Forgiveness as the Spiritual Surrender the Alcoholic Ego Cannot Manufacture Alone – Mary S.

About This Speaker Tape

Mary S. from Charlotte, North Carolina tells her story with explosive humor and deep spiritual conviction. The baby sister of five alcoholic brothers, she grew up resenting alcohol and the poverty it caused her family. Her father was her everything — her protector, her Higher Power — and he put her on a train at 18 to pursue a dance career in New York. A doctor's suggestion to give her whiskey before a show lit the fuse, and within a decade she landed in Johns Hopkins with convulsions, DTs, and pneumonia, her dancing career finished.

Back home with a husband who never drank — a former POW she'd known since age eight — Mary's alcoholism accelerated through two pregnancies, a suicide attempt, and a five-month stretch of round-the-clock drinking. The morning of December 27, 1951, her husband found her on the bedroom floor in DTs and convulsions, took the children, and left. A phone call from a friend led her to dial AA, and within ten minutes her home was full of people who told her they loved her. Her husband, who had just taken out a large insurance policy expecting her to die, came home to find her surrounded by AA members instead of a corpse.

Mary rode a pink cloud for three years but refused to engage with Higher Power — her mother had used religion as a weapon. A restless craving nearly drove her to drink, but her Sunday school teacher and Oxford Group member Roland Jones introduced her to prayer through her own children. At an AA retreat she met Dr. Glenn Clark, and through a painful process of spiritual surrender, she forgave the criminally insane man who had beaten and shot her father to death. She eventually visited him in jail and told him Higher Power loved him and she forgave him — a moment that broke open a hardened detective standing nearby.

With eight years sober at the time of this talk, Mary delivers her message with the machine-gun timing of a seasoned performer and the unshakable faith of someone who walked through the worst kind of loss. Her little boys pray for her while she carries the message, and she closes with a poem about the good shepherd finding the little black sheep — which, she says, was her.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Introduction and opening jokes about confused drunk with misspelled sign
• 3:30 Childhood with five alcoholic brothers, flour-sack underwear, father as her only anchor
• 8:00 Leaves home at 18 for New York dance career, first drink of whiskey backstage on doctor's orders
• 12:00 Johns Hopkins hospitalization, return home on a stretcher as predicted, marriage to Pappy Sutton the POW
• 18:00 Pregnancies, military booze in the closet, second hospitalization while eight months pregnant
• 23:00 Father murdered by criminally insane man — her Higher Power is gone, emotional collapse and five months of 24-hour drinking
• 28:00 The 38 pairs of shoes, the suicide attempt, December 27 1951 bottom — husband leaves with the children
• 34:00 Phone call to AA, house fills with people, husband returns expecting her to be dead
• 40:00 Three years silent in AA, Roland Jones and the Oxford Group introduce her to prayer through her children
• 48:00 Forgiving her father's killer — AA retreat with Dr. Glenn Clark, visiting Earl in jail, the detective's tears, closing poem about the little black sheep