Audio
Transcript
Source: Sackville M – Houston, TX. – 1957 – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: sackville-m-houston-tx-1957-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:43:36
============================================================
Can you hear in the back of that speaker? I do well. Can you hear in the back? Will you ask them to shout out if they can't hear me? Just raise up your hand in the back any time during the talk if you can't hear. Can you hear all right, Bobby? Okay. Good morning, everybody. I apologize, first of all, because I haven't got the shape of Lillian Roth. I understand she was a very great attraction here.
It's a very great pleasure to me, indeed, to be in Houston and to learn how to pronounce the name of your town. I always thought it was Houston, and I hope that before I go away I'll be given a little time to have a look at it, because up to now I haven't seen anything at all except some back ways. It's also a very great privilege, of course, to be asked to speak at anybody else's group. At home they don't allow me to speak very often, and I'm afraid while I've been over in America I've been rather overdoing it the other way.
I wasn't expecting to see so many people here on a Sunday morning. It made me think of the Duke of Wellington. He was one of a long line of Irish generals who had been winning the battles for England right through history. He was fighting the French out in Spain about a hundred years ago. They sent him out a regiment of very raw recruits. He took one look at them, and then he said, Well, gentlemen, I don't know what effect you're going to have upon the enemy, but by God you frightened me.
That's what I'm feeling like just at the moment. However, I'm just talking like this to give you a sporting chance to get used to my accent. It's a little different from yours, and believe me, I have my own problems with your accent. If there's anybody of very Irish blood over here who objects to my having a rather English accent, I'd better explain that I spent most of my active life away from Ireland.
Most good Irishmen do, as you know. Now, I expect that most of you who joined Alcoholics Anonymous here joined a group that was in full working order. And even the oldest members probably joined AA when it was fairly well known in your country. And I thought you might like to hear how AA starts in a land where nobody's ever heard anything at all about it before. And anyway, you're going to hear about it whether you want to or not.
I come from Ireland, as you know. AA started over here in 1935. Well, after eight years it slipped out across the ocean to Australia. And three years after that, that's 1946, an Irish-Australian priest came over from Sydney in Australia to Ireland, to Dublin, on holiday. And he was in charge of a big boys' town in Sydney. And one of our local newspapers thought it would be a good idea to get an interview from him about this boys' town.
But instead of talking about boys' town, he confined himself to talking about the good that Alcoholics Anonymous had already done in Sydney. And he had the impertinence to say that from what he'd seen of Dublin, we could do with a group of Alcoholics Anonymous ourselves. Well, that might have been just so much water under the bridge, as far as we were concerned. Because in my side of the world, we've grown accustomed to hearing of rather queer societies, starting up in Australia, going on for a few months, and then dying out, and nobody hearing any more about them.
And certainly to an Irishman, it seemed one of the crankiest ideas that they'd ever heard of, that drunks should get together to try and persuade each other not to drink. I mean, so that kind of thing doesn't happen over our side, you see. But that happened by the grace of God to be also a member of a Philadelphia group over there at the same time. He was an Irishman who'd gone out about 20 years ago to make some money in America.
He'd become an alcoholic, and he'd been three years a member of AA. Well, he had about six weeks more in Dublin before he had to go back to his business. And his wife got at him and started nagging him and said, Connor, there is his name, that's the reason why she called him Connor, of course, but said, Connor, what about trying to start a group over in Ireland, in your own native country? So he put an advertisement in the paper saying that there was a member of AA over in Dublin, that anybody who was interested could contact him and learn how to stop drinking.
Well, at the same time, there was a lady who wanted to sell a twin bed. And the two advertisements got mixed up in the paper.
[00:05:02]
He got the replies from the people who wanted to buy the twin bed, and the lady presumably got the replies from the alcoholics who wanted to recover. And that wasted about a week's time. However, he put another advertisement in the paper, and this time the non-alcoholic sub or composer was on duty. And the advertisement appeared as it ought to have done, and he got about 20 letters. Fifteen of those letters came from people who thought somebody else ought to stop drinking.
Probably you get the same kind of thing over here. The other five came from people who apparently wanted to recover themselves. Connor went round to visit them all, but found that just at the moment, they were no longer interested in recovery. In fact, they were just as drunk as they ever had been. So that was two weeks gone. He then went round to the hospitals, the mental hospitals. They're the only hospitals in Dublin who treat alcoholics.
And he had the great luck to meet about the only doctor in Ireland then who knew anything at all about AA, and who was interested in it. And he said, well, I've got a buck alcoholic here who I've given up as a chronic and hopeless incurable. If you'd like to try your hand on him, well, have him. Good luck. So this man, whose name was Richard, was handed over to Connor. They took a liking to each other, and Richard started being the first member of Alcoholics Anonymous, not only in Dublin, in Ireland, but in Europe.
That is, the first native European member. Well, they got together a couple more people, and then they decided to have an open meeting. They held that, and about 50 of the citizens of Dublin turned up at it. None of them knew anything at all about AA. I mean, none of the speakers knew anything about AA except this man, Connor. However, that didn't stop them speaking. It's very hard to stop any Irishman from speaking.
And at the end of the meeting, 20 people joined up. Well, Richard and Connor shook hands with themselves, and they said, we may not know much about AA, we've got no literature, but at least we've got 20 members. But in a week or so, the 20 members had dwindled down to four, and they continued holding these open meetings every week. They got people who'd join up for about a week or so, and then they were never seen again.
They just kept about the four or five members on. I joined in April 1947. I think I'm the sixth ranking member to join. And we went on much the same way for about another month or so, and then we elected a secretary. It was the first time we'd had a secretary, because we never had enough people to secretary about. And things carried on for about a couple of months, and then he came in and practically broke the group up, because he came in absolutely roaring drunk and blaspheming at the top of his voice.
And we had about 12 people there that night. Eight of them crept away with him and helped him to get a little more merry before he went to bed. The other four of us by then had seen enough of AA to understand that we must keep it going by some means or other. And we got together, and I concluded that this was no time for democracy to go into action. I elected myself secretary and general manager of the four people.
And I may say, because it shows that I wasn't yet restored to normality or sanity, I kept that job on for about three or four years. Well, we had amongst those three or four members, that was all we had then, we had, they were all good ones. One of them, in fact, was so good that about a year afterwards he had to go to hospital, and he was admitted for dry pleurisy. Well, now, that's an Irish joke.
Well, nothing more happened for about two or three months, and then we held our first anniversary dinner. I had some friends in the press, and I asked them to give us a show in the papers about it. And they produced a big splash of about two columns. You'd imagine that everybody in Ireland was at the dinner, and that people weren't able to get in because there were so many people in there already. There was no room for them.
Actually, in fact, we had about 25 people there, eight of whom were alcoholics and the rest were hangers-on. However, that notice really gave us our first big push. And after that, people started coming in, and not only coming in, but staying in. And since then, we've progressed gradually. We're not terribly big now. We've only got three groups in Dublin, but we have about 200 members there. And most of them are fairly good members.
Anyway, at the time I left Dublin, I don't know what they're doing now. Well, after a bit, we thought we'd branch off out into the country.
[00:10:00]
And some of you may know, some of you mayn't, but there's a certain amount of tension between the north of Ireland and the south of Ireland. They don't get on terribly well together. In fact, we have two different states in our country. We thought we'd been learning all about tolerance and that kind of thing, so we thought it would be a good idea, a Christian idea, if we went up to Belfast in the north and tried to start a group of Alcoholics Anonymous up there.
We were warned by our friends we'd just be wasting our time. They said, first of all, you come from Catholic Ireland, they don't like that. And secondly, you come from Dublin, they like that even less. However, we got up there, and we had a meeting there, and we didn't find very much difficulty in starting a group. The only difficulty we found was at the first meeting, because we'd earmarked a lady who'd been in hospital down in Dublin for a bit and had done fairly well with us.
We'd earmarked her as a kind of first organiser of the group to keep it going when we'd started it. Unfortunately, she suffered from stage fright the night of the first meeting, and she came in very, very drunk and very, very social. She wanted to talk all the time. And we had to take it in turn, the three of us who were speaking, as soon as we'd said our bit, we just went and sat beside her. Every time she opened her mouth, we rather unguarantly just jammed our hand on her.
But it was a very trying meeting, I can assure you. Well, after that, we thought we'd go further afield. We went to another town, we advertised we were coming, and that we were holding an open meeting. Only two people turned up, and they belonged to the local Temperance Society. They were under the impression that we'd come to start an alcohol factory in the town, and they'd come to protest about it.
We then went to another town. Again, only two people turned up. This time it was really embarrassing, because both these people were press reporters, and of course they had nothing to report, but it didn't do us very much good. However, we have got going in the country now. We've got 18 groups there, our population's about three and a quarter million, and we have about 700 members in Ireland at the moment.
Now, when we started in Ireland, you see, we've only been going about nine and a half years now, we came up against four difficulties which were more or less special to our country. The first is that in Ireland there's a very large total abstinence society called the Pioneers. They've got about a quarter of a million members. And the general idea in Ireland when AA started was that there was no need to have any AA at all.
You had the Pioneers. If anybody who drank too much wanted to stop drinking, all he had to do was to stop drinking and join the Pioneers. And that attitude took a certain amount of beating down, because naturally the Pioneers thought we were muscling in on their territory too. However, we convinced them fairly soon that we were dealing with a different kind of person to the type they do, with people who've never had any drink at all in their lives.
And now they're very great friends and they bring us cases and prospects and things like that. Our second difficulty was with the Catholic Church. See, they were suspicious of us and mistrustful of us right from the beginning, because they don't like the word anonymous and they didn't like the word non-sectarian. Anonymous to them meant that we were a secret society, which is forbidden by the Catholic Church, and non-sectarian, well, in Ireland you can call a man practically anything, but if you call him a non-sectarian, well then you've had it, you see.
He gets very annoyed about it. However, after a time I wrote a cross to the Chancellor of Detroit in Michigan and asked him to send me a letter of cross saying what Work A was doing in his archdiocese. He did that and I produced that to the heads of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and ever since then they've been very, very good to us in their support and their sympathy. And they were the first to recognize that they mustn't, under any circumstances, seem to be running the show or to be behind it.
They give us all the help they can, but they stay in the background. Our third difficulty was that of literature. You see, even when I joined five months after we'd started, we still only had one copy, the big book, and that was all the American literature we had. Later we got a few odd gifts from Good Natured members over in America, but nothing that was enough for us. We couldn't buy American literature because of our dollar restrictions on our side of the world, so I thought the best thing to do was to print our own literature, and that's worked out very well, because what we've done is to take the best of the American literature, translate it into English, and then print it as our own, you see.
And the fourth difficulty we haven't overcome yet, that's purely an economic one. You see,
[00:15:10]
what big business we have over there is fully convinced that they haven't got an alcoholic problem to cope with, because there are very many more workers than there is work for them over in Ireland. And we went along to Guinness, they're the people who bruised out, they're the biggest firm we have over in Ireland, and we asked them if they wouldn't set up something in their social welfare department, deal with their alcoholics, and they said, well, we just don't have any alcoholic problem at all. Said, if anybody falls down on his work through drink, well, we just sack them, we've got five people waiting to take his place. That is a real difficulty, because when an alcoholic is recovered and is fit to be employed again, it's very, very hard for us to find them employment. And you have a big jump on us in that way over here. Now, the only other thing I want to say about Irish AA is this, that we haven't got very many groups over there, and we're all getting rather sick of the sound of our own voices. You'll realise why by the time I've finished.
But I do want to entreat anybody who does go over to Ireland to come and look us up and come and talk at our meetings. Dorothy has told you she came to one of our meetings. She hasn't told you how very, very much we enjoyed her, and the people are even speaking about her still. I think what they're speaking about most is they're still trying to interpret what she said. However, if you do come, please do come and look us up, because it gives us a very big boost. Well, now, I've just told you as briefly as I can how AA was ready in Ireland for me when I became ready for it. Now, I just want to talk a bit about myself.
My name is Shaq from Marylands. I'm 58. I'm single. I was an alcoholic for about 30 years, and I've been dry, by the grace of God, in AA for just over nine. Now, we hold an open meeting in Dublin every Monday night, every week in the year, when people come in straight from the street, unsponsored, and, of course, we get people who are sponsored in as well. A few years ago, we were holding one of these meetings, and a very well-dressed man came in to listen. And he sat through the meeting, and at the end of it, he came up to one of our members, and he said, what I've heard here tonight has convinced me that I'm an alcoholic. And he said, what I've heard has also shown me that you people could give me a great deal of help. But he said, I'm a director of this, that, and the other. I've got very large business interests, and a man in my position of life couldn't afford to join anything like AA. Well, said our member, don't worry about that. He said, all you've got to do is to go on drinking like you are now. Then, when you've lost your position in life, you can come back and join us then. Well, that is roughly my position. I came from quite a good class, middle-class family in Ireland. We were fairly well-off at that time. That was before our various chancellors of the Exchequer started spending our money for us instead of letting us do it themselves. I went to a very good, what you call private school. I liked that. I was good at games and work, and I got on very well with everybody.
I had two years at Dublin University. I liked that because there was no necessity to work for the first two years. I found that out. And then I got a nomination to Sandhurst, which is your West Point, and began my career, my profession, as a career officer in the British Army. A lot of Irish people do that. It's been part of our tradition for hundreds of years. Well, I liked the Army. I got on well in that. I was international standard at one game, and that helped me on quite a lot too. But right from the start, and I never really started drinking before I went into the Army. It was just at the end of the First World War. I started drinking differently to the other young people of my age. They could stop or have a good evening out, and that was the end of it. But I couldn't stop.
I was first in and last out, and usually had to have a few corpse revivers the next day. However, I kept some control over it for quite a time, and then the control gradually vanished, and I began drinking before the wrong people at the wrong time and in the wrong place. But I had good friends, and they kept me out of quite a lot of what might have been very serious trouble. I was always just on the verge of trouble, one foot in, but the other was fairly safely out. Well, I'm not going into my drinking career very closely because one alcoholic's pattern was very much the same as another. Just a couple of memories.
[00:20:02]
Once I was commanding the troops in Cyprus, you know, the island that's giving so much trouble at the moment. There were only 200 troops there, not enough to interfere with my profession of drinking. And one night the governor asked me out to dinner at Government House. Well, I stoked up before I got there because I was rather afraid I wouldn't get much when I got there. You know, an alcoholic usually does. But he was pretty generous that night, and after dinner I suffered from a form of blackout. The next morning his ADC came to tell me that the governor was raring mad at me. Apparently I got him into a corner after dinner and given him some very well-meant advice how to run his colony better. Well, English governors have got no sense of humility at all and very little humor, and he didn't like it, and I was very nearly court-martialed for that.
Another time I was down in Palestine, a Jewish settlement, asked me out to have lunch with three other English officers. As usual, I prepared beforehand in case there wasn't anything produced when I got there, but they did us very well indeed, and after lunch I was very nicely thanked. And they suggested we might like to borrow their motor launch, take it out on a very wide lake, about two miles wide, just go for a spin. Well, one of my usual things I did whenever I got drunk was to fall. I've fallen off everything practically that's higher than the ground in my time, including trains and trams and everything like that. We got into this motor launch, and we got out in the middle of the lake, and there I did my usual trick, and I fell off the launch. Well, these other people, they were English, of course. Perhaps they were too good-mannered to let me know that I'd fallen off, or perhaps they thought it was the usual way that I left a party, or they may merely just not have noticed it. I don't know. But anyway, the launch went on and I didn't. I was left swimming in the water there in full uniform and with very heavy boots on, and swimming is not one of the nicest pastimes under those circumstances.
However, I swam about because if nobody else valued my life, I didn't. I didn't want to drown. But gradually, I got tired, and I said to myself, well, Shackfield, you've had it at last. This is the end. I pointed my feet down towards the bottom of the lake, preparing to follow them as soon as necessary, and then I found I could have stood on the bottom of the lake the whole time. There's only one other story I want to tell you. It hasn't got a moral either, but over in Dublin, they closed all the public houses down on our national feast day, St. Patrick's Day, in March. And one March the 17th, I woke up to find that I'd organized things very badly. I had a hangover of all hangovers. I got no drink in the house at all, and I remembered this horrible doom that comes over Dublin every 17th of March. You can't buy a drink outside. However, I wandered out, just hoping that a bottle would fall from heaven somehow or other, and I met a friend. He said, well, you're just a little wrong. He said, there's one place where you can get drink and get as much of it as you want, and he added, even as much as you can take. If you go down to the Irish Kennel Dog Show, all you do is you pay half a dollar to get in. You needn't worry about the dogs. There's a long bar there, and you can stay there for the rest of the day drinking until they'd close. Well, I got down there, and I found it was exactly as he'd said. I waded through platoons of dogs and people like that, but when you got to the bar, everything was all right. There were about 14 barmen behind it, all willing to serve you, and I kept most of them busy. I'd fall asleep every couple of hours or so, and then wake up and find somebody else was sitting beside me. In the afternoon, I woke up and I found a man sitting beside me who looked very, very cross. Well, I couldn't see what there was to be cross about. There were still oceans of drink in front of me, and still people willing to serve me and him. So I asked him, what's the matter? He pointed out through the door of the bar, and he said, look out there. Well, I looked out. There was nothing unusual to the dog show, people walking their dogs up and down, waiting for them to be judged. And I said, oh, what's the matter? And he bent over to me and he said, you know, you'd think people would have more sense than to bring their dogs to a place like this today. It just shows you there are always two points of view about everything.
Well, I lasted for 26 years in the army. It was a little difficult at times, but I got through. I was sent to hospital every now and again for the results of drinking. The army doctors were very kind. Sometimes they'd call it gastritis, sometimes malaria, or sometimes sand fly fever, and once they even called it water on the knee. But I had up for threats
[00:25:02]
of court-martials practically monthly, and life was getting very, very grim. And then eventually I was put in hospital for the last time. They kept me two months there, being the British army and having only just the least amount of sense that they had to have to get on with. They put me on a diet which included a glass of whiskey and a big bottle of beer every day. At the end of two months they turned me out as fully recovered, and then I was sent home from, I was down in Sudan, then I was sent home to London. Well, alcoholics are optimists, and I imagined for quite a long time that I was being sent home for promotion.
When I got back in London, however, I found that wasn't the case. I got a letter one day in 1941 telling me that the army council had accepted my retirement with very great regret. Well, their regret was no greater than mine, because I hadn't even heard that I was thinking of retiring. And when I got over my surprise at finding they thought they could get on with the war without having me to help them, I was just filled with resentment.
I thought they hadn't played the game by me, they'd been unfair. So I went off to show that they were completely wrong in the way they looked at me. I went off on the biggest bout I'd been on up to then, went on for about a fortnight, and was practically a continuous blackout. When I came out of that, I realized I'd lost my profession, I was now a civilian again. So I thought, well, now I'll start things properly now, and I cut drink out.
And to do that properly, I put myself away in a home for a month. I left that home because all it did for me was to give me another resentment, this time against the doctor. I thought the only exercise he took every week was just to come in and collect a check, and he never did anything else for me, as far as I know. And when I left there, I resolved to myself that if I was ever mad enough to have to pay good money to a doctor to recover, to stop drinking, well then I could be locked up for good. And I went away fully convinced that I was going to start life without any more drink. And on the way up to London, I thought, well, it's a poor way of starting a life if you don't celebrate the starting of it.
And I went in to have a drink, just one. Well, I was carried back to bed that night in the usual fashion. About a week after that, I passed out through an overdose of phenobarbital. That kept me busy for about a week. By that time, my parents had caught up with me. They thought I was still out in Egypt. I hadn't written to them for about a year. And they asked me to come back and live with them at home in Dublin. Well, I thought, here's another chance. I'll go home and live with the family. Everything's going to be grand. The old geography cure, in fact. When I got over to Dublin, I found people still drank there. And of course, I seemed to gravitate naturally towards people who drank more than the others. I convinced myself then, I was 43, that I was too old to start working again in civilian life. So I just loafed about and drank. I gave up every idea of religious, attending to my religious duties. And that hurt my mother more than anything else. And I made life miserable for them. I'd just appear for a fortnight or three weeks at a time. They wouldn't know where I was. I wouldn't have told them. Then I'd come back and just start off life again as if I'd only been away for half an hour. They couldn't ask people into the house because they didn't know whether I'd come in and ruin everything by appearing drunk. And I added a little routine of my own. I started taking Benzedrine in the morning just to make me feel fit to drink. Then I'd drink all day and as long as I was sober enough to remember that I was drinking. Then I'd take Peraldehide at night to put me to sleep so that I'd be fit enough to take the Benzedrine the next day. And that's not a very nice way of living.
In fact, it doesn't do much good to your health. Over about six months before I joined AA, my mother asked me as a special favor to go and see a specialist of her own choosing. Strangely enough, he turned out to be a mental specialist. I suppose she'd made a mistake or something. But anyway, I went to him and I was as honest with him as most alcoholics are with their doctors. I told him all about everybody who were driving me to drink. And if they'd only leave me alone, that I'd get along quite well. And he listened to me very patiently. He said, you know, you're going mad but you're not quite mad enough to be locked away for good yet. He said, you soon will be if you live long enough. Well, that frightened me for a whole week. I didn't have a drink for another week. And then I started nibbling again. And I started in on my last bout which went on for about two or three months. Then on the morning of the 28th of April, 1947, my mother came into me in my room when I was still trying to sleep off the drink the night before. And she said, I want to tell you that I was a little bit She said, I want to tell you that we've just cut you out of the family will.
[00:30:00]
I said, now we want you to get up, pack up, get out of the family. We don't want to hear or see of you again. And she added, I've always remembered her words, said, I kept you home for six years because I thought I could help you, but now I don't think you're even worth trying to help. Well, people always tell you these kind of things at the wrong time of the day. I found, and I wasn't feeling very, very fit when that was burst in on me. However, I can tell you, I sobered up like a shot. And in fact, that was the best day of my life. For the first time, I really realized where I got to in life through drink. I'd lost my profession, my career, my health, most of my money. None of that made any impression on me at all.
As long as I had my home, well, I had just enough money to go on drinking. Home represented security to me, but I knew myself well enough to know that if I lost my home, it'd be only a matter of weeks or so before I was on the streets. And I saw that something would have to be done about it. I didn't know what. And then the grace of God put it into my mind to remember that interview about AA that I'd read about six months before. And I thought, well, this is about the only thing I haven't tried. And I managed to patch up a bargain with my mother that she'd let me stay on at home while we saw if AA could do anything for me. But if I couldn't and I continued to get drunk, well, then I'd just have to leave the family for good or the next day, the day after I got drunk. I thought that was a very generous bargain. I still think so. For an hour after I'd made it, I worked out to myself that I'd been trapped into going into AA. So I went out and got plastered again. However, I made my way down to a meeting that night. I was doped when I arrived. I was drunk. I'd lost any faith in God or myself or anybody else. I wasn't expecting anything at all from AA. I didn't know what to expect, for one thing. And I listened to what the three speakers were talking about. They told me something about their own lives. I was just able to understand enough of what they were saying to realize that there were people who'd been drinking the same kind of pattern as myself.
Just what I saw in that room that made the difference to me. I saw rows of people around me. I saw these people who were talking. They were people who'd been drinking like I was still drinking. They'd been people who'd been thinking in the same screwy way that I was still thinking in. Yet here they were, sitting quietly, able to sit still on their chairs, relaxed. People who would laugh again, a thing I hadn't been able to do for a long time.
And something started to well up inside me and to tell me, you've come home at last. These are your people. These are the people you've got to stay with. At the end of the meeting, I went up and I joined and I became a member of AA. And it seemed terribly easy then. All I had to do was just stop drinking and cling on to these people I'd just met. And then I had to walk home about a mile in the dark to my home. And on the way home, it seemed to become harder again. This idea of stopping drinking seemed to become crazy again. Then that new hope that had been born in me at the meeting, it started to whisper to me again. And it said, but those people you met, they did it. They've recovered. You can too if you really try. Well, I haven't had a drink since that night. And when I can remember how I came into that meeting, drugged and drunk as I've told you, it seems to me to be nothing less short of a miracle. But remember, it's only one of the miracles that are happening to somebody somewhere every day in AA, somewhere in the world. I managed to stop drinking very much more easily than I ever thought possible because AA sold me two ideas right from the start, two very simple ideas which even I could understand then. One was that I could do something for a short time which would be almost impossible for me to contemplate having to do for the rest of my life. You know that's what we call the 24-hour plan. And the other was that I could do in company with people what I find it terribly difficult to do by myself. That's our group therapy. And I added a third resolve on my own part, and that was to make myself part of my group and to make my group part of me. And just with those three aids I managed to stop drinking, and I stopped drinking for about two months, but I hadn't got any further into AA by then. I hadn't even read the 12 steps.
And then after two months my mother took her courage in her hands and she did something she hadn't done for years. She went away on a holiday, away from home, leaving me at home by myself for
[00:35:01]
a fortnight. And I thought, well now this is a good opportunity for me to find out whether AA is doing anything for me or whether I'm just still afraid of being kicked out of home. So I went away for a fortnight too. And after a week I found I was getting along very well. I didn't want to drink and I was able to refuse drinks. Then one morning I was down at Killarney, that's one of the really beautiful spots of the world, and I found myself the famous beauty spot called the Lady's View, about 2,000 feet high up. And I was very hot and tired, there was nobody knocking about.
I just sat down to rest, get cool. I wasn't thinking of anything, I wasn't even looking at the country in front of me. And then after a bit my senses seemed to sharpen and I really began to see the scenery. I looked down, I saw the sunlight dancing on the lakes. I saw the green hills and the green trees all around. Two long valleys stretching out like fingers into space, not a soul stirring anywhere. And I began to think why this is what I've been wanting all my life, this peace and this quiet and this beauty. And then I began to think, and it's been waiting for me here all my life, just waiting for me to come and get it. And for a few seconds I felt unutterably happy. I felt I had the secret of all happiness in my hands, the secret you find behind those words, be still and know that I am God. And those seconds passed very, very quickly, of course they always do. But ever since that morning I never had the slightest difficulty in taking up the program of AA and trying to put it to work.
What were these 12 steps were just friendly guides to a life I really want for myself. In my time in AA I've been learning a bit. I want to tell you a few of the things I've been learning, but please understand that I know that they only refer to me. I've learned that as far as I'm concerned, the third step must always be the most important of them all to me. I can practice all the other steps, but if I slacken up on the third step, everything seems flat and pointless.
Everything seems flat and pointless. I get depressed and irritable. But when I start working on that third step again, handing my life and my will over to God, everything else falls into line. What I've got to teach myself is to remember that I just can't only practice that third step during AA meetings. That's got to be a 24-hour program for me too. I've learned the futility and the stupidity of self-pity. You know, it's terribly easy for a member of Alcoholics Anonymous when he's been in AA for a few years and things start going wrong with him in some way.
It's terribly easy for him to start pitting himself and to say, well, what about it? I've been good. I've been without a drink for three or five years. I've done my best for everybody else. I've tried to help the group on, and yet this happens to me. I never get any luck. Or perhaps you get despondent because one of your prospects slips up and doesn't do what you think he ought to start drinking again. And you think, well, look at all the work I put in on that man.
That happens to me. Of course, we very seldom think of the poor man who slipped. Well, I had a lesson in self-pity a few years ago. I was walking around the ward of a children's hospital. Some of them were paralyzed. They were never going to be able to walk or to run or to play games. Some of them were blind. They'd never read or see. Even their mothers would only be voiceless in the dark to them for the rest of their lives. I didn't see any self-pity in that ward. And I came away telling myself, how can I feel self-pity for myself when just at the price of not taking one drink today, I can do anything, go anywhere and see anything? And I'd been learning the meaning of the word we in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, some people, when you talk about Alcoholics Anonymous, they think of 150,000 or 200,000 or whatever our membership is. But to me, we means you and I, flesh and blood persons, one alcoholic who wants to recover, another alcoholic who wants to be shown how to recover, a bunch of friends, people who are all shouldering a little of each other's weight. I don't know if any of you saw the Salvation Army poster they put out of a boy carrying a boy who's just only a little smaller than himself on his shoulders, and he's saying, he's not heavy, he's my brother. That seems to me to be the spirit of AA.
[00:40:01]
And I've been learning that virtues, which may be only just desirable virtues in a non-alcoholic, for me are absolutely necessary frames of thinking. There's patience. I'm by nature terribly impatient. I've got to teach myself to wait for things to happen, not to expect too much too soon, too often, or for too little effort. And there's humility. I don't know very much about that, but I do know that I've got to learn to take as well as to give.
You see, I've got a lot of the big shot complex in me still. It's far easier for me to try and go out and help somebody else than to accept help myself. I've got to remember that no matter how long I stay in AA, I remain my own number one alcoholic problem, and that I require help just as much today as anyone who's joined last night or is going to join tonight. And there's gratitude. Somebody wrote something like this a few years ago, that do you remember the first day you saw your first child, or the day the war was over, the lights came on again, or perhaps the day when the doctor came and told you it isn't cancer, and oh the wonder of it all, but now you are used to it, no wonder, very little gratitude.
Gratitude to me means remembering to teach myself to keep on being grateful, first to God who gave me AA, gave me AA, then to AA who gave me my friends in AA, and then to all the individuals who've been helping me on every day and every night since I've joined. There was a Trappist abbot once who spent most of his life, most of his health, most of his strength in building a new abbey for his order. When it was finished, he got his monks together and he said to them this, he said be very careful where you place your feet in this building, for wherever you walk you'll be treading on my heart. That's what I feel like about AA.
I owe it so much. I owe it my life, my reason, my health, my happiness, everything that I have, everything that I am today. And I owe that not to any merits of mine, but just to my poor efforts at trying to carry out our program, our twelve steps, our very simple program, our program which for me in its simplest is expressed by the words love and faith. My love, my duty, for God as I know him, my love for all of you in Alcoholics Anonymous, and if I'm lucky a little of your love for me. As for the faith, it's expressed in better words than I could give in these few lines. And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, give me a light so I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied, go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God and that shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way. And God bless you all and keep you all safe.