Action of Step 1 Lives in Step 2 — Without It the Steps Are Mental Gymnastics – Vaughan Q.
About This Speaker Tape
Father Vaughan Q. opens with self-deprecating humor about being a Roman Catholic priest who got caught drinking when he tried to say Mass in English — it only took 362 days after ordination. He spent 57 weeks locked up at Our Lady of Mercy in Dyer, Indiana, the twitch farm, wearing a paper honeymoon jacket among 200 psychotics. With medical school, seven years with the Oblate Fathers, and a string of degrees behind him, he arrived at AA certain he was too educated for it — until a nurse named Felicita, who had played defensive end for the Chicago Bears for nine years, told him to go anyway.
The tape is a Step One workshop. Quinn works through four words he says the first step requires: hitting bottom, surrender, ego deflation, humility. Hitting bottom, he insists, has nothing to do with skid row or smashed fenders — it's the moment reality speaks loud enough that the person stops lying to themselves. Surrender goes deeper than acceptance, which still leaves too much I in the equation. He pounds on the difference between compliance (going through the motions while steaming inside) and real internalization. He spent eleven months in therapy still pulling the same trick he had pulled in high school and seminary — looking like the best patient on the outside while his gut stayed over-and-against — until a doctor said, Father, you have just told me you are powerful over alcohol, go back and start all over.
His central teaching: the action of each step is found in the next step. One's action is in Two, Two's in Three, all the way through. Without action the steps are mental gymnastics, intellectual assent to doctrine, dogma, and definition, which is not where life is lived. He reframes spiritual awakening through William James as an educational process — leading out of the person a hierarchy of values gone dormant: self-worth, dignity, enthusiasm, love. He warns against magic, against the best 12-stepper in the group who gave his Big Book to his first pigeon eight years ago and just had a slip.
He closes the morning session with two columns — depressed, guilty, worried, ashamed, powerless, walled off on one side, at peace, worthy, loved, enthusiastic, wanted, alive on the other — and tells the room to ask which column they actually live in. That, he says, is where you are with Step One, not the drunk-a-log.
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