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Source: 1955 St. Louis International Convention – 1955 St Louis Chuck C.mp3 File: 1955-st-louis-international-convention-1955-st-louis-chuck-c.mp3 Duration: 00:31:30
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After I'd found my voice, I yelled at him, I told him, no, I couldn't answer it. And he goes, well, there is a spirit here, and I said I couldn't hear anything that he said tonight, but I think I know everything that he said, and certainly there is a spirit here, and it's this spirit that we must maintain forever. You see, other people have had these principles. These principles of ours are not new. They are in every great religion that there is. And so the principles are not new to us, but the spirit is new in our lives.
And it must be that we dedicate ourselves, and there is no better time than this twentieth anniversary, that we must rededicate ourselves to the little chore of keeping this spirit in alcoholics and us. This spirit of sharing our experience, strength, and hope, one with another. I believe that there is nothing in life that is quite so wondrous in my own livingness as to see a man or a woman as sick as I was ten years ago, and watch them over a period of a few months come back to normalcy, and true normalcy to a happy, peaceful, and joyous way of life.
I liken it to an inside shower. It does something to us that nothing else ever will. And so this is one of the great givings of sharing our experience, strength, and hope with each other. This is one of the things that shoves the past way back so that pretty soon we can laugh with it and at it. This is one of the things that make life for us so much different and so much better. I often hear said from a podium that this is a simple program, but it isn't easy. And I have to laugh again way down deep inside. This is the only easy life I've ever known. It wasn't easy for me to stay drunk. It wasn't easy at all.
Ha ha! It was pretty rough. And so I believe that the program is simple and easy in direct proportion to how badly we want it. If we want sobriety more than life itself, we find this about the easiest thing that we've ever done. And I like Gwen's little remark yesterday afternoon about how the thing works. Every once in a while I hear somebody say they don't know how it works. And I get a great kick out of that too because we have a chapter, chapter 5 in our book that says how it works.
You know, that's the title of it. And I'm just simple enough to believe that's the way it works. Just simple enough. Ha ha ha. I think that's it. I didn't come here to investigate. I didn't come here to find out how to drink socially. I didn't even come here hoping for physical help. I came here hoping against hope that I might find a way to stay sober until I died. And I didn't think I was very long because I wasn't in what one of the good doctors this morning would have called a state of robust health. Ha ha! I wasn't. Ha ha!
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I didn't think I had very long. But it was important to me to be sober for such time as I had left because I'd had that rare period of insight a few days previous to this when I'd been able to see myself as a wife. And I knew that I was licked. I knew that I was all done. And I knew that I couldn't get out of this thing alone. And I knew that my good wife couldn't do anything other than what she was doing, and that was getting rid of me.
And I knew that the boys couldn't feel any differently than they did, and that was that they couldn't wait until she got rid of me. And I knew that the boss couldn't do anything other than what he was going to do, and that was to throw me through the plate glass window out into Alameda Street if I ever showed up down there again. And that's not good because Alameda Street is very heavily traveled and it's all trucks out there, big trucks. Ha ha! Ha ha!
And I knew something else was very much more important to me. I knew why, and it was me. And so it was important to me that I be sober for such time as I had left because I wanted to do what I could to rub out what I'd already written on the blackboard of life. And that's the only reason that I wanted to be sober. I hadn't the slightest thought that the myriad problems that I had might be solved. And as I told you, I wasn't even expecting physical health. I just wanted to be sober so that I might erase as much as I could of what I'd already written.
And so when they read that chapter, How It Works, I believed it. And I just started trying to fulfill those conditions. Just trying to fulfill those conditions. And I had no ability, but I had a great desire to do what I could to fulfill those conditions. And I want to say to you that I do not believe that it takes any ability because I had none. And again, that if we want this thing more than life, that we find it so easy. Because I just started in trying one day at a time to do what I could to fulfill the conditions of this book.
And the conditions are not so rough when they become important. And what are the conditions? Number one, serendipity. Both physical and mental serendipity. Because this is a physical and mental disease. We admit that we were powerless over our faults, that our lives had become unmanageable. Physical and mental. Serendipity. To get out of our own way. To see that a life lived by self-will can hardly be satisfactory. To see that life as we are living is worthless. And to see that we, as we are, are not worth a party to blow us out of.
Serendipity. Complete and utter. Both physical and mental. Secondly, the recognition of the need for help from a power greater than ourselves. And I think that's all we need in the first place. Just the recognition of the need for help. And number three, an honest desire and an honest effort to do what we can with what we have today to live according to these principles. And that's all, in my opinion, that we need.
Just that little need to render the recognition of the need for help and an honest effort to do the best we can with what we have today. And again, I don't think it takes any of them. Just whatever ability that we have. That's all. But it takes all of us.
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I heard a little remark that I love so much the other night. That it doesn't take much of a man to make this program. But it takes all of us. It takes all of us. And so it is that when we fulfill these conditions to the best of our ability, we get sober. And we remain sober. And so, after six months of attending a meeting every night, I woke up to the fact that I was sober. It took me six months, even, to wake up to the fact that I was sober. So you see, I wasn't very bright. I wasn't very bright. And it took me three and a half years to get over falling on my face. So I wasn't very strong.
But I woke up to the fact that I was sober. And that's nine years ago. And everything that's happened in my life since then has just happened. And I've awakened to the fact that it's happened. And it's all been good. And I sort of look back over this, my life, that's good, to figure out why it happened and how it happened. And this seems to me to be the problem. And this seems to me to be the answer.
I'm just as sure as I stand here that I became an alcoholic because of my inability to integrate myself into a society of which I did not approve. I have never liked so-called normal society. And I don't like it now. Thank God I don't have to live in it. They didn't perform according to my patterns, for some reason or another. And I couldn't perform according to theirs because of my own makeup. And so I found alcohol. And it made it a little easier for me to get along in a society that I didn't like. But there was a catch in it. Because when I drank, I didn't perform very well either.
And I didn't like me for my performance. And when I didn't like me, I had to drink a little bit more, and perform a little bit less, and like me, a little bit less. And finally, the time came when I was caught in the snowboard. And I couldn't get out. And I couldn't live with me. And I couldn't die. And so I had to come here. Now all of this time, like all the rest of it, I had had a set of ideals that were way up yonder. But I couldn't perform according to those ideals because my conditioning wouldn't let me.
Because of a lot of things that I learned that weren't true. One amongst them was that there was no such word as surrender. I learned that very early. That there wasn't any such word. About 75% of my people are still fighting the Civil War, you know. There was no surrender in my vocabulary. And so… And so, until I was forty-three years old, it was impossible for me to surrender.
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I didn't get these scars on me by agreeing with my ad… Very quickly, I'll tell you that! Ha ha! And it's a pretty wonderful thing, that we can look back on all the experience in those forty-three years, and thank God for them, because no man knows how free he surrenders until he has to surrender. It's a terrific thing when we wake up to the fact that all these years spent to keep from surrendering ends up in the knowledge that the only thing that we give up in surrendering is our troubles.
That's the only thing we give up! That's all! And so I couldn't fulfill the very first condition, to surrender. And I didn't until everything that I held dear in life was gone. And then the time came when I could. And so, the problem in my way of thinking is that feeling of conscious separation from. Perhaps the best definition we'll ever hear of Dr. Thiebaud's ego. The feeling of conscious separation from, the thing that made us feel so different than everybody else.
The thing that said to me that I had to out-think, out-perform, and out-maneuver everybody else in the world in order to eke out a miserable existence out of an unfriendly universe. The thing that said, here am I, poor little me, or great big me, or smart me, or dumb me, or whatever it is, against everybody else. The feeling of conscious separation from is the problem. I think it's the one problem that includes all problems.
And the one answer that includes all answers is just the reverse of this. The feeling of conscious unity with living in apart of. And that's what we find in this great program of ours. Because we come here for sobriety, and sobriety only. Forgetting all the rest of these problems, we come here for sobriety. We do these things for sobriety, and sobriety only. And in the very doing of them, we find the answer to life itself.
We find that the conditions for sobriety, and the conditions of the good life, and the conditions of God, are one and the same answer. We find out why it is that a belief in God is good, but not good enough. That for people like us, to live in God is the only answer, the true answer. And this by accident, because we didn't do these things for these answers, we did them for sobriety. And lo and behold, we find that the answer to the disease of alcoholism, and the answer to the riddle of life is one and the same.
And it's just the moving out of the feeling of conscious separation from, that feeling of aloneness that eventually is the only feeling that we have. That we're ten million miles from nothing, even in our own way. That feeling of aloneness is wiped out. And a feeling of unity with living in a part of, takes its place. This, to my mind, is a great miracle of alcoholism. I think we're the most fortunate people on the face of the earth, the alcoholics.
Because, you see, we did this thing backwards as long as we could. Just as long as we could. And it was only when we'd run completely out of gas, and then not by choice,
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by necessity, because we couldn't live and we couldn't buy, then we did it right and found the answer. The living answer to the living problem. We moved back into the circle. And when we got honest enough to practice these principles in all of our affairs, and when we got honest enough, excuse me, everything came on. They're going to shut me off. When we got honest enough to sit with ourselves in the quiet and spend a little time on Step 11, thought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as the entity, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry that out, we came to see that that feeling of conscious separation was all wrong.
We came to see that everyone amongst us is our Father's child. Everyone amongst us, our Father's child. We came to see that this was true even when we were way out there in left fields, consciously separated from us, still we were our Father's children, but we were away from home. And we came to see that all we had to do was to come back home, fulfill these simple convictions, do these simple things, and that we'd find that our Father had always been there, that it was ourselves that were away.
And I'm going to close with just a couple of little simple illustrations that have become so very meaningful to me. After many years I ran on to the fellow here last night, from whom I got this little thing, and I won't quote it exactly, but it's been so meaningful in my life, and I've used it so much. But it was Big Smith from up in Michigan who brought it to us out there, and he said he had found it in a spack on a wall in an alcoholic ward down in Texas, in a hospital.
And that little plaque read like this, if you're not as close to God as you once were or as you would like to be, make no mistake, you're the one that moved it. And I thought it was one of the finest sermons I've ever heard. And so then he went ahead and said all we have to do is come back home, do these simple things, and we find that God's always been there. And then again the chap that came up to me one time after one of these meetings, and I was out of shorts, and I didn't want to talk to him or listen to him, and he asked me this question, he said, chap, you know why it's so hard for us to find God?
I thought, oh, this is all nice, you know. And I didn't want to get in a conversation with him, but he had me trapped and I had to say, no, why is it so hard for us to find God? And the kid says, because he ain't lost. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Why, he says, we're the ones that have been lost. All we have to do is come back home, do these simple things, and we find that God's always been there. And so again, I'm so grateful that I can't speak.
So grateful to this fellowship of ours, all of us, and to its founders, those who went ahead of us,
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and to you people, all of us, because you helped me come back home. I am so grateful that I decided I wanted what you had that first time, and was willing to go to any length to get it. So grateful that I decided to take certain steps, because you told me, here are the steps we took, we took, which are suggested in the program of the church. And I decided to take those steps, the twelve steps. So grateful, because in my own experience, I have found that those twelve steps lead all the way from hell to heaven.
I know, because that's the way it happened to me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Before Pat closes the meeting, I would like to know if Alex Modzelewski, not quite so hard to pronounce, is in the audience. He's from Grand Rapids, and if he would come up to me right after the meeting, I'll be right over there. I have a message for him. Thanks, and I'll talk. Well, folks, we've got a time limit on this, as you know.
I would like to close the meeting with something that I heard years ago from Clem Lane in Chicago. I don't know where he got it, but it made a very good impression on me at the time, and I'd like to pass it on to you, because as you've undoubtedly found out, your anonymity doesn't last too long if you practice these principles in all your affairs. My friends, you've changed. You have a new strength, a new serenity, a new spirituality which just oozes out of you, and you can no longer hide the fact that the old fear, anxiety, and anticipation, the negative qualities are gone, and they're replaced by these positive ones.
So this is the story of the happy prince. Many of you have heard it, and there's a fable from your childhood that explains why, in the natural order, alcoholic synonymous works. Let's recall it together, the story of the happy prince. There was this happy prince, and everywhere he went, people crowded about him. They were delighted to see him, eager to shower him with love and with praise. Every time he appeared, people ran to tell their neighbors, and great songs gathered.
Now there was a man who saw the love and adulation given the happy prince, and he wanted these things for himself. So looking on the happy prince in his shining confidence, he said, it's because he's a personable lad. I too could be popular if I was as handsome as he is. So the man had a mask made, a replica of the features of the happy prince, and he donned this mask and he went about. But there came to him no shouting crowd, no glad greetings, no love nor praise nor adulation.
There must be other things, said the man, and he began to follow the happy prince, spy on him in all his doings. And he found that always and ever the prince was ready for the heartening words, an act of courtesy, a deed of kindness, that always he sought to help others. So the man said, if these are the things I must do to win love and praise, then do these things I will. And so he went about doing the good things, the unselfish things, the kindly things, the honest things.
thing, the kindly thing, the honest thing and the pure thing. For months the man went
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about doing these things, and there did come to him the love of his fellows and the admiration of the song. But one day his conscience smote him. Here I am, he said, doing all these things, seeking just to win love and praise, pretending that I am the happy prince. And he reached up to pull the mask from his face, but the mask would not come off. He was the happy prince. That's the moral, my friends. You are the happy prince. All my conferees here, thank you very much. And we'll close, please, with the Lord's Prayer.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.