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Source: DICOBE-00647 – Helen G – EPPLEY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION – 1980-11-02.mp3 File: dicobe-00647-helen-g-eppley-alumni-association-1980-11-02.mp3 Duration: 01:12:30
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Fact to Follow. I'm Helen Griffith and I'm an alcoholic. And it is indeed a privilege and a pleasure to be here tonight. Some friends of mine are here in town with me. The friends being my counselor and his wife from Valley Hope in Norton, Kansas. And Bill was standing there with me and I said, Bill, did you ever think on January 29th, 1974, on a Tuesday afternoon at 7.30 in the afternoon that you would be standing here in the President's Suite with me getting ready to take me to give a talk sober? That's exactly what's happened.
One of the things that I would like to share with you tonight is what the Big Book says. The Big Book says what it was like, what happened, and how it is now. I'd like to spend just a little time telling you what it was like, a little more time telling you what happened, and a whole lot of time telling you what it's like now. Because that is really what's important to me today, what it's like right now. One of the important things for you to know about me is that I grew up in a very happy family. I was an only girl with four brothers. I had a very doting father, very Irish, very Catholic. That also is important for you to know about me in terms of some of the things that I was taught in terms of values and conscience and things that are important in growing up into being an adult. When I was three days, being eighteen years old, I entered the community, the religious community of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in St. Paul, Minnesota. I had lots and lots of opportunities to be educated in spiritual matters. I was educated in education also. I was a school teacher back in the good old days of my youth. And one of the things about me that also is important for you to know is that as a Sister of St. Joseph, I took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And as I go along, you're going to find out why that's important for you to know. One of the obedient kinds of things that happened in my young life was that I was asked to go places and I went. I never questioned, I went. One of the things about my religious life in those days was that I was a happy-go-lucky, come-a-day-go-a-day kind of a community clown. And if there was a problem, please send good old Helen. I did that a lot. If there was a school that was having a problem and things were hard, if the pastor was hard to get along with, you need somebody to keep people laughing. I did a lot of that, going from here to there to everywhere, being the community clown, keeping everybody laughing. At one point in my life, I was in a rural community, very happily teaching fifth and sixth grade, and the principal of that school had a nervous breakdown on Valentine's Day. I'll never forget it. And again, because good old Helen can rally to all situations, I was told to take over her position as principal. I was told to take over her teaching responsibilities, which were sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, religion, music, and mathematics. I had never
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taught a day above sixth grade in my life. And so I did, being a good, obedient soul, took over her duties. I was principal of the school. I taught every minute of the day. And the other thing that I did was I became the superior of the convent, and that also was very important for you to know, that I was the superior of the convent. In those days, the new math had just come in, and I would spend hours every night trying to keep two pages ahead of the kids. I'd be working out my problems, and somebody knows what I'm talking about. And by the time I'd finish, you know, one, two, three, three o'clock was not unusual for me to be finishing up. And my mind was going a mile a minute, and I couldn't sleep. And 530 in the morning was going to come very quickly. And here's where my being the superior becomes important. In those days, drinking was not an acceptable thing, except for medicinal purposes. And the superior of the convent kept the medicine in her closet. And so when I would finish my math problems and crawling to my bed and realize that, by golly, I was not going to go to sleep, I would climb out of my bed and open the closet and have some bourbon. That was the beginning of my drinking. And I drank on those nights because I needed something to change what was going on in me. I never drank for pleasure. I realize that now. That went on for four years, my needing to drink, to take care of the pressures, the tensions, the stresses that were going on in my life. It graduated, I also realize now, from the evening, the middle of the night, to earlier times. And as the changes in the church came, and it was okay to have alcohol, the other sisters in the community drank. And we had wine and we had other liquor to a degree for our meals and so on. One of the questions that I'm frequently asked is, where did you get the alcohol?
How did a nun get a hold of alcohol enough to become an alcoholic? And you know, when the changes came in the church, I remember the first Christmas in this little town that I was teaching in. The people were so happy to be able to give the sisters something besides white handkerchiefs, men's white handkerchiefs and black socks. We had more bottles under our Christmas tree. Marvelous. And that all went to my closet, remember. Another thing that's important about this time in my life was that I had a friend. He was a priest. I knew his family very, very well. We'd been friends for years. And during that time, he was a lifesaver. He would drive to this little town and he'd give me moral support and he'd say mass and it was very, very nice. Okay, when I finally came to a point where I said, this I cannot do any longer, this priest friend said, I know a place. He'd been listening to me for a lot of years saying, there ought to be a place where people could come and just be helped. And the parish he was doing part-time work in on weekends was looking for a sister to do parish ministry. No one in my community had ever done that. I was given permission to do that kind of work. So I went to this brand new parish in one of the suburbs of Minneapolis to become this parish worker. Go around and do and be for folks. Found it very exciting to me. That very same summer, I had a back injury and ended up having to have back surgery. It was also the time in my religious community when people were leaving. The changes in the
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church, Pope John opened the doors to let the Aryan in. People were thinking the stigma of leaving isn't quite so strong. A lot of people left. Most of my good friends, my very best friends left during that time. It was a very lonely time for me. There were also priests leaving, the priesthood at that time, and most of my friends' friends were leaving. The summer that I had my back surgery, I was very sick. I couldn't have visitors, but of course good old Father could come. He always let the priests in. The priests get top door. He would be there. At the end of my hospital stay, I flew off to San Diego to recuperate in my brother's backyard. When I came home, he met me at the airport. I walked into his arms and I stayed there for five years. Now, for just ordinary folks, for that to happen, that's one thing.
For someone who has vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, that's another whole matter. We both had those commitments. In the beginning, when we realized what had happened, that our relationship had changed, we talked very openly about leaving, going off, getting married. We decided that was not what we wanted to do. We'd made our individual commitments, and we were both supportive of each other in those commitments, and we chose to stay with those commitments. We were, however, either very naive or very ignorant, or both, thinking at that time that we could continue to have this lovely platonic relationship. It was a very, very difficult time for me. As that relationship grew, my drinking increased. I was feeling so guilty, and so ashamed, and so frightened. What would people think? My God, if people found out he was a very important man in our archdiocese. I sent lots of my friends to him for spiritual direction and counsel. He was very involved. What would people think? The biggest feeling that I remember from that time was fear.
That went on for two years. The sister that I was living with at that time, my biggest enabler, she to this day doesn't believe I'm alcoholic, and she thinks I'm a damn fool that I broke that relationship. We had this really, very, very nice house, and she would leave. It was very handy and comfortable. I drank, and I drank, and I drank, over all the feelings that centered around that relationship. After two years and into the third year, I finally said, this cannot go on. I can't stand this one more day. Get out of my life.
For that time, it became more insidious because we would go for a couple weeks, and then one of us would weaken and call. For the next three years, it was a nightmare in terms of we were sneaking around even from ourselves. I was drinking more and more heavily. I remember one day after being on the phone with him, and I have no recollection of what the conversation was about, but I was angry. I can remember walking from the little bedroom that I had down the hallway to the kitchen where I knew the bourbon was, calling myself every rotten name I could think of. I kept right on going to the kitchen, and I reached up in the cupboard, and I took the bottle down, and I drank it.
I don't know. Similar kinds of things happened a lot during that time. The last year of that involvement,
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I changed jobs. You know, the good old geographical change. I thought, get out of here and get away from him and I'll be fine. And I went to work in a different parish. I lived in a different house in a different city. I moved across the river from Minneapolis to St. Paul. I was living at that time with ten sisters in my community. We were living in a convent, a regular convent type building that was built for thirty sisters. And it was built in a square. And in the middle of the square was a courtyard. In the wintertime, that courtyard filled up with snow because, of course, you know, didn't have anything to keep it out.
The snow in that courtyard that January was up to my waist. On the 26th of January of that year, 1974, I took my last drink of alcohol. I drank that day. The reason, the excuse for drinking that day was because the sisters in my group, my class, my reception, whatever you want to call it, was going to have a little get together. We were going to have a mass and supper. In the morning of the mass, I found out that he, my friend, was going to be the person saying the mass. And I just went nuts. And I started drinking that very afternoon. I know I drank at least two six packs of beer. I will never forget that day, except the last part of it I will probably never remember. I don't remember what happened. I woke up on Sunday morning, and my winter boots that had been out in a hallway that was clear around from my bedroom this way, with the whole courtyard full of snow to my waist, so I know I didn't go through the courtyard to get them, the boots were sitting in my bedroom. I had no recollection of how they got there. I still don't know how those boots got there. And I can remember sitting on my bed, not being able to remember past the six packs of beer that I had been drinking, what I had drank or what had happened.
But I knew something terrible had happened. And I knew that my life was just in very, very small pieces on the floor in front of me. On Monday morning, I took myself to Sister Mary Kessler, who at that time was the personnel director for my community. Mary was a friend of mine. I went to her office, and I told her about the drinking, and I told her about my friend, and I told her I couldn't go one more day living the way I was living. And Mary just happened to have, sitting right here on her desk, a brochure that she handed to me. And she said, Helen, why don't you go and get some real good help? And I looked at the brochure, and it said, Valley Hope Alcoholism Treatment Center, Norton, Kansas.
Now, the end of the world. Alcoholism treatment. I asked her what that would entail, what would be involved. And she said, a phone call. And I sat there for I don't know how long. It could have been a minute, it could have been five, it could have been ten. And Mary sat
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there with me. And I really believe that the greatest grace the God of my understanding has ever given me was the grace to say to her, finally, okay, make the phone call. That was 9 o'clock on Monday morning, 28th of January, 1974. At 7 o'clock the next day, Mary and I were on an airplane coming to Omaha, Nebraska, Epley Airport, where we rented a car. This was our first endeavor at alcoholism treatment for our sisters. And the journey had not been made yet. It was a virgin voyage, so to speak. And we didn't know there were other ways of getting to Norton, Kansas. You know, my God, where is Norton, Kansas? And so we rented a car. We found other ways since. There are, at my last count, there were 18 or 19 sisters in my community who have gone to treatment since I went to treatment. We drove from this very city to Norton, Kansas. And I can remember driving along, and you are all very familiar with the countryside between here and Norton, Kansas, I would suspect, or at least the countryside in your vicinity. It gets worse the closer you get to Norton, Kansas. And I can remember driving along, looking at that countryside, and thinking, my God, it is desolate and barren and God forsaken. And it matched exactly how I felt inside. I was desolate and forsaken and barren and helpless and hopeless. We got to Norton, Kansas, and we turned to drive in the main drag. And this I will never forget. We were driving down the street in the direction that we were told to go to get to Valley Hope. And I looked ahead of me, and there was just coming, you know, kind of like Jack's Beanstalk, right out of the ground up into the sky, this great, big, humongous sign that said, alcoholism treatment. It was bad inside of me. 3.30 in the afternoon, Mary was turning right around and going back the way she came. My first experience at Valley Hope, I know, made the difference in my whole attitude toward being there. I was sent directly to the business office where this very lovely lady who told me that she originated from Fargo, North Dakota, Moorhead, Minnesota, and she was very, very glad to meet a fellow Minnesotan. Made all the difference. She was kind to me. She didn't talk down to me. She told me that it was time for me to do some things for myself. That lady from that very day on has become a very, very special person in my life. She cares enough about me to be here tonight. She drove all the way from Norton to be here tonight.
She is one of the gifts that this program has given to me. She told me also that her husband was also employed at the treatment center, and I would be meeting him. God knows I would be meeting him, or he knew I would be meeting him. Later on that afternoon, long about quitting time, we were standing in the place where you stand before you go to supper, and I really was just half unconscious. Elaine came along, and she had this great big man in a red jacket and blue eyes looking right at me, and introduced me to him as her husband
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Bill, also from the land of my birth. He looked at me, and he said, Well, Helen, welcome to the land of the drunks. That was the crowning blow, as far as I was concerned. The next day I found out that he was going to be my counselor, and that was the second thing that really solidified my attitude toward Valley Hope and recovery, in terms of the disease of alcoholism. Bill saved my life, is the simplest way that I can say that. The first thing he did, and probably the most meaningful thing that I remember about treatment in our first time together, was he let me cry. He said, Helen, what brought you here? And after all those years of not being able to talk about this, of pretending everything was alright, it was such a relief to be able to talk about it, to share it with someone. And I cried, and I cried, and I cried, and that I remember as one of the things that I was most grateful for in my treatment. I shed many other tears in that office and in that treatment center during the four weeks I was there, but that was the beginning of some very important healing for me. There were some very important things that I did while I was in treatment at Valley Hope. I admitted I was alcoholic. I didn't accept it, really, and I didn't even realize that at the time, but I did admit that I was alcoholic. Another thing that I did was I made a decision that this relationship had to end. And remember, what's important about this decision in treatment was that I had made that decision a hundred times, two hundred, five hundred, I don't know, God knows how many times I'd made that decision before, and I never was able to do it. I was never able to let go of that man. The third weekend I was there, I wrote a letter to him, and I told him that this had to be the end. There could be no more sneaking around, no more meetings, no more telephone calls, nothing.
On Monday, I took the letter to share with Bill. He read the letter, he sealed the letter, thought saying a word, he put it down on the table, the address face down on the table between us. The beginning of our time together. The rest of that hour, his name never came up, and you can believe we'd spent a lot of time on him. When we were finished, it was time for him to go home, and he walked with me over to the mailbox. I put the letter in the mailbox, five o'clock in the afternoon, and since that day, I have never had one moment of regret or doubt about that decision. I have been as free of that relationship as I could ever hope to be. That was the second greatest grace God gave me. I tried, I did everything, and I couldn't. Something else that I did during treatment was I made a decision, following the decision to sever that relationship, I made a decision to go home and get re-involved in my community, because I had really moved away from my community.
You can't be involved in alcohol and things that I was involved in and stay involved the
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way I would be expected to be involved in my religious community. I went home from treatment and one of the things that I was asked to do after a few months by my community was to think about getting myself trained to do some work in terms of clergy, spiritual care, pastoral care with alcoholic treatment centers. My community had at that time two treatment centers, St. Mary's in Minneapolis and St. Joseph's in St. Paul and we didn't have any sisters trained to work in those treatment centers. One of the really exciting things about my religious community is that we really have made efforts to keep abreast of the ministries that were important and relevant to what's going on today and it was very obvious that alcoholism was something we were going to need to deal with in our world and so maybe it would be good to get some people trained. I thought about that and I prayed about it and I cried about it and I fought about it with Bill. I think I made two trips to Valley Hope over that. I liked what I was doing. I liked doing the parish ministry kind of thing. I finally decided, yes, I would do that. I did a year's training out at Hazelden Treatment Center in Center City. I did a year of plain clinical pastoral education and I got myself trained to do this work. At present time, I am working at St. Mary's Alcoholic Treatment Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota as a pastoral care, spiritual care counselor. That was almost seven years ago that I came home from treatment. It's almost six years ago, five years ago that I got my training. Those days just didn't come and go like the wind. Those days, I have had to live a day at a time. Those days are not what happened, how it was. Those days are what it's like now and that's really what I'd like to share with you. I mentioned a little earlier that I admitted being an alcoholic when I was in treatment. Accepting and surrendering to that reality was something that took a little longer, something that was much harder for me to do. I didn't want to be alcoholic.
I hated the thought of being alcoholic. My God, what are people going to think? We got a drunk nun on our hands. I didn't like that real good. I had to really do some struggling with that to come to some acceptance and some surrender. What I've come to realize a day at a time in my living a sober life is that the word surrender is a very important word in my sobriety a day at a time. I have to surrender to a lot of things. I have to surrender a day at a time to being alcoholic. I have to remind myself of that every day. I have to get out of my bed in the morning and get on my knees and acknowledge that fact that indeed I am an alcoholic and please God, do not let me take a drink today. And it's important
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for me to get on my knees and do that. It's important for me to be humble in asking for that very, very special gift for that day. And it's also important for me to get on my knees at night and say thank you that this day has been lived in sobriety. Something else that I had to surrender to that I continually have to surrender to is the fact that I need other people. You know, one of the big things that happened to me when I was drinking was that I became very isolated. I was very isolated from my very own family, my flesh and blood family. They lived a long ways away, so they weren't really involved in my drinking, but I didn't go home like I should have gone home to see my mother and my brothers. I didn't write like I had been accustomed to writing. There were many things that I did that isolated me from my family. I was isolated from my religious community. There were times when I was drinking that I would call up and break appointments. You know, I'd be going out to dinner with one of my friends, and either I had an opportunity to go with my friend, or for some reason something had happened and I was mad or upset or whatever, and I had already started drinking.
And I would call up and say, I can't go. I have to work. Work was just a dynamite excuse for me. I got a lot of mileage out of having to work. So I became very, very isolated. I was isolated from my friends who weren't in the community. I needed to come to realize to really surrender to the fact that I can't do this by myself. I need other folks. You know, it fits in really in my living this program with step two. You know, I came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And I can remember looking at that step in treatment and thinking, well, I don't have any trouble with that little phrase, power greater. You know, that's God for me, sure enough. And then I sat around for a long time. I wasted a lot of time waiting for the big old tap on the shoulder. Helen, this is what I want you to do. And that tap on the shoulder never came. And I finally realized that for me, a whole lot of the help that the God of my understanding was going to give me a day at a time was going to come through the people that he allowed to be in my life a day at a time. That involved and does involve ongoing, this is for me, some humility. You know, it's sometimes very difficult for a grandiose, defiant, arrogant person to say, you know, I'm hurting and I need you. It involves a lot of trust. Very, very difficult. It's a real scary thing. Takes a lot of guts, you know, to stick your hand out and say, I need you. So for me to come to some surrendering to the fact that I do need other people, that I am not an island, that I cannot maintain good, deep, comfortable sobriety all by myself was a very, very big chunk of surrendering for me. Something else that I had to surrender to, and it goes right along this line of other people, was AA. Oh, boy. You know, I don't know how you folks felt when you were first told that it was going to be necessary for you to involve yourself in AA for the rest of your life. I very definitely remember what it was like, how I felt when I was told that I was going to have to go to AA for the rest of my life. I didn't like it. I didn't like it one little tiny bit.
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You know, as I said earlier, that whole thing of, you know, what are people going to think? We got this drunk nun. This is immoral, immodest, and impure. Very bad. So I had to do some real struggling with that. And in the beginning, I really did what I just finished talking about. I trusted the good folks that were saying to me, Helen, get your body to AA. And I went. Not because I wanted to go, but because those folks said I needed to go. And somewhere down the weeks and the months there, what I realized one night as I drove home from the meeting was that I felt better in here, in my heart, than I felt when I went to the meeting. That was some years ago. And I still go to AA. And I still go to AA very regularly. And I still go to AA because I need to go. I need to go to AA just as desperately as a diabetic needs to take insulin or a heart patient needs to take whatever heart medication is prescribed for him or her. But my big motivating feeling now most times is I go because I want to go. I like what happens to me there. I like what I see happening to other folks there.
I like the fellowship that I experience there. And my AA involvement has had a whole lot to do with that attitude, that positive attitude that I gradually came to. My first experience with AA was in Midway, great big group of folks. The first night I went to AA, I walked into this clubhouse. The room was very, very large. Every person in that room but me was smoking a cigarette. And the smoke was thicker than the worst alert day in Los Angeles. And I just thought, my God, this is the pits. I do not get to that place very often anymore.
And it isn't because the cigarette smoke is so thick that I can't see. I live in cigarette smoke all day long working in a treatment center as you probably know. But after a short time of being at the Midway club, one of the fellows that had some very good length of sobriety came to me one night after the meeting and he said, Helen, we've been talked to, Pete and a couple of us, about setting up a new club over on West 7th Street. That's over kind of in the area where you live. We need some women. Would you like to come with us? So I went. Four guys and myself. And we rented this beauty shop that had flunked out as a beauty shop and was situated right next to Schwartz's bar. So every night that I go to AA, I have the opportunity of choosing. I can stop off at Schwartz's bar or I can walk right on by and go on into my club. God has been very, very good to me. I have chosen each time to walk on by Schwartz's bar and go into the West End club. We did all kinds of renovating. We painted, we paneled, we scrubbed and cleaned. That was such a good beginning of some good feelings of belonging. The good feelings that I got from listening at the meetings had already started, but the feelings of belonging began. Going and getting in on the dirty work. The real nitty gritty getting down and cleaning this place up so we have a place to come and experience the fellowship of AA.
And experience the fellowship of AA. Sometimes we have people coming in off the street, but the core of the people are always there.
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I have always believed that was important for me. I had the opportunity this past year of finding out just how important, as I had the opportunity very definitely of finding out that even under the most adverse circumstances this program works. Last September I came down with a virus that went into pericarditis, which is fluid around the lining of the heart. People die from that, they tell me. The doctor wouldn't even let me go home and get my pajamas.
The next morning one of the sisters in my community who was quite elderly came into my room and she said, Did you know Sister So-and-So? And I said, No, I didn't know her. She said, Well, you know, she died of this very same thing you've got. That was my first clue that this was a serious thing that was going on inside my poor old body. Okay, it went from bad to worse. I had pericarditis. They gave me real potent medication, and I came out of that, and before I even got out of that I got a terrible kidney involvement and got more medications for that.
Just trying to get that cleared up and the virus went into bronchial pneumonia, and I got more wonderful medication for that. Well, to make a long story short, what happened over that period of time was all unbeknownst to the doctors that were treating this, there were special kinds of problems, so I had a specialist for every area. Last March, when I finally couldn't get my body out of bed to go to work one morning, I called the doctor and I said, Something's real bad wrong.
I couldn't breathe, and my head was pounding like I was having a stroke, and I couldn't walk, my legs wouldn't carry me. Well, come to find out, after a lot of testing for leukemia and cancer and all those bad things, they realized that the medication had eaten up all my red blood cells and sucked all the iron out of my bone marrow. Now again, God has been very good to me. However, that was in April that all that came about, and I lived from the end of September until that time, becoming more and more sickly, and I also lived during all that time, some of the time, for this little chunk of five minutes.
It was the first sustained crisis in my sobriety, and there was a lot of time during that chunk of time that I didn't get to AA because I wasn't able to go. But I did have the steps to work a day at a time. I had the readings when I could even concentrate on the readings, and I had that core group of AA folks that called and wrote and came and cared and prayed, and whether I was at the meetings or not, I knew that they cared, and that made a very, very great difference in how I lived those months a day at a time.
I know, standing here before you right this minute, that if it weren't for this program and those folks, I'd be drunk after the year I've just had in terms of physical kinds of things, and I am very, very grateful, and I know that the program works a day at a time. It was a long, hard struggle for me to accept and to surrender to the fact that I needed this program, and that is another very, very special grace that the God of my understanding has given me.
I am very grateful for this program. I am very grateful for you folks right here in this room, and for all the people that share the fellowship that we share. We are very, very gifted to be among this fellowship. Something else that I had to surrender to from the beginning,
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and in my life it was even harder than the other pieces of surrendering that I've already talked about. I had to surrender to my human condition. I had to come to some self-forgiveness. You know, I felt so guilty and so ashamed. You know, I was living contrary to every value I ever had. I couldn't stand myself, and I wasn't going anywhere because I couldn't do anything but feel how terrible I was. I was the worst person walking around on two feet.
And in my treatment time, Bill and the person that was my chaplain in treatment decided, this kind of goes to the individual care that I was given, that I really wasn't going to do anything with anything until I did something with all this guilt. And they moved my fifth step, my fourth and my fifth step, up a whole week I would have an opportunity to maybe move out of all of that. And it was a very, very helpful thing for me to do.
And what I realized through going through that process was that indeed I had done some pretty rotten things. According to my value system, according to my conscience, I had done some pretty horrendously terrible things. But there wasn't one blessed thing I could do to change any of it. You know, I could have given both arms and both legs, and I couldn't have taken back one word or changed one chunk of behavior.
So I had two options. I could continue to feel terrible and probably continue to drink, or I could forgive myself. Arthur Miller in one of his books has a story about a lady who from her very, very earliest days of being born into this world hated herself. She just thought she was absolutely the ugliest person walking around on two feet. And as she grew, those feelings of self-loathing grew in proportion.
And in adulthood she had a child, and the child was born physically and mentally deformed. And her first response to that chunk of information was, Well, what do you expect? I'm such a terrible person. How could I ever have anything but this ugly little child? And every time she looked at that little kid, she hated herself more because it reminded her of how terrible she was. And she did all the minimal kinds of things that a mother would do for a child.
She diapered and she fed, and then she ran. She got out of that room so fast because she couldn't tolerate the terrible feelings until finally she couldn't tolerate the running any longer either. And she decided she had to do something about it. And what she came up with was that maybe if she could do something showing some kind of care for this little kid, she'd feel better. So she went into the room where the little child was, and the closer she got, the uglier the child became.
You know, the bitter look she had at it, you know, the bigger the eyes got and the more grotesque the head became. And she wanted to run just like she'd been running every day, but she forced herself to keep going. And she got over to where the little child was and she reached out and she touched it. She leaned over and she kissed it. And the first thing she knew, she was picking it up, hugging it, owning it.
Ugly, grotesque, pitiable as this little child was, it was part of her. And she finally stopped running from that fact. You know, I really believe from the very pit of my being that that's what I had to do, it's what each one of us has to do with the pain and the shame and the guilt and the devastation that we bring from our alcoholic histories. You know, I had to stop running. I ran for years. I drank to hide all that pain because I wasn't willing and I wasn't able to give it up.
And I had to admit, I had to own the responsibility for all that. It was this and this and this and this. And I am responsible. I did that and I own that responsibility. You know, the hardest thing I did in my recovery
[00:55:00]
was to reconcile inside of myself that me, Helen, good, kind, loving, caring, gentle person that I thought I was, was capable of anything when I'm drunk. The hardest thing I ever reconciled inside of myself was that drunk I was capable of anything. And to admit that, to own that, and to forgive that was the hardest thing I ever did in my recovery. What was also very important in that was because, you know, I knew in my head a long time before I ever was able to forgive myself that God forgave me.
I knew that the people that loved me forgave me. But I didn't really feel it inside where it was important to feel it until I was able to forgive myself. And I wasn't able either to really be forgiving of other folks. I was too self-centered and too turned in on myself to be able to think about forgiving other people. So self-forgiveness for me was a very, very important piece of surrendering. And the other thing about that that was important for me was to realize there was a great big difference between forgiving and forgetting.
There are things that I did during my drinking that I'm never going to forget. Standing up here talking to you tonight, there's a parade just marching right across my head. I'm not going to forget some of that. And God help me, I better not forget some of it. But because I've been able to forgive myself, when I remember those things now, I can feel sadness that it happened, because indeed it is very, very sad that some of that happened.
I hurt a lot of people. I hurt mostly myself. So I can remember and I can feel the sadness, but I don't have to haul out the old kerosene jug anymore and pour kerosene on the smoldering coals and fan the flames. I don't have to punish myself any longer because I've been able to forgive myself. So that has been a very, very important part of my surrendering, my recovery. It is also an important thing for me to surrender to now, a day at a time.
I don't do everything perfectly. I make mistakes. And to be able to forgive myself, you know, when I shoot off my mouth at 8 o'clock in the morning, I don't have to shoot the whole day being upset with myself anymore. You know, I can say, okay, I'm sorry that happened and get on with maybe making the rest of the day different. So that has been important for me, the self-forgiveness part. Lastly, very definitely, not leastly, I had to do some real surrendering to the God of my understanding.
It also was a very long, hard involvement. You know, in my community, I had a lot of time being taught scripture and theology and all that kind of thing. I spent a lot of time in chapel. The bell rang at 5.30 in the morning. I was in chapel at 5.00. The bell rang again at 5.00 in the afternoon. I was in chapel. I did all the prescribed kinds of things that I should be doing, and I always knew there was something missing.
I never knew what it was for sure, but I knew there was something missing. I did the best I knew how to do, but I always knew there was something not quite right. I found out what that was since I've gotten into this program of Alcoholics Anonymous. In my worst drinking days, I used to think that I'd stop believing in God. You know, the joke of that was that I cussed him out many a day because he wasn't doing what I wanted him to do.
So obviously God was out there somewhere. Obviously God was out there somewhere, but I really did think for a while that I had stopped believing in God.
[01:00:00]
And you know, I said earlier tonight that when I went to treatment, I hadn't done any surrendering to being alcoholic, and I was way too ashamed for that. But I did know I was in real bad trouble with alcohol, I knew my life was in very small pieces on the floor in front of me, and if there was any hope, and I really didn't think there was, but if perchance there was any hope, then there had to be some kind of reconciliation between me and the God of my understanding.
And I can remember many times going into the little chapel that we had at Valley Hope, and you know, the chapel at Valley Hope was like our chapel at St. Mary's and churches and chapels all over, I suspect. It was empty a lot of the time. And I can remember going into that little chapel and saying, you know, just out of pure unadulterated desperation, right out loud like a babbling idiot, you know, who is my God?
What kind of a God can I turn to right this minute with all this rotten, ugly, ugly stuff inside of me and be accepted, not be rejected? What kind of a God will take me the way I am? Because I didn't think it could be any different. So whoever that God was had to be a God that would take me the way I was, with all this rottenness inside. And every time I asked that question, the answer I got was the God of love.
Now, who is my God? My God is the God of love. That was a very elusive thing to hang on to. It was too easy. I didn't deserve that, and I was just getting off the hook too easily. But every time I asked the question, that was the answer. And you know, finally I did hang on to it for just a little chunk of time. And what I realized was that, okay, if the God of my understanding is the God of love, then that God is also the God of mercy and the God of forgiveness.
And things started to get better for me. And just very, very simply, you know, what all of that has come to mean to me on a day at a time, life and living basis, is that I really do believe, you know, I really do trust, because that's what I'd really stopped doing. I had stopped trusting God. Trusting that he loved me, that he cared for me, no matter where I went, no matter how long I was gone, and no matter what I did, that he loved me.
And so, you know, I really do trust today that the God of my understanding does love me and does care for me and really does just hold me right smack in the hollow of his hand. And he's going to give me today, you know, not tomorrow. I always wanted tomorrow taken care of. No, it's not going to be tomorrow, it's going to be today. Not yesterday either. I don't have yesterday anymore. But that he is going to give me today the grace, the strength, the courage, the people that I need to deal with the realities of today without drinking.
That does not mean that everything I have to do today I'm going to like. That was always very important. It does not mean that everything that comes across my path today is going to be easy. That also was something that was very important for me. It also does not mean that everything I do today I'm going to do perfectly. And that, too, was something that was very important for me. What it does mean is that I trust that I am going to receive from my God whoever or whatever it is I need to deal with today without drinking.
And if I'm not drinking, then no matter how much I screw up, it is never going to be anything like it was when I was drinking. It'll be okay. That is probably today the greatest gift I have. That's the trust that I live on a day at a time, surrendering to that, that the God of my understanding really does love me and care for me and is going to give me today whoever or whatever it is I need. It is a great, great treasure that I have.
You know, I can remember, looking back over my drinking, how really fractured and broken
[01:05:01]
I was in every area of my life, but especially spiritually. My relationships were gone. I hated myself. I had nothing going with God. I mean, how could I look at God? And I can remember times driving around doing the things that I did as a parish worker, visiting hospitals especially. I did a lot of time in the car. I can remember thinking, you know, I'm going to get in a car accident and get killed, or I'm going to get cancer or leukemia or some other deadly disease and die, because there is no way I can go on living the way things are.
And I didn't have one ounce of hope that they could ever be any different. And through this whole surrendering thing that I've been talking to you about, this whole process of surrendering that the program has given to me, I didn't have to die and I got a whole new life. And for that, I am deeply, deeply grateful. And in closing up tonight, I want to share something with you that has very, very great meaning to me and my sobriety.
It's something that happened to me and for me the day that I went back to work after I came home from treatment. I was driving down Snelling Avenue over in St. Paul, and I had my car radio on, and Judy Collins came blasting over the air singing a song that I had heard many, many times, but I never, ever really heard it before. And as I listened to the words of that song, I thought, my God, this is the story of my life.
This is exactly what's happened to me and for me. You know, I almost had a car accident. I almost hit the car in front of me. I had to pull over to the curb, and the big old tears were rolling down my face. And the feeling that I was aware of that morning was deep, deep gratitude. Every time I hear the song, it's the very same thing. It is still exactly what happened to me and for me. And the feeling is still always deep, deep gratitude.
And I want to share that with you in closing up tonight. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind, but now I see. T'was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved. How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed. Through many dangers, toils and snares, we have already found. T'was grace that brought us safe thus far, and grace will lead us home.
[01:10:03]
When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we know there's place to sing God's praise, than when we'd first begun. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind, but now I see. Thank you very much for having me, and God bless all of you. Applause