Dr. Bob’s Six Words: Trust Higher Power, Clean House, Help Others – Father M.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Number one, thank you for being here, and thank you for that lovely reception. Now, most of you are familiar with some of the work I've done and some of the films and the procedure that I normally follow. Now, if this were an ordinary talk, I would open with some jokes. St. Paddy's Day is just a couple of months off, and the Irish are famous for humor. And so I could tell a couple of stories like these. This Irishman went over to the Holy Land, and he is standing at the shore of the Lake of Galilee, at the Sea of Galilee. And he asked the boatman what it would cost to get him to the other side, and the fellow said, $350. He says, good heavens, I never heard of such a thing. The fellow said, you have to remember, this is the lake that our Lord walked on. He said, at them rates, it's no wonder he walked. Or, I can tell you about the Irishman who came home drunk and late. The wife was furious. She said, where have you been? He says, the cemetery. Oh, she said, who's dead? He said, all of them. Or, I could tell you about the fellow two weeks before Christmas who called the local. her story, said, case of bourbon, case of rye, case of scotch, case of vodka, case of gin, and 12 cases of beer. The fellow said, you must be preparing for a super Christmas party. No, I said, I'm trying to get up nerve enough to go to confession. Well, actually, I'm not going to start that way tonight. What I would like to do is what I have never done before, is read something to you. It's a letter. I was in the breakfast shop of a hotel in Hartford, Connecticut. I had given a talk up there the night before, and over coffee, I was reading the morning paper, and this struck my eye. Dear Ann Landers, I am writing this letter to turn on a light in the heads of parents who are living in the dark. I've discussed this with my friends and can tell you there are plenty of parents like that out there. I'm going to read it to you. I am a 17-year-old high school senior, an honor student, and active in student government and sports. I come from an upper-middle-class family. I'm the youngest child and the only girl. It bugs me that my parents think I am an innocent child, and they treat me like one. The truth is, parents today don't have any idea what their teenagers are really like and how much stress they are forced to deal with in their daily lives. In my own circle of friends, these kids are all considered decent, not trash. Two girls have had abortions. One had a baby and married three months later. Another has a stepfather who abuses her sexually. Two have attempted suicide. And another admitted to me that she is gay. As for me, I have had an affair with a married man. 17. We all drink liquor occasionally, but not to excess. And we have all smoked pot. Every person I have named is in the top 10% of our graduating class of more than 1,000 students. They are the last ones you would expect to be involved in the behavior I have described. If parents knew what their sons and daughters go through during adolescence, they would be able to communicate and deal with them better. And it is signed, you're a teenager. I mean, it impressed me so that I clipped it right out of the paper then. It's about three or four years ago. What I'd like to do tonight is to talk to you about some problems, some of which see mentioned and some solutions to them, all based on a sense of values, principles to live by rather than chemicals. It's an astounding thing. Well, one time, I was asked by a somebody connected with a medical school in Ohio to give the chalk talk, the ABCs of alcoholism to a college student. So here we go. I'm going to give it to you. Here we go. Here we go. class of first-year men in medical school. So I went and gave a talk. Invited to it were some local professional people, counselors and so on. Dr. Joe Persch was the other speaker that day. It was just a morning session. I gave the chalk talk. Dr. Persch gave a basic medical talk. When it was all over, they asked people to write out their little evaluation sheets, and one man, a counselor, wrote this. Well, he said, I was expecting to hear something new. Father Martin's personality was nice, but I heard the same old stuff. Of course he heard the same old stuff. Why is it that many people go to workshop after workshop, seminar after seminar, waiting to hear the bizarre and the novel magic answer to things? There is no such thing. Number one, I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, and I was in Gippsburg, giving talk to counselors. I was speaking to first-year medical students who had never heard anything about alcoholism, really. But there are so many people who are looking for the new gimmick that's going to be the ready-made answer to things. Walk into any airport or any drugstore, you're going to see tons of psychology books on some brand new theory about how to live life. First of all, before we find that out, let's look at some of the problems that people face today. If I were growing up in today's age that your children are growing up in, I don't know whether I could make it. I read this letter one time to a group of high school students, seniors, and they were involved in a leadership seminar. When the talk was over, I read the letter, gave a talk, and when it was over, the prettiest girl in the room came up to me sobbing. She said, you know, Father, I've been involved in most of that stuff that girl wrote about. She said, our parents do not have the foggiest notion of what we're living with today. And my heart goes out to a modern youngster because he's living in a kind of jungle. Let's see. Alcoholism, drug addiction, it's as common as breathing. You know as well as I do, teenage alcoholism is old hat. It begins in elementary school. It begins in high school. It begins in high school. It begins in high school. It begins in elementary school. I was talking with a physician in upper New York State who had treated a nine-year-old female for cirrhosis of the liver. I am convinced in my soul, I don't know her, I don't know her parents, but her parents almost have to be alcoholics. Where else can a nine-year-old drink? Teenagers can get it outside. A nine-year-old's got to drink it at home from a liquor cabinet that has to be almost overstocked. And to be able to drink in such a way as to do such damage to herself, what's the point of drinking? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. We have a they've got to be unconscious somewhere. Drugs. I read somewhere not too long ago where a kid in the fifth grade couldn't wait until he got to the eighth grade so he could smoke pot like his older brother. Marijuana, the harmless drug. I remember once in Los Angeles I was speaking to a recovered drug addict who had tried it all. And we were talking about a overdose. I remember once I was And we were together for exactly 100 miles in an automobile going to an airport. So we had a lot of time to talk to each other. And I said, tell me about marijuana, what's your honest opinion of it? And without hesitation, he said, Father, I've done them all. I've tried combinations of them all. He said, marijuana, in my opinion, is the most dangerous of them all. Uppers take you up, downers bring you down, hallucinogens paint pretty pictures, etc., etc., etc. Marijuana, depending on what is stuck into it, can do any one, any combination or none of the following. Then he made this statement. Marijuana smokers dream dreams and do nothing. They become like leaves in a stream. Where the water goes, they go. I was talking to two little girls down south a couple of years ago, one 16, one 17. Each. Each of them had a year recovery from alcohol and pot smoking. Tell me about it. They just said everything goes. Your ambition, gone. Self-respect, shot. Sleep anywhere with anybody. Memory, all but gone. Cocaine, have you ever heard some so-called medical experts say that cocaine is not addictive? Most of the cocaine addicts I've ever spoken to said they were. They were addicted from their first snort. And in the middle of a high, they were looking toward the next one. The destructive drug that has made covers of national magazines. If it isn't addictive, then what's the problem? Then we come to this thing of promiscuity, teenage pregnancy. Two nights ago, on local TV back home in Maryland, they made known that teenage pregnancies, highest in the city of Baltimore, in the country. That's the highest rate. Promiscuity, you know, the sexual freedom. Have you any notion of what it takes to make a girl give herself away in exchange for a pizza or a movie? It's the thing to do. There was an entire article, a cover article in Newsweek magazine, on teenage sex. And they quoted a girl in there. A 17-year-old girl. If you don't, you're odd. After you do, you're filth. In fact, out in Denver, there's a group of girls that wear great big buttons with no written on them. Saves a whole lot of conversation. Okay. Yes. Okay. Okay. There was a study done somewhere. They examined 500 drug addicts. 70% of them had been victims of incest. I remember once hearing a young lawyer in Hartford County, Maryland, say that in July of 76, he was involved in three court cases of incest. He said in the first case, the man was psychotic. The other two cases, alcoholism was involved. I got to thinking, Maryland is one of the tiniest of the 50 states. In our state, there are 23 counties. July is one out of 12 months. This is one-twelfth of one-twenty-third of one-fiftieth of the nation. You tell me how big the problem is. These were three cases that got to court. The damage done to children who are victims of incest, sometimes it's irreparable. One of the results of pregnancy, abortion. We kill humans by the ton because they'd probably be an embarrassment. Teenage depression. I didn't know what... When I was a kid, depression meant hard times. I lived in the 30s. And people had hard times getting jobs and keeping their families fed and clothed. That's what depression meant to me. But this depression that takes over so many teenagers, it very, very often leads to suicide. I remember one time when I was out in the Midwest, I was giving a talk, and I was told by the people there that they had to get a psychiatrist in from New York to speak to the entire neighboring communities. Because within... this is a farm area of our country. Within the past year, they had had seven... seven teenage suicides. I remember it was a few years ago, the first day of August, I remember I was in Seattle, between airplanes. I was going to Anchorage, Alaska, to take part in a school of alcohol studies. And I called home. And May answered the phone. I could tell as soon as she opened her mouth something was wrong. I said, what's the matter, May? She said, well, I... You know, how do you tell anybody except to tell them? She said, well, I'm... She said, I have some bad news for you. I said, what is that? She said, Pat is dead. I said, Pat who? She said, your nephew, Pat. Pat Hines, age 22, one hour before I had called, had put a shotgun to his chest and blew himself off the earth. So every family is torn apart with a lot of these things. Runaways. Are you all familiar with the work of Father Bruce Ritter up on Times Square? He takes care of runaway kids. And he has become so publicized that he has over... I don't know. I don't know. He's opened homes for them practically all around the world. South America. He has one in Houston I know of. He just wrote a letter about it. These are little kids, teens and pre-teens, who have run away from sexual abuse, physical abuse, or emotional battering from their homes. How do they survive? They sell themselves. It's all they've got to sell. Little teens and pre-teen boys and girls. Vandalism. When I was a kid, when most of you were. You know what vandalism was? Grabbing ahold of a neighbor's metal garbage can on Halloween and banging it out of shape. You know what vandalism is today? Five million dollars damage to a school. Desecration of cemeteries. Desecration of churches. You know, your blood almost turns to ice water when you hear that. Cults and devil worship. You want to hear one that, it really shocked me, it did. You remember that business in Guyana where 300 people committed suicide by drinking the poison under James Jones? Right after that, a friend of mine out in Ohio said, Do you know that since then there has been a marked rise in membership in the cults? I said, you're joking. And then we got to the heart of the matter. Why? Why? Ladies and gentlemen, our youngsters are so starved for absolute standards to live by. I'm positive they came to this conclusion. If that man can command such a following that people will die for him, he must have something. He must have something. And so they rushed to get in. Crime? Look at the statistics. Listen to the facts on evening TV. Then we come to this business of, what do they call it, situational ethics, where each of us becomes his own pope and we all create our own morality. It's, in my opinion, it's a kind of an ah morality. It's just, it hasn't anything to do with morality. We each set our own standards. There was a song, I just heard the line the other day. Oh, you know that song, You Light Up My Life? There's a line in there. It can't be wrong because it feels so good. Everything bad feels good. And you know this philosophy, do your own thing? That's what that's based on. And I've told audiences all over the place, if I did my own thing, I'd be in jail in about 15 to 20 minutes. So would you. So would you. Do your, you know that philosophy? Do your, you know that philosophy of do your own thing? It has backfired. It really has. Do you want some proof of that? We are the sophisticates of the world, are we not? We live in the 80s. We live in an era where in the past 50 years, the human race has made more progress than they have in all the preceding centuries. We've got it together. And yet, you walk down any street in any town and shake any hand, it'll belong to a councilor or a counselee. I believe the whole country's in treatment for something. Isn't that right? A-A-N-A-G-A-E-A-B-B-D-P-H-C, my God, name it. See, everybody belongs to groups somewhere. I wonder how together we are. You know what happens when we lay down our own rules of moral behavior? Let's take sex. Well, what right does the Pope or the Church or the law or parents, what right does anybody have to lay down their own rules of moral behavior? What right does anybody have to lay down laws for my sexual behavior? After all, you can't turn it on and off by an act of your will. So a young fellow was talking to me about that one day. I said, hey, Lou, you just got married, didn't you? He said, yes. And you enjoy marriage? Oh, he said, I love it. I said, just supposing, for the sake of discussion, you go to San Francisco for three weeks. Your work takes you there. Your wife is at home. All of a sudden, she feels sexual urges, and you're not there. Is she not free to choose a sexual partner? Well, no. I said, well, why? Didn't you say you can't turn it on or off? You have gotten her used to having a sexual partner, but you're not there? Yeah, but I mean, she's, listen to this, she's, why? She took those vows, as I did. I said, yeah, but you yourself just said those. You know, what's marriage? It's nothing but a piece of paper. And after a while, people can get tired of each other, and you make your choices, and, you know, we're free, aren't we? I said, yeah, everybody but your wife, and you are the one who is shackling her freedom because of you. No church can, no government can, no law can, no parents can, but all of a sudden, you can deprive another young fellow of your freedom. You can deprive another human being of the freedom you've been screaming for. Start off with a screwy premise, and you'll come to a nutty conclusion. Is there any answer to these things? Yes. But they don't come from outside. If you're like me, have you ever done this? Have you ever made this statement? Well, I went to him, and that doctor didn't help me. He didn't get me well. Have you ever gone to a psychologist or psychiatrist? Here's my own mental thoughts about that. I've got a problem. And I take the problem, and I walk into his office, and I place it on his desk, and I say, there's my problem. Now, you get me well. It doesn't work that way. The only thing those people do is make suggestions. I have to get me well by following directions. Ladies and gentlemen, do you know what governs all, all of creation? Law. Because it is law that establishes order. And no community of anything, whether they're ants or lions or humans, can get along without order. And the only thing that protects order is regulation. And law. It is law that creates true freedom. There are laws of gravity, laws of physics, laws of geometry, laws of mathematics. Understanding that those laws are there and that they are absolutes, that they will not change, is what makes men and women climb into a spacecraft with all the confidence in the world that those laws will remain while they go shooting off at 17,000 miles an hour and sleep part of the while. And they're doing it. Laws govern everything. They have to. They have to. When you're building a house, you depend on gravity to hold things where they are. You depend on physics and geometry to hold true while you just go about following directions and building a house. There are also laws to live by. Laws governing behavior. The rightness and wrongness of behavior. Do this. Don't do that. What's the result? Happiness. Happiness because it's a result of order. Now I'm going to prove that. Break the laws and see what happens. Many of us here are in the treatment business. You know what we see walking in? Crushed human beings. Crushed. Battered and beaten in body, mind, emotion, and soul. Because even against their wills, they have broken the law of ingesting chemicals. Now for those who are addicted, they can't do that. They can't help it. But many people who deliberately choose to lie, to cheat, to steal, to break the rules of sex, to do all those things, ultimately wind up miserable. And in treatment, we tell people if you keep the rules, certain things will happen. If you don't keep the rules, certain things will happen. How do we learn that keeping the rules will result in a result? Keeping the rules will result in happiness. It came into being through an organization known as Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935. Two men were at the bottom of the well. They had reached a point in their lives where they had a jump to touch bottom. They were not in denial. They weren't playing cutesy with the truth. They knew what was wrong with them. If they continued to drink, they would die. All they wanted to do was survive. And they had tried everything suggested. One of the co-founders of AA was a man by the name of Bill Wilson. And on his last hospital stay, he said to his doctor, in effect, he must have, he said, you know as well as I do, I'm not weak-willed. He said, I've tried everything that you've suggested to me. And he said, here I am, sick and drunk, hungover again. And then, ladies and gentlemen, he asked the question whose answer holds within itself the answer to every human problem. I wonder if I might not get well by trying to help somebody else get well. Self-preservation is always the first law of nature. Always. I wonder if I might not get well sober. How? Commitment to others. And his physician, a Dr. Silkworth, said, must have been kind of disheartening. I don't know. But since nothing beats a trial but a failure, why don't you try? And he did. And by going out and trying to help other alcoholics get sober, it kept him sober even though they didn't get well. Commitment to others, he discovered, was the clue to personal fulfillment, which is directly against the philosophy, do your own thing. He was trying to do somebody else's thing in order to help himself. And it was working. Then when he met Dr. Bob and the two of them got together and began sharing their lives, I give you myself, I share my life with you, he helped that man get sober, and by doing it, he helped himself get sober. And so, they created, well, they brought into being a therapy that is the most scientific of them all. Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you know why it is so scientific? They use pure laboratory technique. They didn't begin with a theory, they simply wanted to survive. What they did, they were searching for the unknown, they accepted every suggestion made, and they kept what worked. They came up with 12 principles. You know what the 12 principles were? Principles of living that had been around for centuries. They didn't create them, they simply rediscovered what was already there. Probably what their parents were living by, what my parents lived by, and what I knew to be the truth. They simply proved it. . . . by using them to survive. And you know, I won't go into the 12 steps, but you know what Dr. Bob's six-word summary is. Trust God, clean house, help others. You see, you and I are human beings. We are created to love. We are created to love God and neighbor as we love ourselves, and those 12 principles make right again these three relationships that have been so damaged by backward living. . . . I've often said this, my friends, and you have found . . . I am absolutely certain you have found it to be true. It's hard to be good, even when it's easy. Now drug your brain with alcohol or other drugs for 5, 10, 15, or 20 years and see where you wind up. In a moral garbage pit. And that is the source of most human misery. I've seen people dying of cancer who are happy. I've seen people who are poor, but who are happy. But no one can kick around law of any kind without repercussions. It just can't be done. It can't be done. So these men discovered through trial and error the validity of absolute principles that have always held. You know what they boil down to, basically, the golden rule? Do to others what you would have them do to you. Alcoholics Anonymous puts it this way, Live and let live. You can prove this to yourselves. Do it and see what happens. Try not doing it and see what happens. And you won't need me to say a word. Some children are fortunate because they have parents who try to imbue these principles into them. Some children are lucky because they have parents who not only verbally teach it, but who live it. Some children are lucky because they have parents who look them right in the eye and say, It is perfectly all right to pray. It's perfectly all right to read books. There's nothing wrong with that. You remember that absolutely horrible tale of a kid who graduated from high school. He said, Here's my diploma, Pop. Read it to me. Couldn't read. High school graduate, couldn't read. It's perfectly all right to turn off a TV set. I have actually seen this on TV. Panels, groups of grown people like you. These TV producers have a real obligation to us not to put trash on TV. Oh, come off it. It's your house, it's your TV set. If you don't want your kids to watch it, turn it off. But Muslims don't have guts enough to do that because our kids wouldn't like us if we did. So we want somebody else to pick up the tab. There are rules to live by. When I break them, I'm unhappy. And when I live them, I'm happy. My own mother's a perfect case of that. She died penniless. She died a happy woman. She had a hard life. I know people who have money and easy life and everything else, but they get into addiction and they're miserable. Some of them die miserable. I know people who kick out, I mean kick them out, all the rules of morality and live miserable. It's unreal. All right, we know, we know that there are certain rules to live by. You can take the golden rule. You can take live and let live. You can take the Ten Commandments. Respect the rights of God. Respect the rights of Caesar. Whatever. They've been around for centuries. We all know them. Now, let's get to the heart of the matter. What is going to make people want to do that? Nobody's going to make me happy. The rules are there. It's up to me to get in touch with them and to will to do them. What's going to motivate me to do that? One thing and one thing only. The way I value myself. What do I think of me? The bottom line is, I hate that expression, but it is the bottom line. I am a human being. I have a mind. I have emotions. I have a will. It is that. The sum total of those three that I call my soul, that's what makes me God-like. And we human beings are at the top of the hierarchy of all creatures. We are the ones who rule. We are the ones who run the world. We are the ones who are now beginning to control space. Oh, every now and then God lets us know where we really stand when he kicks us with a flood or a volcano or a few goodies like that. But nonetheless, we are the brains who have put men into space, who have discovered electricity, who have channeled it. All the wonderful things we take for granted. We are human beings. My friends, the mind is what makes me God-like. And it is not meant to go through its life drugged and out of commitment. And out of commission. It just isn't. At the basis of it all is how I respect myself. What do you think of yourself? What are you worth? I was talking to a school principal in Alabama who said that periodically as he goes through the school, he doesn't embarrass anybody. He waits until he sees a single student, boy or girl. And he just walks up and says, what do you think of yourself? Are you a decent, nice person? And he says, strangely enough, a lot of them just stand and stare and think. And he says, strangely enough, a lot of them just stand and stare and think. A friend of mine in Ohio, he runs a treatment center for youngsters. He has them either in a word, a sentence, a paragraph, or a page. Kind of describe themselves. Universally. Universally. They come up with a single concept among a whole lot of others. Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt for the way they live. You know those two little girls I was telling you about down south? I said, okay, you were well enough off. You had money enough for pot and alcohol and everything else. What made you want to get well? And they almost yelled, guilt! We were living like pigs. And we couldn't stand it. You see, when I do my own thing, I wind up pig-like. And I often wonder if that is not an insult to swine. But we do wind up that way, don't we? When we kick the rules around. Guilt made them want to get out. What do you think of yourself? You know, there's a man in my neighborhood, when I was a youngster, he used to put it this way. Margarine covers the bread, but it ain't butter. And I said, well, I don't know. And I like butter. What do you reach for in your life? Really, what do you reach for in your own life? Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA, you know what he put down as the ideal AA life? The good is too often the enemy of the best. When I settle for anything, even though it's good, if I've settled, I've settled. And it prevents me from seeking that which is better. Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of you know me. I'm 61 years old. Do you want to know what I'm worth? I'm worth the best. And I've said to people, and I mean this, if you don't have it, get out of my way. I'll go around you. I'll go over you. I'll go through you to someone who has it. I have been taught that as a human being and a child of God, I am worth the best. And I'll die trying to achieve it, to attain it. What do you think of yourself? Let me share a couple of stories from actual human lives that says something about personal wealth. A friend of mine said he was in Chicago. He wanted to go to an AA meeting and a black lady said, I'll take you tonight. Let's meet such and such. And when he met her, she was terribly, terribly nervous. And he said, what's wrong? She said, well, I promised to take you to a meeting, but a young girl I've been working with insists on seeing me and she's in trouble. He said, let's go. So they met this young girl in a bar, a very sleazy place on the south side of the city. They walked in. 23 years old, black, sober, three months. Her background, a loner and a prostitute. She sold herself to survive. Her problem, she's sober now three months and can't stand it. Before, she was paralyzed drunk. But she said, I don't want to hear any God talk. She was so scared of God, she says, there is none. And her sponsor said, it's the only thing I know to talk about. It's what AA teaches us. She said, I want to hear it. And they kept growing farther and farther apart. And this man was hearing something in her that desperately wanted to come out. And he waited until the two of them hit a moment of silence. And he looked at the girl and he said, well, it is the only life you know. Why do you want out? He says, she came roaring right out of the chair. Because I'm worth too much. Boy, she knew that. She didn't know what she was worth. But her sobriety had given her a faint inkling that she was worth more than what she was in. And ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure she found it, ultimately. Not too long ago, I was down in Annapolis. I had just had the privilege of speaking to some midshipmen. And afterwards, I was talking to a commander who was on the faculty and a captain who was a Navy pilot. He said, you know, the commander said, I'm not going to talk to you. The commander said, Bob and I didn't drink for six straight years. I said, good heavens, what occasion is that? He said, we were POWs at the time in Hanoi. And I asked them if they minded talking about it. And they said, no. We were talking about values, this talk I had just given. You know what that commander said? He said, let me tell you something, Father. Part of their torture was pain. They were torturing me. They were tortured for six years. Part of their torture was having their faces shoved into buckets of vomit and unable to wash for six to eight months at a time. He said, you know, Father, when you live that way, and you own absolutely nothing but about half of your underwear, you better have a grab bag of values that you can dig into. When you're tempted to doubt if it's all worth it, when you're tempted to dump your patriotism, when you're tempted, just tempted to believe the propaganda, he said, you'd better have some values. Up in the Bronx, a lot of Latins were redoing a lot of the burned-out apartments so they could have homes to live in. They had professional carpenters, electricians, and so on, teaching them how. And this was on a TV program. And the camera zeroed in on it. The camera zeroed in on a little 19-year-old girl who was laying tile on the floor of a kitchen in one of these places. And the interviewer, I think it was Bill Moyers, he said, you're taking great pains with that. Why? She said, because this one is going to be mine. My home. My home. What are you worth? Are you worth the best? I look youngsters right in the eye and say, if you think you're a garbage can, you're going to treat yourself that way. You'll dump anything into yourself. You know, your own self-evaluation, how it comes out to people like me, it's how you appear, how you sound, and what you are reaching for. It's who you hang out with. It's what you hold up to me to look at and listen to. What are you worth? We have the standards, we have the principles to live by, but do I think enough of myself to want to grasp them and live them and be everything that I can and should be? If I do, I can walk tall all my life. One time in a treatment center I met a little fellow. I'm short, but he only came up to my shoulder. He said, I have the same name as you, but my first name is different. It's John. I said, well, John, we've talked for a while. I said, well, so long, John. Walk tall. And he looked at me and he said, me? And I said to him what I say to everybody and what I can say to you right now. You don't have to be tall to walk tall. And I would hope to God that every one of you in this room learns to do so. I want to read you another passage. I want to read you another letter that came to me, and I'll finish with this. It's about a man who truly grasped basic facts of human life. Listen to it. Dear Father Martin, Enclosed, please find a check for $50 to go toward the renovation of Ashley. This money, $46 of it, was in my 17-year-old son's billfold when he took over the house. When he committed suicide. You see, Father, he was a drug addict and an alcoholic since he was ten years old. We sent him to treatment three times, but for some reason, he was unable to cope with life. All I am asking, Father, is that if it is possible for you to remember him specially in your prayers and mass, God bless you and your work sincerely. This was written by a man from Sioux City, Alabama. This is a letter to you. from Sioux City, Iowa. Do you know what he knew? He was a grieving father, but he didn't let it destroy him. He knew that his son is sober now, with no more battles to fight, no more drunks to get over, no more near-misses driving a car drunk, no more agony, no more aloneness. He knew that his son was safe in the arms of the God who had made him, and this man was grateful for that. And he allowed his son to help save other lives through a posthumous contribution that might help. That man, in my opinion, walks very tall. I hope you do. Thank you and good night. applause Rate Here Pod.com K scotscili sacrosanct Mattoаков space station Colorado Center, começa arbeiten Turn 12 27 15 Canberra City, Iowa miracles This któ yeah! Dome by Michael Boecki Thanks for watching. Thank you.