Fearlessly Facing the Proposition in the Chapter to the Agnostics – Mildred F.

About This Speaker Tape

Paris, during the Nazi occupation, with French citizens climbing the Eiffel Tower shouting liberté. Mildred F. sees her own life in that image: a reclamation of a world lost to the dark side. She arrived at the fellowship broken, unemployable, and in a state of "pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization." A former nun of fifteen years, she spent decades trying to orchestrate her own salvation—treating a Higher Power like a "cosmic concierge" who would deliver the world exactly as she ordered it.

Her wreckage is concrete: 32 hospitalizations, 38 shock treatments, and a period spent diapered in a psych ward at age forty, staring at a purple, bruised face in the mirror. She chased "heaven on earth" through booze, vanilla extract, and Chanel No. 5, until she hit a line in the sand. Through the "three Ps"—poverty, people, and the stripping of the ego—she stopped directing the results and started doing the "do things."

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Mildred F. opens by reflecting on the recent death of her sister, Dora.
• 4:15 Discussion of Step 3 and the singular nature of the 'problem': self-centeredness.
• 8:30 Laughter: Mildred F. lists her psychiatric history, including 32 hospitalizations and 38 shock treatments.
• 15:40 Mildred F. describes her fifteen years in the convent and the secrecy of her drinking.
• 22:10 The 'bloom off the rose' after leaving the convent and her subsequent descent into jail and asylums.
• 31:20 The rock bottom moment in the psych ward at age 40, wearing diapers and facing her reflection.
• 38:15 Description of her first year of sobriety on Skid Row and the 'three Ps': poverty, people, and the process of ego deflation.
• 46:50 Mildred F. discusses the necessity of working the steps in sequence and the gift of realizing she was the problem.
• 55:10 Reflections on the 'walls' she built around herself and the loneliness of material success.
• 1:02:15 A detailed account of the final 18 hours with her sister Dora, using the Third and Seventh Step prayers.
• 1:12:40 Mildred F.'s metaphor of the twig in the brook as a representation of the dance of life and powerlessness.