it has not been easy. It seems as though my vocation has been the area where I have been least ready to apply the traditions and the principles of this program because of that secret little image that I had about what I was going to become when I became this dynamic, spiritual man about town that this program was building me into. And for some reason I have had lots of fears and lots of upsets and that kind of thing over my work.
The steps of the program of AA have given me great help in that area and it has been a very calming experience and I would like to share one of them with you. I have a job now in which I am paid way beyond what I am worth. I am dealing in a complex and intricate area of business which is really well beyond my intellectual capacity. It is an area which demands utmost faith by other people in me that I am handling large sums of money for them and that I am not unduly risking their funds as we go about doing what we do.
And I know that I am not intellectually capable of doing that all by myself. I know that I am existing in a state of grace. It's funny the fact that it took me a while to realize that if God could keep me sober through grace, he could probably keep me employed through grace too. So whenever I get suffering from untreated alcoholism, one of the ways is my big mouth gets negative and I start yapping around the office, named it awful and all that kind of stuff and bitching about the typing pool and all that sort of thing.
One day it occurred to me that I was sick of being like that and I owed amends to the firm that I work for. How do you make amends to a business firm? So I prayed about that on the way into work one day and I went in and it occurred to me that there had been a severe potential problem in one of the large clients that I handled which had worked itself out and the problem was gone, there was no chance of it happening, it was completely behind me and it occurred to me that if I was going to be thoroughly and really dishonest, I had to go tell my boss that I didn't tell him the truth, that he had not known about that potential problem and he as the head of the firm had every right to know.
So I went into him and I said, I have some amends to make to you and then you always have to explain what those words mean. And I told him what I had done. I said, I've been dishonest by withholding information to you and I want to apologize to you and I want to tell you that I'll try to make it up and I'll try the best of my ability to never withhold things that you as the head of this firm are entitled to know.
And I walked out the door and I was walking down the hall and another fellow in the firm came up to me and said, look, we need to go down and talk to a third guy. So we went down to his office and so the second guy left and the third guy and I were sitting there and the third guy looked at me and he said, would you do something for me? And I said, what's that? He said, would you start a Bible study here in this office?
I walked out of his office and it hit me. The instant that I became willing to make amends to that firm, God gave me the way to do it. What better could I do for a firm than try to share the God of my understanding? So you see, it works. It really does. It really and honestly works. Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all of our program and I had a hard time understanding how I put that into my daily life.
I finally began to realize that all my life I have had an immature need for recognition, but I always let everybody know what I was doing or not doing. For a while it was the cute drunken pranks, then it was the being terribly sober in AA and telling everybody, and then there was the period of spiritual giantism. But I've always had an immature need for recognition, and I began to realize that God had the perfect antidote to that, and that's simple, plain anonymity. And that means that if I am willing to do the things that I consider important in my relationship between God and
[01:15:02]
I, and never tell anybody, then I'm probably okay. This spiritual business is what I think we're about. I believe that the eleventh step of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is as infinite and as large as you wish to make of it. I will never run out of God, and that was a nice feeling I found out that day. No matter how much study and digging and working and praying and meditate that I do, I will never run out of an infinite God, that I will be allowed at His leisure and at His will to become aware of Him on an increasing basis according to His schedule and in His way, which is generally through you all.
Now it happens that my eleventh step involves the acquisition and the maintenance of a religious pursuit. Many of us have the opportunity that when we come in here we are able to find a spiritual way of life of our own, which does not include organized religion, and I think that's good. In my case it's very necessary, and I'd just like to point out that in the spirit of unity that either way is okay. And again I would refer you to the big book that says to be sure to see where spiritual people are ripe and make use of what they have.
So whichever way you choose to go, I believe it's okay, as if you're honestly doing it. That's all that counts. And I'm working at my spiritual life one day at a time. It is the most exciting and most rewarding and most fulfilling experience that I have had and I believe I will ever have in my life. I don't know where He's got me going. I know I'm okay today. And whatever He's got on down that path, all I have to do is pick up my little dusty feet and set them down on the path and find out what's around the next corner.
And around the next corner are some of the most glorious and beautiful experiences I think that we can ever possibly imagine. For those of you who are new and you come here and you ask how do I share with what you are trying to describe. Now many of you think that I'm up here and that I'm not telling you the whole truth because many of you are like I was and you're sitting back there or up front here if you got up front by mistake. And you're saying this is just more of that old PTA con. If you will set aside your spiritual prejudices long enough to find out whether or not I'm really telling the truth, I can guarantee that there's a way that you can find out conclusively for yourself. It's going to require you're doing some things which we don't think you are ready to do all by yourself so we'll help you. It means that you're going to have to work the program and you're also going to have to agree and admit it was very difficult for me that you don't know how to work the program. When I first came into this program I thought the steps were something with which you agree. I didn't realize they were something you do regularly each and every day of your life to the best of your ability. There are people here who can actually teach you how to work those steps.
If you go to discussion meetings where they discuss the importance of the steps, find a meeting where they talk about how to work the steps. The inventory I took eight years ago isn't doing me a bit of good today. It just got me here to today. It's the inventory that I'm doing this morning when I get up or when I go to bed at night. Last year's prayers aren't cutting it for me today. It's today's prayers and today's meditation that are keeping me sober and reasonably free from the disease of alcoholism. We would like to offer you that. You may not trust our motives. You may not understand all of our motivations and perhaps we're a little unclear on them ourselves at times. But we do know that this thing works and we would like to share it with you. I can stand up here and I can say that I can look out at you, as beautiful as you are this evening, and say that I love you. I don't mean that in just a nice sweeping statement. That means there is something in each and every one of you. It's that thing that made you want to get cleaned up. It's the thing that made that alcoholic woman want to get her hair fixed again and put on a clean dress and go somewhere looking nice. It's the thing in that alcoholic man that said, Oh God, I just want to be a good father to my children and I just want to pay my bills. It's that thing that keeps each and every one of us going, that I love in you. And it is there.
No matter how sick and no matter how disturbed and no matter how upset you are, it's there and I love you for it. Because I depend upon it for the strength in my daily life. And you who are new, it is that which you bring that you don't even know you have to a great extent that we wish to share with you and we will allow you to walk the road with us and help you build upon that. And someday there will come a time when you'll be able to stand up here as I have and be able to look up and say that I can see Almighty God.
There is a poem that ends, it's called High Flight, and it ends, it says, I have reached
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up and I have touched the face of God. And I have done that this evening and I am very grateful for you to it. Thank you.