Step 2 and the Road to Humility – 1967 – Bob

Well, I've had my little say, and now it gives me extreme pleasure to hand this meeting over to our old friend Bob. Thank you, Bob. Thank you. Thank you for your part, Louise. also Bill. I was kind of put on the spot when I arrived here a week ago. Louise was down there to make sure I didn't get very far before I was told that there was this meeting. And all during the week I've been trying to find out what was expected of me. And all I got by way of answer was, it's over to you. As you know, these meetings usually run according to formula. At least they did when I was here before. I had the good word in front of me and I couldn't stray very far from it I've given a great deal of thought as to what I would say tonight and in a way I am going to go according to formula because first of all I feel that I must, like other speakers, qualify myself. I am an alcoholic. I don't know, I've never been able to understand why I am a alcoholic. But my knowledge that I had an alcoholic problem goes back to when I was 24. This was in 1929. And I got drunk on board ship. Well, it was nothing unusual for me to get drunk, but on this particular occasion I felt that I had to explain to complete foreigners, strangers why it was that I was in that condition and I invented a story I said that I had just received a telegram on board ship that my sister whose marriage I had attended the night that I sailed had been killed in an automobile accident. And therefore, I was consoling myself. Well, unbeknown to me, there was a cousin of mine on board, a very distant cousin, and she took the trouble to verify this piece of information. And, of course, I were caught in a downright lie. This is when I realized that I had a problem, but it wasn't very likely that I would do very much about it, and I carried and lived with that problem for about eight years or nine years after. Now, I'm the kind of a drunk who would take the odd drink or two in the morning in order to level off and keep an edge on all day just enough and then give it stick at night. And this would go on for three or four days until I was so sick that I couldn't get up, and I might miss a day or two of work. And then maybe I wouldn't drink for a week, two weeks, maybe a couple of months. And you know the old cycle. I'd get to feeling sorry for myself. Or maybe I resented the fact that my wife could drink and I couldn't, so then I began to take it out on her. And eventually, of course, I would take the drink that led to the drunk and would be in the soup all over again. Now this didn't sit very well with the organization I worked for, which was the United States government. and these things have a way of seeping back and getting into your file. So in 1938, I guess they figured that I had had a long enough time to sow my wild oats or to grow up in the service, and they had me on the carpet. And they asked me what I was going to do about my drinking. Well, my father had already suggested a way of dealing with the problem. And I went to see a psychiatrist in New York. Now his solution was really rather pat. He said that my trouble was that I was a minister's son. I had the wrong parents, in other words. And also he thought that perhaps if I changed wives it might help. I'm not maligning him and I'm not making a funny story at his expense. This is just about what he told me. Well, Well, I was willing to accept the first premise because, you know, it is rather hard to grow up as a minister's son. And although I hadn't thought it through to its logical conclusion, it seemed a fair assumption that at least that was partially responsible for my aberration. in any case this fellow said all you've got to do is to dispose of these two problems and use a little willpower and you'll be alright and I was for five years but it was not the solution I was outside of the United States during most of that time and I can honestly say that I don't remember hearing anything about AA until suddenly I was faced with it when I didn't even know that the people who were asking me whether I wanted to stop drinking were members of AA. I was so drunk. I, it's one of the reasons that I feel that I can understand perhaps the situation here in Durban when I first came here. But I want to pass over that for the moment and come back to it and continue with my own qualifications. I became a member of A.A. in Dallas, Texas and about four or five months afterward I was sent out to South Africa I had ten years of sobriety in the spring of 1957. And after I left Durban, I was posted in Salzburg and Vienna in Austria, in Leopoldville in the Congo, and then on to a dual job in Washington and New York. There was no AA in Austria. There was none in the Congo. In fact, the Belgians took such a dim view of alcoholics that if any one of their civil servants showed even the slightest tendency, he was shipped back to Belgium. But when I returned to the United States, where AA was going full blast, I didn't attend any of the meetings. And, in consequence, on returning home from dining out one evening, I went right to the cupboard in the kitchen where there was a bottle of brandy and I took a drink. Now, it was obvious from what followed that I hadn't learned anything about drinking in the ten years of my sobriety because I got just as drunk as I ever had before. this initiated a period of uncertainty, to put it mildly, in my own life. I know now what it was that was basically at fault. I had failed to grow spiritually. And with that failure, the old traits and characteristics came back. I stayed sober for about two years after that initial plunge. Frankly, I was quite scared that I didn't come back more than in a token way to AA. And I was posted to Jamaica. There I helped to set up AA. It had been there before, but some of its members had just drifted away and there was nothing active when I got there. From Jamaica, I retired and live, presently live, in Sarasota in Florida. And I had not even then thoroughly thrashed out my problem. I was attending AA meetings, but I was unhappy, I was discontented, and I wondered what it would be like to achieve serenity I recall very vividly a talk that was given by a man who when I was a boy was a great hero of mine he was one of our great baseball players one of all time greats and I never met him at that time we didn't have television so I didn't see him but I knew his name and he was a member of this group in Sarasota even then he was in his last years because he had a very bad case of emphysema and this man who was a great athlete in his day weighed less than 100 pounds in his last talk before our group he was describing a trip he had made at the expense of one of the clubs that he had been active with to Mexico. And he'd been through this, with this team in spring training for about six months. And he said during that time, I have achieved something I had long wanted in AA. I have achieved serenity. His face showed it, his whole manner showed it. And he died about three months later. It is rare, I think, for anyone to say they have achieved that goal that is at the end of Twelve Steps. But I can honestly say to you tonight that I would not have come back to Durban to be with you if I had not felt that I have achieved that serenity now. But it isn't a matter of the moment. I have felt it growing and burning for the last several months. And I think the reason that I can prove it to myself is that if you take serenity as one side of the coin, the other side you will find humility. and I had to achieve the latter before I could even get a glimmer of the former. So much for qualifying. I think you can see that I have gone the whole gamut, the whole road that alcohol leads you through. and having had the slip and then a number of other slips, I feel that my sobriety is the deeper for it. I, of course, can go back to the time when A.A. was not. and many in this room I think can too because AA did not come to Durban until some time after it had been established in the States so I imagine that many of you have been over that road of going to doctors to your clergymen of hearing from your friends how concerned they are of trying everything that we know how to achieve sobriety to get out of the squirrel cage. And even though AA is alive and growing and well-known. Sometimes it sets up a prejudice in the minds of people who are on the outside looking in. It's a little like the insect that becomes immune to DT, to DDT, the alcoholic begins to get immune to the approach of AA. Now in the early days here, which Louise has alluded to, I'm going to become a little facetious now because there was a lot of fun in those days. And I do want to pay tribute to Robbie. I'm sorry he's no longer with us, but no one who knew him could ever forget it. I referred to him as Gimlet Eye. I used to see him go down Smith Street, West Street and those quick eyes going all over the place he never missed anything if I was walking on one side of the street and he was on the other he'd tell me about it a week later if anybody deserves credit for starting AA it's Robbie because he found my AA book up at the nursing home in Hillary and he tracked me down. He broke right through all the little fences I had built around me in the office. He wouldn't pay any attention to the secretary or anything. He came right on in and he said, is this your book? And I said yes. Well he says I'm Robbie XAA Joburg and he says we've got to start a group here well I'd only been here about three or four months and I wasn't sure that I wanted to come flat out in the open as an avowed alcoholic so I kept stalling him off but he was an infernal pest He wouldn't leave me alone, and what's more, he used to send customers in to see me. I don't know whether Durbin's the same today as it was then, but it seems to me every bum from the Rand used to come down here, and they knew something was going on in the Netherlands Bank building, and it got to be pretty difficult sometimes. so Robbie really pestered me into doing something about it and we put that note in the paper we put the little ad in the newspaper said AA anyone interested in Alcoholics Anonymous meeting Chelmsford Road Friday night and a few of us met there Louise alluded to the fellow who came to the door and rang the bell and said he'd heard there was a free drink available. Robbie came back just laughing his head off. Another incident you might be interested in had to do with the evening paper here. I went to a lot of trouble to write an article, which I kind of slanted toward a Durban reader and I took it over to the editor and I said that I had gone to a lot of trouble and every word in here meant exactly what I wanted it to mean and I didn't want his editors to get after it and tear it to pieces. If he wasn't going to publish it as it was please not publish it. Well, he gave me his word. And I didn't see the evening paper in which it came out in time to prevent a couple of irate telephone calls. It seems that the article was published exactly as it was written, but I had failed to give the caps, the words in the large print, which had been supplied by an editor. so the article read ex-drunks cure drunks and I can tell you only a closed meeting of the then membership preserved AA from going under because these fellows didn't feel like they wanted to be called ex-drunks we had no office and we had very unlikely prospects of getting an office because we couldn't seem to stay ahead of ourselves financially. We'd pass the hat and every bit that we got we'd put into literature. I remember we had a post office member who translated the Twelve Steps into Afrikaans. This was the first effort that was made to put AA into the other national language. Well, as I say, things got a little bit difficult around my office. And it happened that the mayor, the then mayor of Durban, wanted me, pled with me to try to get some cortisone for his little niece who was wracked with arthritis at the age of about four. This little child had her hands doubled up against her chest and her knees drawn up. She hadn't been able to straighten them out. It was a pitiful sight And in those days, Cortison was thought to be helpful, and the supply was controlled by the United States government. So I rode over, and a small supply was sent, along with instructions for its use. so I called him up as soon as I got the package and I went down to see him and he was pathetically grateful in fact he was so grateful that he really didn't know how to express himself and finally he said well you must have some charity that you're interested in couldn't i contribute to that and i said well mr mayor if you won't tell anybody you could give an amount that would help us set up an aa office he said how much do you want well i said we don't want very much but i said i think 25 pounds will see us over the deposit and perhaps the first couple of months until we can get on our feet and that's how it happened and we got a telephone it is true as Louise said we were fairly doctrinaire in those days and we didn't stray very far from the twelve steps and in thinking of some little message that I might leave with you tonight I couldn't get very much further than the very second word of our 12 step program we admit it because there's an awful lot in our personal history that precedes that admission. It seems as though we will do anything rather than to admit that we are powerless over alcohol. Yet, that very word and that very act is the only thing that will unlock the door to this fellowship which we know and beyond which lies the 12 steps with its goal of serenity. How often have we dashed ourselves against the door and found it unyielding? How often has we in our own 12-step work gone out and seen somebody who desperately needs what we have to offer and found ourselves powerless in the face of his unwillingness to make that admission. I don't know of anything that is more frustrating than to try to carry this message to other alcoholics and then to find that the door cannot be opened. Yet, we keep saying there are no musts in AA. Yet I believe this is an absolute essential. Without it, there can be no sobriety. for the alcoholic. Certainly, other means of tackling the problem have not been successful. When I was here, I remember we used to say it wasn't important necessarily to take steps two and three. We could skip around a little bit and we could go to something that we could do, like take our inventory. But the more I have worked for this program, and the more I have used this program in my own life, the more i find it absolutely essential to jump from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and so on. Because AA is not a religious program but a spiritual one. And in taking the second step, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. We are starting ourselves on the road to humility, and without it, this program doesn't work. And the third step made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the power of God as we understand it. It's making that decision that is the important thing. We can't spring full bloom into a knowledge of all of the potential of that step. But in making that position, we are embarking on a life of spiritual growth. and to place that in substitution for the egocentricity of our lives before is the thing that makes this program work. And the other steps that are therapeutic are the personal inventory and the admission. I never took step five until I got to Sarasota and I think this had a lot to do with a delay in my spiritual growth. And making amends, and coming to the last two steps of all, where we are given the mechanics for making this program work, sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with that higher power. praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out. What a tremendous insight those early people had into our basic needs when they could come up with a formula so concisely put. You know, there are only 200 words in this program of ours only 200 words and yet they take a lifetime of living we can study them over and over and come up with different meanings we can sit here and discuss them week after week and apply them to our lives and never really get to the end of it Friends, one thing has touched me very much tonight, and that is your kindness and generosity in mentioning Mary along with me as having been instrumental in bringing this message. Mary has been a source of great strength to me all of my life, and when I think of the strength that she put into the work that we did here in Durban, and the fact that you would couple her with what has eventuated from that humble beginning, I am more than grateful. And I want to thank you on her behalf. I also want to say that I would like to attend each of the meetings here in the Durban area while I'm here, and I would be very glad if you would call me up on the telephone and see if we can't work out a mutual date. I don't have a car, but I'm given to understand that transportation isn't too difficult. I would like very much to get to go home with a real knowledge of what AA is doing here. And let me say again that you're one of the main reasons why we have come back. And I am going to indulge myself in your friendship. Thank you very much. well thank you very much Bob for that most delightful talk as far as I'm concerned it's as delightful a talk as we've had in Durban for many a long day it was very interesting especially to some of the older members to hear and to some of the newer ones about the early days in AA