Jumping to Conclusions Is One of My Favorite Indoor Sports 😂 – Joe M.

Good evening. This is the fifth, pardon the expression, segment of our series, and it has to do with the fifth step of AA, considered by some to be the most difficult. I once heard a man say that the value of steps four and five will come only after they are done. If people could realize the import of these steps, there would be no question about their doing them. Many people fight these steps, bring up all kinds of lame-brained excuses for not doing them for many years, and I believe that the basic reason people do not do them is pure fear. Simple, pure fear. They're difficult. They're horribly difficult. This one is a real dilly. Admitted to God? To ourselves and to another human being. The exact nature of our wrongs. I think you can see from the very wording of the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous that it is a deadly serious, deadly painful set of things to do, and usually I think we have to attain some measure, some measure of a desire to be grown. I think we have to be grown up in order to do them. They're tough, and this is perhaps the toughest of all. I have heard brave men and women say that they sweat bullets before doing this one. I heard a man ask a friend, a good friend of his, to hear his fifth step, and he said, I knew even as I asked him if he would hear my fifth step. That after I had done it, I would have lost a friend, for he said, if anyone on this earth really knows me, they wouldn't speak to me. Well, of course, the opposite happened, because for that man it took a great deal of humility to do his fifth step at all. We are asked to admit to God because he's the one who established the moral law that we've kicked around. That shouldn't be too hard to do because he knows anyway. To admit to ourselves is a little bit more difficult. It's a terrible thing to look yourself in the mirror and even try to say out loud you are perhaps the most self-centered thing I've ever encountered. Awfully, awfully, awfully difficult to admit to self exactly what I am. To another human being? Come on! Even the great saints tried to tell us that they were the greatest sinners. Even the just man stumbles all over the place. You know what I've said so many times? It's hard to be good even when it's easy. Now you drug your brain and drug your conscience for 10 or 15 years and see what kind of a pigsty you wind up in. You're asking me to admit to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs? Yes. Why? Because for some reason or other it's healing and nobody knows why except God established it that way. Have you ever gone on a retreat with a group of people and you're usually out in some setting of maybe a religious house in the country where the setting is simply beautiful and you're kind of walking on a hillside or a mountain or through the woods with somebody else and you find yourself bearing your entire soul to somebody else? And somehow or other it cleans, it cleanses. You're all familiar with the fact that we Catholics have what we call the sacrament of penance in which you go to a priest and tell your sins. Somehow or other, you know, I mean apart from the purely doctrinal and the spiritual end of it, the purely psychological part of it, bearing one's soul to another human being somehow or other has a great cleansing and healing effect to it. But the doing of it is horrible. It's absolutely horrible. The exact nature of my wrongs. I keep my goodies to myself. You know, what I've got, what I haven't got and what has to go. I keep the good points to myself. This step has to do with cleaning up my wrongs. I share with another the exact nature of my wrongs. Now, how do I take this step? I ask another human being if he'll be willing to go through six or eight weeks of nauseating. No. I ask another human being if he's willing to hear me. May I suggest that even though you can fulfill that step by asking anybody, if you want to gain something from your past, why not go to someone who understands the human soul and who can help you with your wrongs? We have made it possible for people to go to clergymen if they so choose. They may choose fellow AA's if they so choose. They can go to anybody, they can pick anybody. And that's the way it should be. That's called freedom of conscience. You should be free to choose the one person and other single human being to whom you bear your soul. How many of you in this room right here would want any human being, any other human being, any human being of your choice, some saint, your mother, some good friend, to see one single 24-hour period of your life on a screen? Every thought, every judgment. I've often said one of my favorite indoor sports is jumping to conclusions. We're all good at that. I wouldn't want you to see my best day up here. And we're asked to bear the exact nature of the wrongs of our entire lives to one other human being. Ladies and gentlemen, that is humiliating. It's horribly humiliating. But humiliation is the surest path to humility. It makes me see what I have become. And for what it's worth, and it's worth a tremendously great deal in the healing of a human soul, that for as long as he or she lives, there is one other human being on this earth that knows the real me. There's great therapy in that. And this isn't something that you can choose to do or not do. Bill and Dr. Bob came up with a skeletal plan of life of 12 things. Please believe this, please. They were interested in survival. And if it could be done on 10 steps, that's all there'd have been. If they could have done it on four, that's all there would have been. These steps are essential. And I once heard a man say, I do not do them because they are nice. I do them because they are necessary. And the thing that is going to get you or anybody else on this earth well is this. You come to the doors of AA, and you say, I want what you've got. And they say, if you want what we've got, then you do what we did. And if you can come into treatment or into AA with this attitude, I am here, I place myself in your hands, I will do whatever you suggest that I do. I truly believe that you can get well. But ladies and gentlemen, from this point on, from this point on, you will breathe the clear air of decency again. You know the serenity prayer, we speak so much of serenity. In my opinion, serenity is nothing more than peace of conscience. I am now, now, living the way I know God wants me to live. I've got to be peaceful about it. And so the rest of these steps, making amends, continuing to take inventory, praying, admitting being wrong, trying to help others, these things now are almost easy. Because I've climbed over the biggest hurdle of them all. I've let one other person in on the real me. There's great healing in that. And every human being who approaches the door of AA simply wants to be well, simply wants to be happy, wants to be free of despair, wants, like every soul that was ever created, to hope, wants to be good, and wants to share life with somebody else. There is almost a burning anxiety in every recovered addict to try to get every other addict well. You're like a swimmer who has just burst the surface of the water after having been submerged to a point where you think your lungs have burst. You're breathing the free air of sobriety. You're like the thirsty man drinking of the well of sobriety. You're like the blind man who is being given the sight of the beautiful garden of sobriety. And God, how you want everybody to have it. I hope that it will be yours. It can be. All it takes is a desire to be well, a willingness to do what needs to be done, and the ability to count from one to twelve. Good night.