Higher Power Became Personal Not Because I Believed but Because I Repeated Words I Didn’t Mean – Jay P.
About This Speaker Tape
Jay P. shares his story at the 43rd Kansas Convention in 2000 with 26 years of sobriety. He describes a childhood consumed by fear, lying, stealing, and institutionalization from age eight through seventeen, all before ever taking a drink. Born in a Cleveland suburb, he was labeled a gifted child by a nun named Sister Lisa in first grade, but the moment he heard he was smart, his education stopped. He traces the roots of his alcoholism through character defects that predated drinking — dishonesty he considered a gift, theft he rationalized as generosity, and a rage he thought was normal.
His first drink at thirteen behind some bushes with stolen money and Thunderbird wine produced a transformative relief from lifelong fear, and he chased that feeling for the next seventeen years. He cycled through a reformatory, six months in the Navy ending in a psychiatric discharge, and a merchant marine career where three hundred ships meant three hundred chances to get fired. He married a woman he met in a bar after a twenty-minute courtship, made promises to her and her two small children he was powerless to keep, and watched hope drain from her eyes every time she smelled liquor on his breath at the airport.
Blackballed from the Merchant Marines in 1973 for chronic alcoholism, he knocked on his father's door in 1974 and said for the first time in his life, "I think I have a problem drinking." His father, sober since 1959 through Rosary Hall and AA, had waited years with a Big Book inscribed inside. His sponsor Jimmy gave him three simple daily actions — a morning prayer, a meeting, and a bedtime prayer — and two weeks later asked the question that made Higher Power personal: when was the last time you went this long without a drink? Jay worked the steps in a year and a half and three days with his sponsor John, discovering through his fourth step inventory that every resentment contained his own part in the wrong.
Jay closes with three amends stories that span decades. He rebuilt a relationship with his mother through weekly phone calls over twenty-five years, and she died in 1999 calling him the best son a mother could have. His father died of cancer in 1981, leaving a letter celebrating Jay's sobriety as proof of a loving Higher Power who returned a lost son. His wife, an Al-Anon member who suffered a massive stroke in 1994, died on July 12, 2000, just before their son's wedding in Mexico. He found a locked box on her dresser containing a prayer that ended with "all my love" — a depth of relationship with Higher Power he had never reached himself. He concludes that gratitude means preserving the program exactly as it was given, so there is always a place for the next drunk who has nowhere else to go.
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