Larry K. on the Disease of Hurt and Using the AA Program as an Antidote

There's a town in England up in the hills but with great foresight saw the air pollution problem, the whole ecology crisis that we're living through in so many areas today. They saw it 40 years ago. They thought also that the combustion engine was probably with the most of the main contributor to the future problem and they had an all-day town meeting on it and immediately banned the combustion engine forever from the town. You can't own an automobile in the town, you can't drive an automobile even as a tourist through the town you have to go way around it. They quickly decided that it ought to be banned but they had a lot of trouble coming up with what they were going to use then for transportation for themselves and to carry things around and it took all day haggling back and forth until finally at the end of the day they settled way back then right down to today on the donkey it's the only means of transportation and it's very crucial you need some way to get around and to carry things should you ever visit the town because of how important donkeys are in their economy if you look real carefully if you really study it up close you'll see that every old man has his own ass and every old lady has her own ass the young gals have asses and the young guys have ass is because they needed to get around. Everybody in town has their own ass. And because it's so important, people are pushing their ass and pushing their ass, and if you push your ass hard enough it breaks down. But you need an ass. I mean think of what life would be like without it, how uncomfortable it would be. So when somebody's ass breaks down they borrow somebody else's. Now I'm sure you could see that nobody else's ass is ever going to move fast enough for you. So what you do is you prod it a little bit in public, and this has led to a lot of fights, because nobody likes to have their ass kicked in public by a stranger. I think with just a little bit of thought you'll understand that people are pretty much the same anywhere you go. So a young gal will park her ass where it doesn't belong and a local cop has to come around and pinch it. Once a year, because they're so important to the economy, everybody parades their ass in public. And they try to pick the best looking ass in town. I don't know if you've studied asses but there's a lot of variety to them. They're not all the same. Politicians are the same and you'll see the local mayor kissing ass for votes, you know, just right across the board. People are peddling ass because you got to have one. I mean, you just got to. So this is very important. Come Sunday morning, everybody hauls their ass off the church. And what leads to the story I'm sharing with you, that particular Sunday, that town was hit by an earthquake right in the middle of the Catholic mass. And everybody ran out instantly to save their ass except for the priest. He had parked his ass along the side of the church and the windows there were broken and he jumped through the window hoping to land on his ass he didn't know that that's where the main crevice of the earthquake was and he fell into the crevace proving that even a priest cannot tell his ass from a hole in the ground i'm larry kowalski i'm an alcoholic and as we've heard i'm a priest and i'm here because I couldn't tell my ass from a hole in the ground in any which possible way at all. It is really a pleasure being here, very, very much. I've experienced a lot of friendship. I've experience a lot growth. I'm Polish as the name Kowalski seems to show but it's real weird. I'm so screwed up I don't have a drop of Polish blood from the Kowalski side. That's true. I've got Polish blood form another side. Tell you how Polish I am. I live near Lawton, Oklahoma, and having been invited to come down here where I could have because of how kind y'all would be flown down. I volunteered to drive thinking that Odessa was approximately five miles, five hours in drive from Lawton Oklahoma. After we decided to drive down, I pulled a map out and I kept scouring the middle of Texas for Odessa. And I wondered how a city that large was left off my map. And then I started wondering further over. This is the only time I've had the pleasure of being this far out up till now I've been in level and in Del Rio and it's a real real treat to be here If I don't forget I want to comment on the speakers who went before me as I get into the theme that I'd like to share with you I haven't found it necessary to take a drink or a mood changing chemical of any kind today Or any today since May the 21st 1972 Immediately before my birthday this year my 12th birthday I had one of the most momentous days I've ever had in the program I don't have the time to share it all with you Four different speakers made me confront every single thing that alcoholism and that Alcoholics Anonymous are together in my life But I was at a meeting on a Saturday morning and a drinking drunk came in And in the course of the meeting he had to confess to us that he had been drinking already that morning The meeting began about 10 o'clock And after he got this out of his system And there was like about a two-minute silence, 20-second silence. And the next person began talking. And he just had to break in. And he broke out shouting, it hurt. And I think that's one of the most important things I've heard at any meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in about the last two or three years. And it's something that I forget and a lot of other people have a tendency to forget. I want to describe what I was like before I began drinking. And the phrase, it hurts, describes my life at that time. then I found alcohol I consider my alcoholism that hurting and I found alcohol and alcohol was a solution for my hurt and I think a lot of us often forget that it worked and it worked better than anything else that I had found up until that time in my life anything else besides the program the tragedy of alcoholism for me came at that time symbolized by this guy who is drunk crying out at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting it hurt when alcohol stopped working and started bringing new pain in I needed it to drug me to the hurt that I had I could not live with it and I couldn't live without it and there was more hurt coming up. I would like then also I hope there will be time to show you how the steps of our program are individually designed to deal with hurt in my life and I believe in yours and each of them look at a different facet the hurt that I experienced and together they're sort of the antidote that I really was seeking for this type of pain. I hurt, and the answer for my hurt is the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, the steps and the loving God that they bring me to experience. And I think we've been privileged to observe that hurt shared by people so well. Madeleine began with the contrast between the time of her drinking and when she even gave us as we've heard today you know the time in the treatment centers when the DTs came in and experiencing the pain that she was walking through and the joy of life today. She hurt, and she isn't hurting now. I really enjoy hearing Hank because I believe he paints the monotony of the hurt that we have when we're drinking better than anyone else that I've ever had hurt in the beauty of going through just those two days back to back, and it doesn't need great things car accidents and other things that are the dramatic the hurt is in the day-to-day breathing for me and i'm sure for many of you and i really experienced and appreciated hearing that ramona and i have been very great friends and we saw the pain that she had walked through so very very long and how that pain just made her take her anger out on everybody in her own family there's just so much hurt that she was dumping it on her children and the scars that her children had and that hurt spreads and that hurts therefore for me is what my disease is and i think what a lot of your disease is in our program is the answer before i get into talking on that though let me just share i am a catholic priest i am on active assignment i have i'm the pastor of three parishes now that sounds great until you know one of them has 40 people the second has 100 written the third has 140 i'm living in the town of sterling oklahoma it has about 600 people so i'm not exactly the success story of in the eyes of the catholic church in oklahona i don't use the title father in aa at all and i don'T dress as a priest because the disease that i have is not a disease that strikes from the level of my being a christian it's a disease that strikes on my level of being a person and whatever separates me from anyone else is going to separate me from the solution. I saw this lesson in the life of someone else when I first came into our program. I was in a military town, and we had a man who was a Colonel John until he got drunk and came back as John. And anything that separates us, that makes me want to be different, that caters to that, but you don't understand I'm different, is a threat to my serenity and to my sobriety. And therefore, for my sake, if you meet me in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I will ask you to call me what I am. just larry because that's how we share that's how we understand each other i'm not ashamed of my priesthood i have some troubles occasionally in some areas of functioning in the church but i'm very proud of ministering the love that i've experienced here the god that i first found in the program to people in and through the church i also feel free because of my profession to make a comment on a problem that a lot of people face, and that is, shouldn't you be in church this morning rather than here? And a lot OF sincere Christians will feel that somehow we can't be the answer. Now there are some people whose religious views will be a little different, so I can't talk with them, who believe that any disease can be handled by faith alone. but i personally feel that the reason that i belong first here and then can go to church is that i have a terminal disease and i can't talk with people who see alcoholism as a weakness but i can talk with People who are willing to say that it's a disease and I believe my God can and does heal diseases directly. I've been involved in two extraordinary actions when I was just the instrument and didn't even have faith in what was happening and someone that I know in the program was instantly healed of a throat malignancy. So I know God can touch diseases directly, but I also believe my God has given us because he does want to heal a normal way to healing and that's medicine. I believe medical science is the result of God unfolding for the human mind the secrets of the healing powers of his universe. And if I had an attack of appendicitis right now and you started taking me to church to pray, I would hope I'd have the power to slug you out so I could be taken to a hospital. Because if God has said the normal way to handle appendicitis is in a hospital, and I drive to the church and say, heal me here. I believe it's not going to work because my God doesn't take orders well. I believe my God has offered the world a solution to the disease of alcoholism, and it's the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Churches work for three percent, medicine works for three procent, psychiatry works for three Prozent, and we have a guaranteed program. if i go to church and i tell god aware that he has offered a normal way to handle this disease you handle it now through church he isn't going to listen to me i also believe very much in following the guidance of god i give spiritual direction to a man who has been sober for 11 years one year behind me and really in essence never been a member of alcoholics anonymous god brought him to a church and he is healed through active membership in that church and he must continue to share what he's received with the people there i believe if he made our program the basis of his sobriety he'd probably get drunk because god gave him a direction i want you to be active in church god brought me to the program of alcoholics anonymous and once i'm sober if i switch my base i'm telling god that i'm not going to read the guidance he gave me and i had a tremendous person in our church tell me that that's how i came into this insight he said you know looking at the pattern of your life, nothing short of a direct message from God should cause you to put your church before your program. In the program I find God and then I go to church and I thank him. And I believe there are certain times when newcomers in our program should stay away from church. I feel very free to talk about this to Catholics because most Catholics by the time they come to the program are in their second or their third or their fourth marriages and they know that they belong to a church that they are taught says they should only have one marriage and they turn their life and their will over to God and they go running back to church and they get hit with a ton of guilt the last thing that the God of love and of freedom and of acceptance that I've experienced through this program I feel once for and the way I equate that with a disease is that if I were operated on for appendicitis on Saturday I'm not supposed to be in church on Sunday my stitches are too weak and when I first come to this program I have emotional stitches and I think they're too weak and it takes a certain amount of time for those stitches to heal before I can really share in a good way and thank God there are some other religions i won't name them because i'm not part of them that i feel people really should also stay away from for a while religions that would hold that drinking and gambling and smoking and dancing are wrong because where is the person who comes here you can't get here without drinking and rare is the alcoholic and certainly isn't me i am not saint joe with a drinking problem i've heard some priests who drank and that's all they did that's not me i've done it all and if i didn't do it it's because i couldn't get around to it or hadn't thought about it i broke every single rule i had and i broke them as often as i could and i did it because i needed it i did for what i told you i hurt and to go to church then and be hit with this wall of guilt before my healing starts can sometimes be some somehow upsetting now this morning if you're sitting here hurting at all there's enough of us here that there's about i'd say like a fifth of us have a real hurt in our lives i hope you can kind of listen to the experience that i had and i hope you'll understand that ours is a program that is addressed to that hurt it doesn't deal with alcohol it deals with alcoholism it assumes we have stopped drinking and we're people who have hurts and pains in our lives and the program must speak to those or else we've got to return to drinking i hurt physically emotionally intellectually i hurt socially and spiritually. I hurt physically. I have an older brother who is three years older than me. As a child, my ears prominently stuck out, and he called me Dumbo. He called me Big Ears, and he made me honestly feel I was physically ugly. And if I closed my eyes for most of my life, I can't picture my face because I reject what I look like. At the age of 28, I'd been with some people preparing for the seminary, and we had been going to school together for two months, and we were out in the bar relaxing and having a drink. And one of them looked up and he says, Larry, your ears stick out. And he didn't know how sensitive that was. I could not say another word for the rest of the night. I felt as if my ears went from wall to wall. And that taught me something that became very important for sponsoring. I don't deal with people from what reality says. I deal with it from the world of their feelings. Because I could look in a mirror and see that my ears didn't go out that far but I didn't live with what the mirror said. I lived with what my feelings said, and I felt ugly, and that's how I grew up. And I felt like a total physical wreck. I had nobody my age in my neighborhood, and so I was panned off on this three-year older brother. And so when I was seven, I was trying to play ball with people who were 10 and falling all over my feet because I'm not naturally graceful. And I thought I couldn't do anything athletic, and i've never really done anything athletic but swim i'm so into myself that i couldn't even try to bowl because i might bowl a 299 and when that last pin stood i would be sure that every one of you were looking at it and laughing at me and i've had all the failure i need and i can't invite any more into my life it took me nine years in this program of sobriety before i started learning to play and trying for the first time to learn to snow ski and i'm really happy to tell you that with a lot of work i've become a very adept skier I'm 47 years old now so like four years of skiing and I'm a pretty good blue skier and that's just astounding me it's shocking what for 43 years I lived with that I was a physical failure I hurt emotionally and here I can speak to the Al-Anons because you see our program doesn't deal with alcohol it deals with alcoholism with the pain it deals mit the hurt and the program is designed to remove that hurt it's designed to move those same hurts whether they're in an alcoholic a drug addict and al-anon anyone can use the steps any fellowship can employ the steps there are in our program people who for a long time had a good self-image of themselves there's another group that i belong to people who never felt the right to be and this a lot of al-ans can identify with if you hit me and spill coffee on me i'm going to apologize if you bump into me you step on my feet i'm gonna say i'm sorry it's like i don't have a right to be where I'm at at any moment. I have a tendency to be a compulsive worker because I've got to justify my existence. I belong to that group of people who feel guilt for just being and depression as this regular state. I've been depressed for things I've done, and I've known some horrible things, but they're nothing like the states of depression I slip in. I haven't had a major one in my sobriety, and this is astounding, but in my drinking in my early life, I could just feel myself going over a cliff and going into one of those states of depression where i just felt like a ton of weight on everything that i was and it just life was heavy and it's like a fog a fog that is so thick and so heavy i couldn't move through it and i knew i ought to call somebody but it was too much energy to move a finger to dial a phone and it is just a state that would last i was in it at the end really for approximately nine months and i could easily I've had manic depressive phases. I could easily flip in and out of a depression that would last a month or two before that. I belong to that group of people who just know anxiety is a constant state. Near the end of my drinking, I bought aspirin 500 to 1,000 at a time in economy lots and they were just being shoveled in because the tension headaches were there all the time and I was taking tranquilizers and sleeping pills and drinking and I had that not in the stomach as constant state and psychosomatic diarrhea at least three or four times a week after the evening meal really it was a tremendous sign of the success of this program the first time in my sobriety that i had to take xlax and people always laugh when i share it and i don't understand why bowel control is a tremendous side benefit of this programme for me it's just tremendous i didn't have it i had anxiety i had all the other things but let me just go on i hurt intellectually at the age of 14 i was sick and tired of being sick and tired and sometimes be careful of the slogans as a clergyman in the program i'm privileged to hear fifth step and i because of this afterwards we'll hear people stand behind a podium and they'll say all alcoholic the only thing all alcoholics from my experience did was drink alcohol and that's all not all alcoholic slide not all alcoholic steel i heard the fifth step of someone who never stole a pin from anyone in the world in her whole life i've heard the first step of people who were totally honest and they shared enough other gut pain that i knew they weren't lying all diseases have different symptoms and they hit different kinds of people we all didn't even drink store alcohol i know people i was sharing this it's one of the neater stories i know a teacher who could never have alcohol on her breath so she stayed drunk for several years on Listerine. And it's a much harder drunk because you can go to a liquor store and find a different liquor store and buy a case of booze, but you try to explain going into a drugstore and buy case of Listerines every week. And they think you're nuts. She had to scour a huge area to get it. Inside me at the age of 14 I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I hated everything I was from that moment on. And I wanted to die. And i'm here only because i couldn't kill myself and i think that's a valid premise for many of us here i for whatever reason from my past do not have the option of killing myself i would have if i could have i prayed the last whole year and a half of my sobriety i was i was driving 90 miles approximately for therapy once a week and i would pray that some drunk would cross over and kill me in a head-on crash from the age of 14 to the age 35 even before that i don't ever remember wanting to take another breath. Life was all pain, and I didn't want that pain anymore. I really didn't. I hurt. I didn'T like what I was, and on top of it, I rejected in my mind what I WAS. I was breaking every rule. I WAS violating every commandment. I WAS walking roads I SHOULDN'T walk, and I DIDN'T LIKE WHAT I WAS, so I rejected it in my mind. I hurt socially. I have an older brother and a younger sister. I was raised in a family of love, and I never felt love. My parents literally sacrificed themselves for us, but we paid a price. They did so much that it affected their nerves they gave us the signs of love but all i felt was rejection love can be offered but it wasn't felt ever in my childhood just one time before i came into this program that i ever feel love from anyone i've had no place in that family my parents had a room my sister had aroom my brother and i shared one i changed clothes there and slept there and that's all it was his room and i was a nomad in the family and i wandered from room to room to study and to recreate and today whatever is mine is sacred for that reason i really get offended if somebody walks into my home and turns my television on if i tell you go over to my home and wherever you want take it then you can do whatever you want but i had nothing for so long nothing i could put my feet on and say this is larry this is Larry's but it's important when i have anything today still nobody my age in the neighborhood so i didn't belong have any friends I went to school in a Polish school and I was about the only one in the class that lived outside the Polish ghetto And I was the second youngest person in the classroom. I started school first grade a month after my fifth birthday I graduated from high school at 16 in college at 20 not because I was smart I think my mother wanted get rid of me I did very well in school, but I didn't fit because I couldn't identify with what people were talking about I pretended to know the sexual things they were referring to I didn't have any idea what they were talking about and I just started meeting life as somebody who doesn't know what life is Talking about at any time and life doesn't want any part of me and my picture of life Until I come into this program would be that the whole world would be where you are On a cliff having a party and I was about where I am on another cliff all alone And I was afraid to make the leap to join you and you didn't want me And jumping ahead. I was at a meeting in Whitney, Texas of young people's AA about a year and a half into my sobriety And I walked out of the meeting and everybody inside the meeting ended I had to go to the bathroom And they all locked arms and they stood up and they started doing a dance and singing I've got a never-ending love for you, and I saw that I was outside But I knew one major difference that I have never ever doubted And I don't know why I knew the program wanted me and I was out side only because of my own fears and Sunday when the meeting end it I was part of the group inside locking hands singing I've got a never-ending love for you and dancing with everyone else and I just can't dance at all even drunk I was so inhibited I didn't dare go on a dance floor I felt part but growing up I felt isolated like I never ever belonged spiritually I've never felt a God who loved me I was given introduced to a God from some Polish nuns who taught us that you took a watch out when you kissed a gal and if the kiss went over 10 seconds it was a sexually immoral act and God would send you to hell for all eternity if you did it and i had a god then i was going to hell that's all there was to it for everything that i did late in my drinking i stowed every cent that was in the poor fund of the first church i was in for three years and i didn't need the money for alcohol or drugs i needed for some of the sexual activities i was involved in and they sure don't make you sane of the year for doing that i'll tell you so you know my whole relationship with god was one of total hurt i heard on every one of those levels and i tried everything to find an answer i tried sex and the pleasure would distract me and then given my mother's hang-ups as they came down to me instantly there was so much guilt that i just felt worse and hated myself and just wanted to have myself destroyed i tried activities i was super super active but what i didn't know in all my running i was taking along the person i was running from and i had a stop sooner or later and i was left with me i tried buying things i'm a compulsive buyer and i'd handle my my compulsions for six months i wouldn't buy a record and i was visiting dallas once this is an example in my sobriety and i bought like i think it was 200 albums something like that just go crazy and the reason this is is the newness of a thing distracted me from the emptiness of me and the whole trouble was that anything new had to grow old and i just left with me again i tried money that's one of the reasons i did all the stealing because money in my wallet was power power to dream dreams power to buy people power to impress people in power to buy things but if it just sat there i came back and the hurt was back and it'd have to be spent and i'd need more i tried fantasy i lived about a quarter of my life in a fantasy world until i realized how destructive that was and that continued into my sobriety it occurred to me that i wasn't this perfect person that i was in the daydreams and when i made myself a perfect personthat was criticizing the person that I really was and I couldn't afford the luxury of having that kind of fantasy life anymore and i needed some kind of casual thinking to fall asleep because my mind is so intensive if i go to think try to sleep thinking about something i'm going to be so keyed up i'll never fall asleep what i do now is i write mystery novels not right compose the plots for mystery novels and you could usually tell who i am most angry at at any time because it's that character person who's being killed you'll all like this one it shows you where I'm at in the church one of my more recent novels had a priest murder his bishop the bishop had a bad heart and the priest substituted an abuse for his heart medicine right before a banquet where there were going to be several toasts and all i just thought that one was really delightful you know i got fired three years ago some of you from who've heard me recently know that priests don't too often get fired you know we got job security i was teaching the catholic high school run by some nuns and they ran the high school completely and they and i had a difference of opinion after two years they won and i lost well the next novel had a nun murdered but i had a fantasy life and it was just ever i just had a dream and dream and dreamed to escape myself and none of these things really worked i tried psychiatry it was the one thing i really worshipped i had an excellent shrink i needed one because otherwise i still wouldn't have made the program i blamed my pain on the fact that my shrink was no good mine was excellent and i just got worse and none of those things worked until i found alcohol and i think that's rather important for us to remember i found alcoholic let me just take it aside you know i told you about the guy talking at the meeting crying out it hurts we forget that i hear people talk at meetings and say that you know if they didn't feel good they'd go back to drinking and i feel very sorry for them because they forgot something they came here because drinking stopped working and they hurt when they drank and the experience that we hear here is that drinking never really goes back to working again it might for a brief time but it won't work anymore and so it's not an alternative and i don't have a choice no matter how bad life gets whatever wherever i'm at drinking will make it worse and however bad i'm hurting if i bring alcohol in i'm going to hurt from the alcohol on top of the other hurt and that's one of the big things that keeps me active here we tell newcomers you you go back to drink and you're going to die? If you could have guaranteed me that at my first meeting, I'd have gone right back out and drank because that's what I wanted. I was praying to die. I heard Clancy say when I was a year and a half sober how wrong this is and what we really should tell newcomers is the truth. You go back to drinking and you are going to live. You are going to live in that hell that you were in when you came here and it's going to be worse and you will stay there and you'll probably be healthy enough that short of a fortunate accident you're gonna stay there for 10 or 20 years with that hell just getting worse. And when Clancy said that my stomach turned it hurts when i drink and i don't have a choice to go back to alcohol but when i first found alcohol it worked alcohol drugged me and i felt good alcohol drug me physically i didn't feel ugly i could talk with people and i really didn't think my ears went from wall to wall and i was just physically grotesque and physically ungainly i could just be with people it drugged my alcohol's a drug and it does what it's supposed to for me it drugs me I'm so, you know, I didn't like the taste and I believe I was alcoholic from the first drink I believe that I had alcoholism long before I took the first ring and alcohol triggered the disease in growing all these hurts I'm expressing that. I live with that's my alcoholism and alcohol was the solution for my alcohol ism in the early days It handled every one of those pains and I don't ever remember Doing to alcohol what I've done with a glass of water putting it down and ignoring it three years six years sober i saw a priest do nursing a drink of of uh booze the way i've been nursing this water and it made me mad and i i gotta apologize because i'm going to quote what i said and sometimes women find the phrase offensive and they may have suffered from the experience but it's what i said i looked at him and i said now listen a good drink is supposed to be raped not fondled so get the hell with it and that's my whole attitude to drinking six years over i still can't understand somebody nursing a drank i needed it inside me i needed the effect and my dreams would be like well just full-size water glass get two of them in instantly manhattan's i never had the class that hank did i could never enjoy uh gin but mine would be strong manhattans get two in instantly and start putting that third one down as fast as you could because i needed that explosion that's what i needed i need it to be drugged then i try to stay there the rest of the time i didn't alcohol drugging me i didn t feel emotionally hurting anymore i didn't feel guilt and i didn t i thought they were gone but it was just a fog between me and then mountain of guilt and mountain of fear and i could talk to people and it was all okay i i couldn't talk to a person and i couldn' t talk to a group without a drink in my hand but with the drink in my hand i could talk to anybody i felt i was delightful i felt i was witty i wanted the spotlight to be on me i thought i was intellectually clever i thought i was smart and i could accept what i was intellectually and socially it ended every one of those isolations i could go out and be with people it was my bridge to the world it spanned this the cliff between us and i could just be with you fortunately or unfortunately i'm an alcoholic and i can't control the amount of alcohol that i had and two things happened the alcohol stopped working and the alcohol started bringing in its own hurt in each of these levels i started hurting physically deeper i started getting the shake middle of sunday mass when it was time to give people the communion wafer and ours is very small my hand was bouncing around that much the phrase i use is i couldn't put it in the holland tunnel let alone on someone's mouth or in their hand and i've always been a glib liar so all i did was walk up to the microphone and tell everybody that i just got hit by a flu and had this you know bad case of the jitters would they please get the pastor to finish the communion and i got a lot of sympathy and from then on in on sunday morning i was so pilled out that if they set off an atomic bomb in that church i wasn't going to shake and it just worked for me but i started feeling bad physically and i had the blahs and so and the pain started coming in i just felt uglier and uglier. And i certainly felt that emotionally i was hating everything that i was drunk blacked out i would dump all my garbage on people people that i didn't even like i would tell them things that i had trouble saying in the fifth step and they would come back to me at this with me and i could see there was just so much inner pain and guilt and self-hatred from every way that i was feeling from wrecking people's parties from from wrecked people's lives and betraying confidences but i just couldn't stand what i was and the alcohol just wasn't helping anymore i needed to drink it and i felt the hurt it was coming back in and i started disliking myself more and more and because of what the alcohol was doing to me and because of what i would do because of the alcohol the only area that i had any respect for was my ability to function as a professional and when i was running around betraying confidences i just couldn't take that anymore i nearly broke up a marriage ruined three friendships all of my closest friends by what i blurted out drunk at a party that i threw betraying some of some real secret matter that had been told me and that was the last straw i had nothing left in my life after that period socially i was getting isolated again i was pulling in i was runnin from the world i started drinking in public and i pulled into my room and the shades were then down and the doors were closed and i was spending more and more time running in the bedroom and really just spending the time under the covers because i was just hurting socially and certainly i heard it i mean i hurt spiritually and i came to the program i had an instant cloud nine and it gave me a deep sense of peace but i haven't sustained that because i'm a very complex person i wish i weren't i envy people who appear so very very simple and i've had to go back and work the steps more than once to bring these tools in to touch some of the hurts i'm experiencing let me share something it has nothing to do with what i'm saying except it does deal with some of my friends when i come to alcoholics anonymous i come most vulnerable because here i found the solution to my hurt and i lower all my defenses if you say something that isn't positive you have the ability to scar me more than anyone else therefore and i hear people scarred i was chairing a meeting when somebody quoted fat joe and i stopped and i said that shouldn't be in this program they said we always call them fat jo and i say that wouldn't make the hurt any less i've had people comment on my hair my dress people comment on my weight when i'm putting weight on let me assure you by the time you notice i'm pulling weight on i'm aware of it already and i really don't need your acts of kindness to point it out to me it doesn't make anything any better for me not when i come to be uplifted and i've heard people say words that are very sad for me here they'll say at least i never at least in my drinking and you can fill in the blanks with whatever you would put there and what they didn't know is almost always there's a friend of mine or me sitting at that meeting who did what they say at lest i never and if i didn't do some of the things you did it's because we weren't in the same circumstances let me tell you whatever you did i've never listened to a fifth step and i've heard about i'd say between five and 800 where i've listened to the person give me their life and i was able to say i wouldn't have done that i know what i did and when i walk in another person's childhood and their adulthood i understand exactly where they're at and i would have done what they did not have done a lot more usually and i've heard i believe everything more than once and people don't come here to be put down so i may not have done something i could say i never but that's very different from at least i never because that implies that somehow what they did was wrong and they were just whatever any of us have done let me tell you was done to keep hurt out because we were hurting too badly or to bring some pleasure in as an antidote to that hurt we felt. That's the experience of my life, and it's the experience of what we have, the lives of people who have shared with me. Looking at the program after my cloud nine, I've just had some good days, and I've had some real bad days. I'm going to share with you how I feel the steps helped me with my program, helped me with my hurt, and I'm gonna do them usually on two levels. What they mean, and then how I've Had to reuse them to handle that same hurt a second time. the first thing about handling my hurt is to diagnose my hurt i can't have a sickness treated until i know i've got the sickness and the first step is my admitting why i hurt because i'm powerless powerless over alcohol and sometimes in our fellowship we hear things that go against what we really are trying to tell the world and if i listen enough i'll get the impression that what i'm powerless over is alcohol when i start drinking and that isn't what our program what our experience and what our book says i'm powerless over the first drink and i'm as powerless today as i was 13 years ago when i was drinking there is no power in me at all i have no defense against the first strength i'm just hurting that badly that's why i'm hurting and i can't manage my own life i was astounded at a meeting when someone said this because it was so so tremendous i have 12 years of college almost all straight a and i listened to this guy say if i walked out of the doors here and walked out on the street and walked up to the first person I met and said run my life he couldn't have screwed it up as badly as I did. And that's really an eye-opener for somebody who thinks they're as brilliant as I am when I see where I've gotten myself. That's why I'm hurting because I can't manage my life at all and I'm absolutely powerless and I've got to see that. This is the cause of my problem but seeing it once isn't seeing it forever. An alcoholic synonymous can be dangerous to sobriety because the talks I feel we most need to hear are never given every time you hear a speaker you know no matter how far down she has gone or he is gone they're going to reach the point where they say and then i came back and they've turned a corner that isn't the story of our disease for most alcoholics guess roughly nine out of ten of us never make it here even the first time most of us who are here well about half of us who are gonna die drunk from past experience many who have a slip never make it back we only hear the people who have made it back and so deep in us is this little thought no matter how often you slip you can come back one of the most important lives i've ever heard was someone in my first home group who had eight years sobriety took a drink and for the next eight years kept coming to aa trying to start the program and never quit and died of alcoholism i sponsored somebody who killed himself because he went to church and i warned him that switching after a year and a half of being sober to church wasn't going to last that's all i could do was tell him the experience that i had seen i thought he'd last two years in church he lasted eight months and he's one of those who never was able to make it back he came to aa and he just couldn't get on the program and he killed himself and i hope i learned his lesson that i don't waste his death and that i gained the message there is no guarantee that i can ever come back into this program there is a guarantee that i can get drunk and i'm powerless and i can't manage my life and i've got to understand that there's a certain fear comes into me when i see the first step as i shared with you i'm not afraid of dying drunk i'm afraid of living one second drunk again when i was in that hell it was hell but i never knew there was anything else and i don't know how i could stand it now that i know that there's touch of heaven i don'T KNOW HOW I GO BACK TO THAT TASTE OF HELL AGAIN i DON'T UNDERSTAND IT AT ALL AND i shudder at that thought and that's why i've stayed active the program for 12 years and i hope it'll continue this way but i forget the first step i forget the cause of my my pain and periodically i undo my first step a good example of this would have been about three years ago when i was teaching in the high school i started going to meetings right on time and leaving immediately for no reason i started getting upset when anybody called me when people i sponsored needed help i was short with them i had no sympathy when people came to do a fifth step they were just an invasion of my time i didn't identify at all and this went on for about two months before i really saw what the problem was i was going to bed saying of course i'm sober rather than my god i'm silver and i was assuming my sobriety rather than being shocked by it which means i wasn't taking the first step of the program i wasn t understanding the nature of my hurt therefore anything dealing with the program wasn't in position if i can stay sober and see aa kind of gives me that impression that we're all going to stay sober and it's only when we force ourselves to inventory other people contrary to what we're told the big book was written i heard clancy share this in a way by inventorying other people and burying them to find out what we have to do and what we can't do and there's only two ways for me to learn by my making a mistake and by your making a mistake and if i don't watch what you're doing and pay attention to it i've got to learn and do it myself and if you look at the big book in chapter five on the fourth step the resentment list that resentment list can only be taking another person's inventory because what i inventory of you is part of my inventory what i thought of my dad as part of my inventory isn't what my dad was i thought he was a mean tall son of a until the last year of his life he was killed in a mine accident so it isn't a turnaround because i knew he was dying but i went away to school and discovered i had the best parents in the dorm and And I wrote my parents a letter making amends before I heard of the program and telling them how great they were. But that wasn't the dad I lived with. I lived in New York City. I lived within the inventory that I grew up with. And I'm still so afraid of authority that if I get stopped by police, I'll sit and shake for about three minutes after they drive away because I just have this terror that authority is just so, so awesome and so overpowering for me. First step, I've got to constantly remind myself that I'm powerless and that alcohol's out there waiting and that i've got this hurt the second step if you're hurting on any level at the beginning of the answer and it's there's a solution whatever your hurt is there's a solution whether it's bodily emotional physical spiritual intellectual there is a solution to the pain you're experiencing just believe that's what the challenge was as it comes into my life and i did it by just seeing a bunch of drunks and believing and surrendering my life in my world over their care now for me the second step means something that doesn't for most other people it's an offer of sanity insanity comes from the latin word that means whole and entire and the second step for me is a challenge to believe that someday i'm going to be perfect i belong to a church that does hold that people can become saintly this side of death but you see it isn't important for me to know if it's going to do this side or the other side what is important is for me to know that my lust my sexual problems my greed my jealousy my inability to relate with people these aren't going to with me forever that somewhere in time there's going to be a time when God's power, being stronger than my will, is going to remove that weakness. And when I see that and really believe, it takes away a little bit of the hurt now. Not all of it, most of it stays, but it takes a little of the pain away now. I'm not going to hurt forever. I will someday be everything I want to be. For me, being perfect means I can love everything that I am—past and present, the total person that I AM. God is love God loves me and if I'm going to be perfect I'll be loving myself the same way that my god of love loves me. I believe the second step is the most overlooked step of the whole program of Alcoholics Anonymous especially by sponsors and I stumbled on that from my own error when somebody came to me and I had him try to do a third step and it finally occurred to me that she wasn't any dumber than I was and if i thought she ought to do her third step she knew she ought to do the third step in the reason he wasn't doing it is because he just couldn't trust And what I ought to gently be doing with her was working on belief. And I just took it very gently for her the way I do it with myself. And I looked at every single moment of sobriety, and I count those. And I say that if God has taken the mountain of alcoholism out of my life right now, he's not going to let me fall on my butt over some little mohill. And his power will walk me through this. And I count the days, and i count the hours, andI count the weeks. And I also look at what God does for other people. And this is where drunkologues are so powerful to see how lives can change. when somebody stands up here and they share where they were at and then later on I see they're not there at all and God's power has enabled them to walk through that pain and that same power can enable me to walk through that same pain. So I don't always have to lust. I just got into an old problem. I find it nearly impossible to tell a friend when they're hurting me. And so what I do is just allow the straws to keep gathering on my back until I've had the last straw and I break the friendship and I never talk to the person again. And I lose good friends without their ever having a chance to see what's hurting me until it's too late And it just happened again 12 years over except this time I really wanted to do something about it and fortunately was given an opportunity when the guy came by I didn't have a chance talk to him, but I called him up And I dumped it off and that's the first time that ever happened But far more upsetting to me is 12 years sober I still don't know how to relate with people and it's so easy for me to give up and say I'm always going to be like this and I don't want that i don't want to live with i'm always going to be like this it is crucial for me to honestly believe i will not always be like that but there's going to be a time when i'm going to be able to relate healthily and the second step is crucial for that it's crucial every single day of my program and the longer i'm sober the more important it is because being sober longer it's easier for us to feel hey this is going to stay when you keep the same sexual problems for 47 years 12 years into your sobriety you can just easily give up and feel they're going to stay forever and i've got to be able able to believe that God's power can remove them and will when he knows for my good that I don't need him anymore. Third step, made a decision to turn our wills, lives and wills over the care of a loving God is taking all this hurt and submitting it first to care. That's the big word for me in the third step. God's going to take care of me through AA taking care of Me and for Me that means My sponsor is going to Take Care of Me. Let me share what for me the third step isn't. It doesn't deal with my actions or my thoughts. I can feel better than a lot of people. I can fail dislike for a lot people. I've discovered I can't control what I feel. I can think I'm too good for certain things. I really don't have that much control over my thoughts if my actions are right. I went up to someone I couldn't stand at all. The man had never been taught any social graces at all, he never knew how to eat. His way of eating a steak, he'd be dirty, he would have saliva dripping from his chin when he talked to you, take his hand, slap it on the steak, grab the fork like a pitchfork, pull off a chunk and shove it in. And I'm a prissy Easterner. Took him out for his birthday. I couldn't stand the way he ate, but I forced myself to sit there. I had feelings and thoughts like you couldn't believe in the right actions. I looked at him and I did the things that love would do. And i sponsored him for a year and a half until he outgrew me and he never drank through that period. And for most of that time I didn't like him, but i loved him. In other words, i did the thing for him that love invited it and that he needed. That's all that I can control. The third step is not the time when a person becomes a saint. People will say they're not ready to go on with the program because in their eyes there's so many things they did wrong. If I become a saint in the third step, I don't need the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth steps of the program. I lied before my third and after. I hanky-panked before and after, I cheated before and after and that didn't have anything to do with the third steps. The first step dealt with my taking my life and my will and turn it over to the care of AA. God through AA through my sponsor. And I believe I've been sober from the day I first came to this program because I've done every single thing my sponsors have told me to do. I haven't done them because I liked it. I haven'T done it because I thought it was going to work. I've done things to prove how stupid my sponsor was. I was angry when they gave me what my sponsor told me they were going to give me because I couldn't show him how wrong he was.I've waited months before I started them but I've done them. Basically, I had this hurt and someone's going to take care of it. That's what the third step is. And I surrender myself to that care, and I've got to keep doing it. And it's harder to do with more and more and More Time. And i picked the best sponsor in the world for me. Not the best sponsor. The best sponsor In the world, for me, I have a tremendously strong ego, a strong personality, and i've been over... I've been educated way beyond my ability to quote someone else I've heard. 12 years of college, four years of theology. I could pull a snow job on most people who have more time than me. I go running full steam on my sponsor, and I'd bounce off and wonder what the hell happened. What did I hit? And that's what I need. And I can take his inventory possibly better than he can. But in nine years of him sponsoring me, I've never gone to him with a problem that God hasn't given him the answer that I needed. And so I just continue to go and that's very important for me and it's a sacred relationship for me. It's the start of having my hurts taken care of. Now steps one, two, and three deal right with my relationship with god and they take care of the hurts in that area uh what is alcoholism the book says liquor is only a symptom what's the disease and from something my sponsor once said my understanding of my disease is the need to run i just can't walk and face life the way a normal person would i ran with all the things i told you with sex with money with goods with activity with friends with psychiatry with daydreams with alcohol i just couldn't walk through life steps one two and three don't touch the disease and that's why the book almost assures us that when we stop there we're going to drink again because the disease is still running wild the opposite of running from what i am is confronting what i'm on paper and it had to hurt to putting it all out and for me it's all out it's every pain whether i did it or thought i'd do it and i would be as specific as that list is i don't say i lied i don'T SAY I CHEATED the book doesn't say I resent it the book says i resented brown because and some of the things are real and some of them are imagined and i had to go down and write the real in the imagined because they're all pains locked in me and anything i keep in me might just be the thing i can't live with that's going to force me to run from life until i got it all out and i confronted everything that i was but instantly i started denying what i was again this past year and a half i've updated my inventory and i was astounded to see i'm going through midlife crisis in a very real way i don't think I've ever heard a speaker anywhere talk about this, and it is really a heavy thing to walk through. I have a sense of being a failure, 47 years old. They don't give you a cathedral after you're in Sterling, Oklahoma. I mean, they just don't. I'm in Sterlings, Oklahoma as their indication of what they think I'm worth. And I finally had to see that they may not be that wrong as a pastor. The hierarchy in our church and the priests have no use for me. I've had good relationships with the people. But I do have a lot of hang-ups, and I wouldn't make an excellent pastor of a large parish, and i've been very realistic about myself confronting it on paper. And this inventory showed me something that just astounded me. My dreams are all dead. And what do you do when your dreams die? I was a liberal and I had all these great dreams growing up. And reality has confronted them outside the program. My dreams were all dead, all of them. I've been around too long to be able to think I'm going to change the world and that life is going to be good in these other areas. And I see that I'm having real problems and I'm doing through a crisis inside. Fortunately, it's not bad right today because I shared it with my sponsor and he gave me some things to do. I'm now doing a gratitude list. I must write out one thing I'm grateful for every day. And it's forcing me to see the positive and to reconstruct dreams. And I believe if I stay sober and by staying active in this program, my dreams will all be resurrected. But this is part of the new me. I've got to look at my hurt. I can't deal with the disease until I see it. And I've gotta say this is the hurt that I am. And then I can start handling it. And so the fourth step really starts attacking the problem in a real way. Another part of my disease is dealt with in the fifth step not only did i deny what i was because i hated everything that i was from the age of 14 on i hid it and i told you how i've retreated from the world i put camouflages up and then i ran you certainly couldn't like what i wasn't and there's a pain i can't be me i have to be someone else i'm 5 10 and see this for both steps four and five if for your acceptance and your approval i thought i had to be five ten and a half not standing on my tiptoes but standing flat and i strained to be that can you imagine the tension i put in my life and supposing another part of me felt that for the other half the room's approval i should only be five nine and i tried to shrink in between that pressure and that tension it's impossible to no peace i hate kids priests aren't supposed to hate kids and so i try to be what i'm not and i'm not going to do that anymore i may act nice toward it but i can't stand them till They hit high school. I think God would have been a lot smarter if he popped us out at 16, 17, 18. Hate them far more. I'm in three churches now. We're so small, one service, no cry room. I got, they're getting even with me. They scream all through my sermons. Here it is, the greatest sermon since the Sermon on the Mountain. There's some yak and brat right down to the first few. Parents can't take them out and I don't tell them to because then they wouldn't hear the sermons I just, I don' t like to visit people in the hospital because I'm so insecure. yours. I never know how they're going to react to me when I walk into a room. Priests are supposed to want to visit people in the hospital. Bull. This one doesn't. And so, you know, I went through life feeling I'm supposed to be taller, supposed to like more kids more than I do and like hospital visiting. And I'm opposed to be smaller. You're not supposed to have those lusts when you're a priest. You don't have this thing for porno and have this things for greed and for material gifts. And so I'm trying to be small. And then I am. Peace comes from seeing my size. Peace comes from saying, if you don't like what I am, that's your responsibility. God makes me to be the size that I am. I really believe he's in control. And I had this kind of meditation and the Redwoods were once the size That I am today. And when they were this size, they were that size because that's what God wanted them to be. And if God wanted me to like kids more today, I'd like kids more Today. And If He wanted me To have less lust, I would have less Lust. I just have to be who I am and to have peace not to hurt. I've got to have the ability to share with you when you need, not to hide anything that I am. And I got that from my fifth step. It doesn't come easy at all. When I was about three or four years ago, I had a woman 20 years sober come to me and her life was all screwed up. And she did a fifth step when she first sobered up and never again. And I told her, you've got 19 years of pain. Go home, write about it. She called me three years later and she said, I can't possibly confront that and share it. And i thought, isn't that sad? When she came into the program, she could write out everything she did for her whole life, including her drinking. She can't write out what she did in 19 years as sobriety, how great pride is. This last update of my inventory was by far the hardest I've ever done. At Pride, I understand the longer you're sober, the more you feel you're supposed to live up to your own press notices. And I didn't want to see what I was seeing because I was told you were sober and shouldn't be acting this way. And then there's a peace can start coming in because I can be open and just be myself. The sixth step is probably my favorite step to comment on. Entirely ready is not entirely eager. That's very important. God is not Larry. To have God removed doesn't mean Larry's planning to remove. There's a total world of difference. I can plan to work on defects, but the spirit of this step is very different. To be ready to have God removed. Removed is not suspend. I don't want my defectors removed. I want them suspended. I want them in a closet. I don't want my resentment to upset me today, but if you smash into my car, you back into my care and total it when we're getting out of the parking lot here, and I reach inside to resent you, and there's no resentment in there because God just removed us. I'm not going to be very happy. I want God to suspend my lust so it doesn't bring in patterns that are self-destructive. But if the right person passed and I reached inside to resentment and there is nothing there, it's not going to make me feel good. Defect. First three years, the defects were the things that made me an SOB. Years four to nine, the defects were the things that made a nice guy. Al-Anon I think can identify with this. It had occurred to me that it wasn't good for me to let anyone walk on me. That wasn't healthy for them or for me and I started standing up for my rights and confronting people and saying you have no right to say that about me. That isn't good from me or for you. And when people make certain sly remarks meetings, I'll confront them on it because it isn't healthy for either of the last three years i don't know what a defect is i really don't i want to share it if you go to a club and you see a whole list of defects if i have a right to my own experience of god how can you tell me what's right and wrong what's Right and Wrong flows from my experience of God on a lot of lists I see profanity I don't believe profanities most of the time as a defective character at all and I'll give you some instances of it if I use it to hurt you there isn't a shadow of a doubt it's defective but supposing a bunch of guys are talking male talk that's just a vocabulary there's nothing wrong with that i knew a guy who drove alone and he was he would get angry at stupid drivers and cursed and he told me that this was wrong and i said no it isn't somebody does something stupid when you start cursing not at them but just to yourself allowed in the car you're getting rid of your anger it's making you a better driver you keep that anger inside you're going to be a lousy driver but the best example was i knew i fooled a full-fledged prescription drug addict society woman who got hired to run a street program where heroin addicts were coming in and they've got a gutter vocabulary this woman never knew cursed in her life she had to learn to roll off all the curses because that was the language of the street and she couldn't help a frenchman talking english to help a french man she had learned french she couldn t help a street addict without profanity cause that was their language and for her profanit wasn t a defect it was an asset I ll tell you something my sexual problems that have stayed through 12 years of sobriety enable me to listen with love when i'm sponsoring and when someone comes caught in an affair that they know is wrong and they want to get out of i don't judge them i relate with them i could never do that and i've seen priests who have never had sexual problems who are monsters because they just don't understand where anyone else has had and i believe god is keeping these problems in my life because they're necessary for me to love the seventh step is a prayer i pray that you now remove every defective character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you and others not the things larry doesn't like about himself that's what i consider defects but what god considers a defect is what keeps me from sharing with you i've been so into lust that people have sponsored have called and i haven't really listened to him and i had to make amends i have also allowed my own lust to help me listen to others with a greater degree of depth one time it's a defect for the next time it can ask that and if i was so filled with love that i could listen to you then god will remove the defects i think without that they're just going to go and they're going to go when i don't need them in that sense the sixth step to me is my being a whole person how does god remove defects my god is a god of love that means he's going to love the total person that i am so the whole person i am will share with you and notice how that starts ending all this hurt see i want to be schizo as a religious person and stand here and let you and god love my zeal for aa my the times i really do listen as a sponsor the times I put myself out to help people but you're not supposed to like my greed. You're not supposed to like my laziness. You are not supposed to like the times I get distracted watching a television program rather than listening to someone who calls me. And I want to split and hold these over here. But you see, my God doesn't love traits and actions. He loves people, and I'm just a person. And the sixth step is my simply trying to be a simple person in standing in God's love and letting him love me rather than labels and traits. And when I do that, that's the beginning and the end of all my personal hurt. The seventh step, I take the initiative. Humbly ask him. And there's only one thing I want to add on to this from what I've shared already. God, I never met God. I met him through the program, through my sponsor. I had sponsors first and the program. Every time I've done six and seven direct with God, they haven't worked at all. But if I take it and go back to the way God came into my life and I go to my sponsor with a defect, it's removed in love if I do what he tells me. I lived with my sponsor this past fall two nights a week i was going to law school and i had some sexual problems come back and i didn't tell him about it for several months because i just so ashamed and i was carrying just so much pain inside and finally i just had to take him aside and dump him and that's all just tell him he didn't say anything but that enabled me to start having a peace inside i've i had another defect i didn'T want to i DIDN'T want TO have a bad relationship with the bishop improved and i deliberately kept that one from him until i couldn't take it any longer and i went to tell him it and he chewed my butt out so i said i'm not willing i want you to still know that I'm not willing to have this removed right now but telling him was the beginning and within three months it was gone from my life I can't go direct to God maybe you can my channel to God is through my sponsor and if I take a defect to him God gives me what I need to have it removed from my wife Bob White helped me with so much in my program I hope most of you have known him he died recently from Whitney Texas the greatest contribution for me that he ever may dealt with the eight step when he told me the two parts made a list of all persons we had harmed comes first then became and became he said god could have reversed it and said we were willing to make amends to all people we had armed and so we made a lift and we'd have to be willing first he said larry you don't have to want to make an end to anyone and let me tell you except for a few brown nose amends i had no intention to make a single amend when i made my eight step list and it did more for my program than any other step i've done to date i sat down and i wrote the name and what i did and when i was done i was astounded to discover you had feelings and i was walking through life treating you as if you were a thing i've hurt people badly trying to do good for them because i forgot to be aware of where they were at it doesn't come natural for me i've had too much pain i cannot naturally think of you it takes an effort for me to understand where you're at and to listen to where you are at so that i can help you and it's the eight step that started showing me that and i've got to constantly again and again and again go back to that because i'll continue to hurt people trying to do good for them then i can pray to have this removed see the next level of hurt in my life comes from these relationships why do i have so much hurt because i was treating people like things and they didn't like it and eight nine start removing you say nine i go to all the people i've hurt and i just want to clear away the wreckage so all the pain in me is gone i don't make the nine steps for your sake i make the nine step first for my sake eventually the book says it should be done so i'll be of maximum use to you but immediately it's so that all this hurt within me is going to be washed away and while the way i do this is i picture the person and i start praying and usually the people i owe amends to i don't like and when i start picturing them an anger comes and i hate them all the more and see i can't control my feelings and to me this is the pus coming out and i don'T feel bad about this i'll just keep praying imagining them and then the pain, the anger goes and then a peace comes. What I want to share on nine, I want to share two heavy areas. Maybe they'll be of benefit to you. One is in my own experience and the other isn't. They deal with amends to the dead, both areas. I believe they're crucial, very, very crucial. And I know three ways to make amends for the dead. One I've used, and that's you picture the dead person. I can use imagination. Me, the dead person, and the Lord. Nine years sober, I had a kid who I taught in high school after he graduated come over and when he was in college for a football game and he brought a little vodka in and i don't mind if anybody else drank but he drank that in my home had a fight with his gal got into his car got into the car went tearing off was way over on far left lane of a four-lane road and head on it into someone who was killed and i went down the body hospital to identify his body and i just wanted to kill him because i loved him that much and felt guilt and needed to make amends and i pictured him and i figured the lord and i featured me after i wrote about it and i said all the things that needed to be said and i could hear his words of forgiveness and then i see if in the lord we can come together and embrace if we can't there's something unsaid either i'm mad at him for dying yet or he's still mad at me for something i've done and i've got to dig until it's out now that works for me i've been with my dad and i did it with this guy and i've some people write a letter and that works for them i think the imagination and the most powerful is you go to the grave and you just talk it all out go alone and just cry and first you're just going to be a little kid and you tell them everything they've done wrong you get it out of your system then you ask for forgiveness you give forgiveness first for me i got to get my own anger out before i can feel the peace coming in i think that is crucial a lawyer that i sponsored had his deepest spiritual experience of the program going to his mother's grave she died an alcoholic into his sobriety he shares it from the podium so i can say it and his relationship with his own wife changed from that day on the next thing is so heavy this doesn't come from me it comes from women in the program it doesn't comes from the church at all it deals with abortion if you've done a fourth and fifth step on an abortion and you still feel some guilt it just might be that you haven't made amends if you believe your child is still alive your child needs something and amends is correcting a relationship your child means a mother loving her or him and wants to be able to love a mother the women told me something I could easily guess at they said they knew the sex of every child that they've aborted. Now, that I could guess at. The next thing that women have come back, and this is alcoholics, not Catholics, absolutely astounded me. They have told me they also know the name of the children. They'll go into a chapel, they'll go into church, and just the name comes, and that's the name. And they picture the child, and if they aborted on their own, they ask forgiveness for the abortion and for the not loving up until now and they say I want to have a daughter I wantto have a son I wanto be your mother and women have walked free powerfully free from that if in some sense you're still carrying an unfulfillment for a miscarriage or an abortion just go in and become a mother and have a child and maybe you'll experience something very deep 8 and 9 get rid of the last pains of hurt 1, 2, and 3 the hurts I had from God 4, 5, 6, and 7 all the hurts from myself 8, 9 the hurts in my relationships with you but I just don't stay there see I can constantly bring pains in and so I've got to do a daily written inventory and the way I do it is I counter my natural tendency some people can't see their defects that's what they got to look at I can't be my assets I don't want to look any good and so I had to force myself to start seeing the good that I was doing and now for six months I would write the good and I was ready to ship date my inventory with my sponsor and I took this and I was astounded to see that before I finished the thought whatever I wrote good I did away give with. So the way I do an inventory is I get a stenographer's tablet and the left-hand side has only the good that I've done. The right side, and I've got to concentrate on that, has the wrong that I'd done that day. An example, supposing a nun comes collecting for a charity and I give her 20 bucks and then she turns around and she really looks good and I rape her. The left- hand side, I say I gave $20 to charity. And I go through with all the other good things I've done and on the right-hand site I write the other incident. And incidentally, one of the big problems we have is we don't consider something we do day after day good anymore. You know, if I rape a nun, a different nun every day, that stays a defect. After a year of doing it, it's no longer, no longer a defect, it still a defect! Think of the things you wouldn't be doing if you were drinking from the day you stopped drinking down through today. You probably would smell a lot differently, you'd be dressed a lot differently, your bed wouldn't made, your children wouldn't be fed, and so you put all this in your inventory. I got up, I took a shower, I combed my hair, I shampooed. All of this is positive. If I say because I'm doing them every day, it's not positive anymore, I'm not left with any way to see God acting in my life. And all I have is me acting. And my inventory for me is supposed to show what God is doing and what I'm going. So that I know how much I need him and yet that he's still there. And that pulls me into 11. 11 is praying and meditating. Praying is talking. Meditating is listening. I don't pray much because I don' t think God needs to hear what I say. I need to hear What God Says. and remember i told i found i told you i found my god through my program that gives me still the best example of what prayer and meditation would be if i come before you today and give you the impression that i'm walking on top of the water and i go home i'm not going to feel very good for some reason i felt it very necessary for you to for me to tell you that for about the last three or four years i've ended up in a position that i don't agree with i'm sponsoring a lot of women in our program and i felt if i hid that from you i couldn't go home with your acceptance it's been out of necessity and to date there hasn't been any problems but one and in that instance i had to end the relationship for the good of both of us i'm sponsoring a lot of men i do not agree with cross-sex sponsorship and i want to make that plain but i feel i've got to tell you that i'm doing it because otherwise when i leave here i'm not going to feel your love if i gave you the impression that everything was fabulous when i'm walking through a midlife crisis feeling a lot of a failure in what i'm doing and having no dreams and you give me acceptance i'm going to think you accepted a front but when i tell you what i am and you just sit there and you haven't all rushed out because i'm such a crud and you don't leave instantly then what you sit there in give me is loving me and i feel your love prayer is me presenting the real person i am to god meditating then it's just listening to his acceptance praying isn't in my mind because mine is a god of love meditating isn't in my mind meditating's in my heart i learned from people i sponsored this program is so fabulous i had somebody call me and say that he was reading a different chapter of the bible every morning and evening and he wasn't getting anywhere and i said don't do it anymore pick a simple story a very simple good story read it every day for a week and meditate on it fabulous results his wife i sponsor her i sponsor a husband and a wife both in aa in the program for a year and it's been going very well His wife went on the system, and it's working for her. Three or four other people I sponsored went on the system with tremendous results, and I figured if it's working for them, maybe I ought to try it. And I started trying it, and the first week I got nothing, and the next two weeks were some of the greatest meditating I've ever done. This worked for me. The passage I was on this week was a story where, I'm very near winding up, I would hope, where Jesus is out in a wasteland with a crowd of 4,000, and I have to tell you that's a non-believing group probably it's in the gospel of mark and he has sympathy for the crowd because they've been with him three days and they're going to go be hungry and if they go home they're gonna feel faint and he turns to the disciples and disciples said what are we gonna do we don't have enough bread he says what do you have and they have seven loaves and he takes it and he starts distributing and there's seven baskets left over and driving in john who i've driven in with was sleeping and i had some time to meditate and this passage stayed with me that's the nice thing is staying with a passage like this it keeps coming to you through the day and i when i come to a conference because i haven't lost any children and had some of the you know been in jail and stuff like that simply out of circumstances because i stole everything and i would could have been the police were looking for me to get me for anti-war activities i just god just or circumstances kept me out of it but because i don't have a low bottom i always feel inadequate when i get behind a podium what are they going to do what are going to listen to how am i going to feed them and it just certainly occurred to me i'm the sunday speaker i thought i was i wasn't sure i'm polish so I don't check these things out too often. And I could hear Jesus say, I try to do this meditation looking from the heart of God as he looked out at the crowd. He said, The crowd has been with me three days now. They're going to go home and some of them are going to be hungry and they're goingto faint along the way. And what does my God most want for you? He wants to feed your hunger. And what's the hunger I feel? It's the anger of your hurt. He wants it. He wants us to feed our hurt. And how can I do it? I can't do it. The disciples couldn't. But if I just take the little bit of bread that I am and I share it through him to you, those hungers are goingto be fed. now that's how my meditating is working and i experienced that love it was a very powerful experience for me i knew exactly what i was supposed to be doing and how i was opposed to be doing it the 12th step i just want to make one comment on someday i've got to give a talk just on the 12 step because we don't hear enough see by 11 my hurts are handled the loving of god experienced in my life is the final answer of all that hurt up until then we've been taking pain out 11 puts in it's my experience being loved it's what i was looking for at the bottom of a bottle i don't want to be drugged to this reality i don'T WANT IT the insanity is i donT make it nearly as important as it should be after i experience and i keep making these other things important again but that is my answer the 12th step is sharing this with you it just occurred to me that the answer of alcoholics anonymous to the disease of alcoholism is not god or we should be in churches they've got more experience it isn't fellowship and it isn' t the program it isn't the steps because people who work the steps get drunk to stay sober bill wilson had to call on dr bob he had to find an alcoholic he could share with to stay sobre bob and bill had to fine an alcoholic to share with it's all through the book it's at the start of chapter seven practically nothing will ensure the continuing sobriety of an alcoholic as intensive work with another alcoholic i went through the books just looking at the references to work in others and we have treatment centers and we're putting our work over on them we have people who tend to listen to fifth steps and we are letting them do the fifth step we have certain people who are doing all this sponsoring and a lot of people in the program aren't carrying the message and they're getting drunk they're staying sober a year two three to five years our program says working with you keeps me drunk one two keeps me sober one two eleven handles my hurt so that I won't be at pain when I work with you and if I'm hurting enough I'm going to stop working with you I'm gonna get drunk eventually but we're not hearing enough see the treatment centers aren't suffering by working with others they're staying sober people who hear fifth steps aren't they're saying sober i'll never hopefully turn down a fifth step i feel bad for people who do because they're missing this tremendous experience of love and gloving but carrying the message is absolutely crucial where am i at winding it all down i was at a conference in jonesborough arkansas we ended holding hands and someone sang the our father and while our father was being sung i pictured my face i've never been able to do that i've been with you 11 12 years now and in the presence of love i don't feel i'm physically ugly anymore i can picture my own faith emotionally there are times when i do things that bring the guilt back but i feel tremendous i can hug myself that took a year in my fifth year of sobriety but i mean it when i hug myself i like what i am and i love what i am intellectually i can accept the reality that if i die today my life hasn't been a failure because I've been loved and I've been able to share that love with others in our program. And I still do have a future. You know, I told you I don't have dreams outside the program. I can only have dreams in the program. I've never felt that there isn't a message, some work for me to do. I'm not going to, you know, I don' t have to be one of the big ones. I just have to help the people who come to me. And that's very important for me, that there is a place for me in this world. And I can, by sharing myself, help people who are hurting. Socially, I'm not isolated. I've told you, I feel you want me. I stand here and I feel loved. There are times when I come the clubhouses and I'm hurting and I pull away from the table and my hands are locked. And I understand that hurt, but I know you want me. It's just that I don't like me that much, that I don't want me to be part of wanting you, but i know you wants me. And so that's being helped and I found a God. So spiritually I'm not hurting anymore either. I've walked with a God that I never even knew existed at all. This is all summed up by the story that I'd like to close with. It's in the Gospel of John, I think it's chapter 9. Jesus has a friend named Lazarus who was dead and he comes to the tomb and he cries Lazarus comes out and Lazarus comes out and he's all bound in little strips and this is so neat because Jesus turns to the crowd and he says untie him and let him walk free and that helps me see God and you in the right perspective you don't give me sobriety only God calls me from that back to life but when God gave me my serenity I was still bound I couldn't talk to people I had guilt I couldn' face people bound in so many ways I couldn'' come out of my room and at first I crawled and then I knelt and then i stumbled and slowly your love keeps unbinding me and these hurts keep going away and hear this for you too you know what are you doing here God is offering you sobriety but what are you doing here God is bringing you to us that with our love and our stories we might unbind you and let her let him go free thank you very much Thank you.