A Spiritual Malady – Sandy B.

Hi everybody, my name is Andy Beecher. I'm an alcoholic. Lee and I are pretty close. I've known him a lot of years. I called him about a week ago and I said, Is there any chance that there's an opening at quarter of ten for a talk? And he said, Yeah, coincidentally there was an opening. No one else wanted it. I'm only kidding. I will make this as short as possible, I promise you. The topic that I wanted to discuss a little bit is called the spiritual malady. and I was thinking about alcoholism as a three-fold illness mental, physical, and spiritual and you hear a lot of talk about the physical over the years the medical world has certainly learned a great deal about the fiscal nature of alcoholism and there's all kinds of descriptions this is exactly what happens when the alcohol hits your system and this happens and that happens. And I think there's been a lot of progress in looking at the mental aspects of alcoholism so that if you were asked what they are, you could get an answer. But when we come to what is the spiritual malady, I don't remember seeing any specific answer to that question. You know, we agree it is a spiritual problem. But what is the nature of that spiritual problem? And when I first started thinking about it, I said, well, we're too far away from God. And if that was the natureof the problem, we'd simply move closer to God and there wouldn't be a problem. them. So I started thinking about my own case and so many other alcoholics, and not just alcoholics. There's a sense in almost every human being's life as they go along that there's something missing. They're just, some of us call it a hole. Some of us call it something unexplainable, but there's, I'm still not there yet. And regular people call it the midlife crisis. Alcoholics, I don't know what we call it. We have a whole different vocabulary. But they come to realize that in spite of succeeding and following all the rules of the material world, they've got the family and the boat and the car, and they're a very senior vice president, and they're thinking of suicide. What is missing? And so that is what I got thinking about. Now, alcoholics have this same problem. I did. I always felt I didn't belong. There was something missing. Somebody didn't tell me. They briefed everybody else on what's going on. I was the only kid in school that didn't know what was going on, and I don't I don't know if you had that problem. But I didn't want to ask anyone, but then they'd know I didn'T know what was going on and I felt that would be terrible. And along came alcohol. And alcohol fixed everything that was wrong with me. I no longer had the feeling that there was something missing. I was finally complete. I remember that sense of sitting at a bar with the third drink kicked in and just sitting there just going, it just doesn't get any better than this. If I could stay like this all the time, wouldn't that be wonderful? There is no hole anymore and there's no feeling that I'm not complete. There wasn't any missing pieces. Through alcohol, I became a complete person. Bill talks about this in the forward to the 12 and 12 where he has that little sentence that describes our 12 steps. He calls them a group of principles, spiritual and nature, which you've practiced as a way of life will expel the obsession to drink and enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole. So there's the word, whole. I want to be whole. I want To Be Complete. I want TO BE A TOTAL PERSON. And when I drank, that was fixed. I didn't need anything else. I was just there and enjoying it. And so in that instance, I was absolutely convinced that God was not needed in order for me to be a whole person. And to me, that's the nature of our spiritual malady of any spiritual malody is the idea that God is not needed for me to become whole. That this can be done by myself. And that's what alcohol did. And so whenever anyone suggested God to me when I was hungover, hopeless, everything's rotten. He said, have you thought of God? I said, I don't need God. I need a drink. That's what I need because I had this. I had total faith that when I consumed alcohol, I once again would be a whole person and I wouldn't need anything. And so, to me, the nature of this spiritual malady is the sense that God isn't needed. That's what I've concluded when I thought about this. fortunately for us we get beaten down so far that a good sponsor or someone browbeats us into keeping an open mind enough to say okay I'll try God I'm willing to try this I'm unwilling to try this I didn't want anything to do with it I grew up in a religion that didn't work for me, so I had a lot of bad feelings about it when I first got here. The word I hated the most was God. I didn't say the Lord's Prayer. I didn' t want to talk about spirituality. And my sponsor said, well, that's good. You can have all those things. But if you don't change your mind, you're going to die. Really? Really? Yeah. Okay, well don't tell anybody I changed my mind, okay? Because I've been bad-mouthing God for all these years. I don't want people to think I changed their minds. I changed mine. You all went through the same thing. You reached a point where you were willing to go against your own set of ideas, your own better judgment. you were desperate, you threw up the white flag and as William James said that's when we can experience the real reality of a spiritual experience is in that moment of desperation. And that's why it's so important to get new people on the steps right away while they're still desperate and their minds are open to this God idea. And so I changed my mind. Big deal. Sandy changed his mind about God. The person that made the happiest was God. He was saying, God, I'm so glad that Sandy changed his life and changed his mind about me so I can exist. Those egos are, aren't they amazing? So I changed my mind. And I remember I almost didn't want to try praying for fear that it would work. And everything I had said all these years about prayer would be wrong. It's almost like I'd rather get lousy results but still be right about prayer than have my life transformed. And so I tried prayer. and I tried everything that my sponsor told me to do and I made the amends and I did the inventory and several times during that first year I had these experiences of my own creator just awarenesses driving in a car not hearing a voice but being aware that something was telling me If I stayed in AA, everything would be fine and I didn't have to worry about a thing. And just other things that were signals that this creator was real and was in my life and was making himself known to me. that is the point of working the steps is to have that personal experience Bill said it perfectly it's the experience we don't need a definition we don' t need a history we don''t need anything once we have this experience that's our understanding of God as it came to us in that experience now Now, as the years go on, the desperation kind of fades away. We're not as desperate as when we first got here. Now we've got a job. We've got our car in our own name. Phone, maybe. Driver's license. And they're speaking well of us at home and at work. They just give us a promotion. And there's a sense that we don't need God as much as we used to when we first got here. And I said, that's the name of the spiritual malady is we don' t need God. And it occurs in almost all of us as we first get sober. It's a very common thing to get five years sobriety or six or whatever it is. and suddenly have the bottom fall out of our peace of mind. We don't have to lose our job, we don't have to have material things go wrong, but there's just a sense that we're all alone again. And what happened? And what happened was, I started thinking that I was doing a lot of this staying sober. That my actions, that I thought up and going on the 12-step call and going over here and going over there, that that's what really counted. And that's What was keeping me sober and happy. And there's a lot of inertia that is accrued when we first have that spiritual contact. And it will allow us to keep this illusion going that I've got this, God, I really appreciate what you did for me, and I'll never forget it. But I'm really doing pretty damn good on my own. And I will call you if something, emergency comes up or something like that. And conscious contact is kind of optional and meditation isn't that important if you're succeeding and all these things. And then all of a sudden, there is this sense that the bottom fell out. And we have to talk to our home group. They see it first. What's going on? Nothing? I don't know what you say, but that's what I always say. How are you doing? Great. Great. Fine. Really fine. Why don't you tell your face? Remember that? I think I took that from Clancy. Our friends can see the difference. And I think we save each other from a lot of trouble by sticking our nose in other people's business. And I tell the people that I sponsor, you should go up to three people that you feel close to and tell them they can stick their nose in your business anytime they want because they could save your life someday. Because there's that thing where you can't just walk up and, you know, start saying that. That would be crossing a boundary or whatever it is. But, you Know, we got the people in the home group that don't care about that and they cross any boundary there is and they're the ones that save us. And so I can think of two or three times where I had that same phenomenon where I just, and then I came back and reestablished this contact and followed the slogan, first things first. And the first thing is God. It's such a simple thing. Just keep God first and everything will be fine. Got it, got it. Well, actually, today I think I could do okay without them. And that thinking starts. And so you can see how this pattern can repeat itself until there comes an interest in seeking God at a higher level that Bill was talking about that now becomes so interesting and so much fun and so important that the phenomenon doesn't seem to repeat itself, that God isn't necessary. So my ego has to attack me in other ways. Egos are amazing. they can find more ways of screwing up our day God loves you but your group doesn't that kind of really? think about it did Carolyn say hello to you tonight? no she didn't well what do you think that's all about? You don't even have to work hard when your ego kicks in and wants to get. And so a lot of years go by since they got started. What are we at, 77? That's a long time. A lot of things change since 1935. The stuff that science has learned since 1936 is astounding. And the society has changed. They see things differently. And there's a general sense that God really isn't as necessary to explain the universe as he used to be. It used to mean that whenever you couldn't answer a question, you'd go, well, God planned it this way and God did that. But now they've got it down to where almost all the answers are in And the great mysteries are getting narrowed down to just a few. And in the fourth step, Bill talks about one of the types of characters that comes to AA and we all kind of fit that mold was the intellectually self-sufficient. You remember that one? I felt I was that way, intellectually self sufficient. Well, there's a sense that perhaps that's been overlooked as something that's more powerful than we realized. And that maybe there is some value in this self-sufficiency. And AA members are trying to share the good news with us. There are few, but they're growing. and they're trying to get the word out to the rest of us. The secret that they have discovered. And they have discovered that you don't need God to get sober. And this word is being passed around. It isn't being welcomed yet because we're suspicious and we go, I don't get it. But it's there. There is a definite voice that is getting louder and it is appearing in the grapevine and pamphlets and speeches. And the basic message is we now have proof with many years of sobriety that God isn't necessary for hopeless alcoholics to get sober in AA. Well, there we have it again. The same words that I used in the very beginning, the spiritual malady. God isn't necessary. Isn't that interesting? That it just shows up. We had it way back then. Only instead of alcohol creating this illusion, it's the human ego. And it is creating the illusion that God isn't necessary. Sobriety is not the name of the game in AA. That's how we measure how long we've been around here. Conscious contact with God is the only result that is spoken about in the steps. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. Step 11, try to improve our conscious contact. So that is the jackpot in AA And so I think about this and I go, isn't it amazing that that same spiritual malady, with using the exact same words, God isn't necessary. There's an arrogance to God isn'T necessary rather than I don't like God, I don' t believe in God. It's just, well, it doesn't matter because he's not necessary in this situation. We can do fine without him. And I look at that and I go, what an unusual malady. And so I try to imagine what this new sobriety looks like. And I concede that there is a good deal of not drinking going on. And the best I can possibly imagine is that the restless, irritable and discontent has been reduced to semi-restless, irritble and discondent. And that the four horsemen of terror, bewilderment, frustration and despair that were pounding all over us are now circling at a reasonable distance. and that it's not as good as we'd like it, but it's not as bad as it was. And so we should be grateful for the pretty good life that we have. That's what I imagine the alternative might offer. This is just my own head imagining this. and Bill said that the biggest enemy of the best is the good that if something can be presented as pretty good better than it was it's just a tragedy that that is allowed to exist we have I think about my own life and how easy it is to get off course. All I have to do is tell one lie. Then I've got to tell another lie to cover up that lie and then I've Got to do this and the next thing you've deviated about this far and you've got a turn around and make a big correction and groups can do that and the fellowship can do that. And so I'm trying to suggest that there is a way of navigating AA's future. And it's so simple that it probably won't be used because alcoholics hate simplicity. They just hate it. Remember that? Just don't drink. Well, god damn, it's got to be more complicated than that. Just don' t drink. and so I'll offer this and then I'll shut up if anything that we're doing is taking us closer to God that's we're on course if whatever we're doing is taking us away from God we're off course there's only one beacon that will be permanent, one anchor that we can hold on to. And it has to be the central force. It has to be the one thing that never gets changed in AA. I agree there's all kinds of things that we might be able to change, but certainly not the anchor of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I just wanted to put a pitch in that if we're moving away from God, try to stop it. If we're going to move away from Christ, if we are moving closer to God, try to support it. Thank you all very much.