She’s a Snob About Snobs – Gert B.

I would like to see the hands of any Episcopalians who are here with the Institute, not any by chance who are here from town. Pretty weak, aren't we? We don't watch it. These Baptists are going to convert us. Sam Shoemaker, the Episcopal clergyman, says anybody who can convert the Episcopalians is going strong. So it just may be you Baptists. The only reason on earth that I am here or on any platform or in any pulpit anywhere is because two things. Two things. 20,000 years ago, a man by the name of Jesus Christ said to do this. When I speak at Alcoholics Anonymous, I never need to tell any of them what a miracle is. Every chair is occupied by a miracle, and they know it. When I speak in churches or to interdenominational clergy conferences, they are apt to think that it stopped with Lazarus. When I tell you what the Lord has done for me, I have to tell you something about what he had to work with. He didn't have very much. And when I talk about what I used to be like, I have to talk about money. I have to talk about money because we had so much of it. And because there is no possible doubt in my mind but what this upholstering, kept me many years from meeting our Lord. Too much money. Our Lord said, Our Father knows what you have need of. Not what you want or what you would like or could use, but what you have need of. And so when we have so much more than we have need of, there is a great wall, a great satin upholstered wall that protects us from the evil of the devil. From unhappiness of others and above all protects us against reality. I never saw anyone who was poor. I would see pictures of them but pictures aren't people. I would see pictures of tenements and I would say, my, my, how can people live in such places? They had nothing to do with me. I had been born into a group of people, a group that took it as their right that they should have permanent and excessive privileges. There is a great deal of talk and has been for many years about the aching back of the poor man, but there really is not enough talk about the aching heart of the rich man. The being separated from people. And because we all are snobs, my behavior, which for many, many years was totally unacceptable behavior, was accepted. And so I was never allowed to face the consequences of my own behavior. In other words, people played God with me. I was an only child brought up for the first nine years of my life in New York City, living in the old Waldorf. By the time I was seven or eight years old, I realized that my parents' own marriage was on the rocks. My father was a man of great brilliance of mind with a special genius for making money. And my mother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. And I realized quite young that I was caught between the two of them, that I had neither brilliance nor beauty. I would go places with my mother and people would do a double take and then say about me, well, I'm sure she's nice and wholesome anyway. To call a female of any age wholesome is a dirty word. There's no woman on earth who wants to be wholesome, whether she's four or four hundred. We want to be smooth and suave and sleek and femme fatales. We don't want to be wholesome. How much this affected my later delinquency, I don't know, but that it had something to do with it, I'm perfectly certain. Since my parents' marriage was already rocky, my father decided that his only child was not to marry. Marriage was for fools. She was to have two or three college degrees in this country and then go to the Sorbonne in Paris and perhaps to Heidelberg in Germany. And then perhaps I could be the first woman ambassador to Great Britain. We still haven't had one. And then perhaps in my spare time I could find a cure for cancer. Well, I heard all this. I knew that I would never do it, first because I couldn't, and second because I didn't want to. Already the soil was being tilled for a sense of inadequacy of not measuring up. I was not of brilliant mind nor of beautiful face. And these plans that my father, whom I loved and respected inordinately, was making for me, I would never carry them out. At the age of nine I was sent to Europe to school and I was there until World War I blasted me back. I think perhaps it has been typical of my life that it takes a war to get rid of me. Everything has been extra dramatic and extra traumatic. Since Smith College is not coeducational, this was the first place I'd ever been that my father couldn't go with me. This was very heady business. He had told me when to breathe and how often, what to think and how to express it, whom to bring home, whom to know, what to wear, what to study. And to be without him was extraordinarily heady. And also for the first time I saw girls who had bows. I would watch these girls batting their eyelashes at the young males and telling them how wonderful they were and the young males would swoon. If I had known that I had a soul I would have been charmed to have sold it for the ability to make men swoon. But because Northampton, where Smith is, is very strategically located, it's surrounded by men's colleges and you can hardly miss, and I didn't. In my junior year I met a young man who was silly enough to ask me to marry him the first night we met. And because the room was rather shadowy, instead of saying yes, I said when. I thought, wait till he gets me out in the light and sees how wholesome I am. I had no idea that marriage was what the Roman Catholic Church and our own, the Episcopal Church, calls a holy sacrament. That it was a holy state. There wouldn't have been anyone who could have told me. My father and mother could not have been more moral, more responsible, more ethical people. But there was no God whatsoever, and of course there was no prayer. There was not even church membership. And surely I do not need to tell you that knowing and serving God is not necessarily synonymous with church membership. Nor had I ever seen a Bible. I had seen the great Gutenberg Bible under glass in a museum in the city of London. In the museums in Europe. I had seen the beautiful early illumined manuscripts from ancient monasteries. But I had never seen a Bible. I had never known anyone who had one. So there wasn't any way for me to have known that marriage was a holy state. I married this foolish young man for just two reasons. First, to get away from my father's inordinate demands upon me. And second, because I didn't think anybody else would ever ask me. Really very simple reasons. The marriage should not have succeeded based on such reasons, and it didn't. It lasted five years. Out of this marriage I had a son. A son who graduated from the proper prep school and the proper college, both in the East. And who a few years back graduated from ten years on Skid Row. Bill's sobriety hangs by a thread. Yes, it does. He has not found Christ under the highly spiritual program of AA, or in any church group from any minister or any lay Christian. I am absolutely positive that it is the power of prayer that has gotten him and is keeping him sober. We do not know what prayer is. We only know that it is. When I pray for individuals, I like to locate them in my mind. In my mind's eye. So Bill is in Southern California. Wing your prayers labeled Bill toward Southern California. This sense of inadequacy that I had had as a child after the failure of my first marriage of course grew into a real and active guilt. I left Smith the end of my junior year because a husband seemed more important at that moment than a diploma. I had not even gotten one diploma. I had gone off and married, which was the one thing my father didn't want me to do, however right or wrong he was. And that marriage had failed. A hard, still small lump of guilt began to form inside of me. At the failure of my first marriage, with all this money, it was absurd to think of getting a job in any way I didn't know how to do anything. And so I looked around for husband number two. The only prerequisite for husband number two was that he be as unlike husband number one as possible. Husband number one had been very dashing. Therefore, husband number two must be a nice, quiet, and kind man. Husband number two must be a nice, quiet, and kind man. Well, I got one. I didn't know how quiet a harbor could be. Well, I got one. I didn't know how quiet a harbor could be. I'm going to take you along with me. I'm going to take you along with me. When I came to write a book, The Late Liz, about all this, husband number two and I were married for fourteen years, and I couldn't think of anything he'd ever said. Well, you have to say something in fourteen years, so whatever husband number two says in The Late Liz, it's what I think he might have said. This is a very good man. Again, we have one of these moral, responsible, ethical men. Again, we have one of these moral, responsible, ethical men. And very rich. You all know his name. And the biggest bore you can possibly imagine. I have come to truly believe that to bore people is a real sin. If we are thinking so much about what we want to say, that we do not get what they want to hear, then I cannot believe this is Christian. Then I cannot believe this is Christian. It was in this second marriage that I became an alcoholic. Crossed this indivisible line, no one knows what it is or where it is, it makes no difference. I had had wine with my meals as a child in Europe, no problem whatsoever. I had been a social drinker prior to this, no problem whatsoever. Suddenly, I became an obsessive drinker. As I talk about liquor, I beg of you, not to be, I beg of you, not to be comfortable. I beg of you, not to lean back and say, what a brave little old woman to talk about her sins. Whatever are yours, let's put them in the place of mine, and we'll take it from there. Paul said, all have sinned and all are guilty, and I presume this includes you. Alcoholism is merely a mode of escapism. It is something we get on to run away from our responsibilities in this ugly world. When sobriety is attained by the alcoholic, the sins that caused the escapism still remain. And now that I have graduated to the Christian sins, I find, I really find these much more difficult than the sins of the flesh. When anyone is committing adultery, I assure you, he, she knows it. When you fall down drunk, I assure you, we know it, or I also assure you, somebody will be kind enough to tell us. But, but these snide little Christian sins, am I proud of not being proud? I notice that when Christian speakers, speakers for our Lord, deeply sincere, dedicated people get together, they begin to compete. How many souls have you led to Christ, they say? Oh, I'm just appalled. Every single group has its paramount sins. And pride is one of ours. I discovered the other day that I am a snob. I am a snob about snobs. I look down on people who look down on people. I look down on people who look down on people. So if by chance one of your sins is to look down on drunks, that will do just fine for a sin. Just fine. Because actually, you see what that does, that sets you above our Lord Jesus Christ, who announced that he came. That was his purpose. He came to save sinners. So if you look down on us drunks, this is really setting yourself pretty high, isn't it? And self-righteousness, oh, that's a peach of a sin. That'll do just fine. I can't make out anywhere where our Lord forgave the Pharisees. Nowhere along the line. And if you are self-appointed martyrs, the president of the Poor Me Club, that'll do just fine as a sin. Alcoholism, in my case specifically, surely was the result of mounting shame. Escapism, do you know? Escapism due to knowing nowhere to turn, knowing no God, God was a swear word, knowing no one, my father long since dead, in any way long since disgusted with me. The first marriage had failed, the second marriage was failing, and I was the only constant factor in all these situations. I was my parents' only child. Here were two men, one woman named Gert. It had to be me. Along with alcoholism, surely within a year or so, I began to take drugs. With all of the servants in the house, all I had to do for breakfast about 11 in the morning was to push a button, and the breakfast came up. I would spend a few days, a few minutes dawdling with that, then I would take Benzedrine to get me up, somewhat later not much, liquor to keep me up, and then sleeping pills to knock me out. Well, this makes a very short day. There were only about two hours when I was even approximately compass-mentis. As I look back on that woman, I know completely, utterly, basically, what it means to be born again, because I am not that woman. There she goes. And I look at her with compassion, overwhelming distaste, and some amusement. There's a line in my book which I like very much, and since nobody ever quotes it to me, I have to quote it to them. . And that line is that it was as though we were Siamese twins, one of whom must die that the other might live. Of course, self-pity set in, one of the most dread of dis-eases. If you do not blame yourself, you must blame someone. And so I would try to conjure up some blame for my parents, my first husband, my then husband. I could not blame myself, because I was not ready to do anything about this state, and anyway, I didn't know what to do. There was no such thing as AA. I knew of no one who knew God, and as I looked around, I could find no one whose lives seemed to be much more wise than mine. They were not drunks, and I was, but nevertheless, there was a lack of stability in all of their relationships and in, above all, their lack of purpose or goal. Out of this marriage, too, I had a son, a son who is now an Episcopal rector. Again, I can understand personally and completely the words of our Lord, blessed are the pure in heart. Bard has always been good, not goody-good, God forbid, but good. His brother and I have always seemed to have to learn everything the very hardest way. Bard has always been loving, always been strong, always been honest, and always been kind. And when, through me, Christ was presented to him, he did what Fosdy calls crossing the stream at the narrowest part and went on up the other side, and spiritually, I've hardly seen him since. He's so far ahead of me. Bill and I have always seemed to have to wallow against the tide, against the great breakers, banged back and forth, sucked down by sea pusses, wallowing in the sand. And Bard has been the pure in heart and oh, so blessed. I left this good and rich, though boring, man at the end of fourteen years and married another man four months later for the pure and simple reason that somebody told me I couldn't get him. Well, you see now what has happened to this woman. She is using human souls for her own ego's aggrandizement. However, you'll all be delighted to know that husband number three and I deserved each other. This lasted twelve years, and it was real mayhem. My first two husbands had been from the right side of the tracks. When I yelled divorce, which of course I increasingly did, they would say, oh, what would we do without you? Number three was from the wrong side of the tracks. He didn't know the rules with the very rich. And I yelled divorce just once too often, and he said, get going. Of course I couldn't take it. I'd never taken anything else, and I couldn't take this, and so I tried to take my life. I took forty-five grains of second-all, cold, sober, on an empty stomach. When I came to write my book, I had a doctor friend of mine check the book for possible medical inaccuracies, and he said, Gert, if you say you took forty-five grains, that's what you took, but don't put it in your book because anywhere from ten to twenty is a lethal dose. Now, I didn't throw up. They did not get to me in time to use the stomach pump. I am not suggesting for a moment that God stop the cosmic machinery so that one Gert Bahanna could stand here and speak, but I do know that I should have died in the middle of the night. I died, and although yesterday was my sixty-eighth birthday, if you think I'm dead, you're crazy. Because my younger son had been overseas in World War II in the Second Marine Division, he had had great experience with death and near death, and this was practically his mother's homecoming present to him that he should find her body. Knowing what to do, he let me lie there and called the doctor and the ambulance in the hospital, and I woke up thirty-six hours later in a hospital room with a great many tubes in it, all of them ending in me. Now, right here, I'm in the hospital, and I want to say that all writers, all speakers, as you see, I'm not a speaker, a lecturer, uh-huh, none of that. I'm a talker. I just get up and talk. It's what A.A. calls a pitch. We get misquoted. There are the fantastic headlines that come after I've spoken. Just fantastic. Things are all switched around. So right here, I want to tell you that I am against suicide. Years ago, Cal Coolidge went to church one Sunday without Mrs. Coolidge, and when he returned, Mrs. Coolidge said, Calvin, what was the sermon about? And he said, adultery. And she said, well, what did the minister have to say about it? And Cal says, he's against it. So I am against suicide, but if you really want to make it, I kind of hope you do, because there's nothing more embarrassing when you come to and find that you can't even die. I had failed my parents. I had now failed three husbands. I had failed two sons. I had put a blight on every life that was even remotely connected with mine. I wanted to leave life because life was intolerable. The thought that there was another world, a place which might follow this and this be the testing time of such a place, that you might enter the grade for which you had prepared yourself here, never entered my mind. I wanted extinction because I was without hope. I was in the hospital for four days, and in this incredibly palpable misery that surrounded me, I returned to my house, which was not a home, and at midnight the first night, the phone rang saying that my mother had died in California. With the very rich, there is the biggest nonsense called sportsmanship. So with great sportsmanship, I arose from my self-inflicted bed of pain to go out to California to inherit more money. Can you imagine anything more absurd? Than the bravery which I wrapped around myself. I was out in California until the late spring of 1947 while the estate was being settled. And then I returned to the Chicago area where I was then living, a very sick woman. My crippled mind and heart had by now crippled my body. I was walking with a cane crippled with psychosomatic arthritis, dragging my right leg. My spine was so packed with calcium that the doctors all told me that within five years I would not be able to move my head. And I had a blood count of 38, which is of course pernicious anemia. A totally sick woman. I went to this small sanitarium, which you may be sure was very expensive, and there they took pictures of things going down and pictures of things coming up. At the end of that time, the doctor in charge of all the reports on me from the staff said to me, Ms. Bahana, you're a very sick woman and there's nothing the matter with you. Well, the word psychosomatic had come into more or less common usage and being a smarty, I was very glad that I knew how to use it. So I said, you mean it's all psychosomatically induced? And he said, yes. He then, however, did something that even I couldn't try to be amusing about. He tapped his forehead and he said, but make no mistake, you are a borderline case. He then pushed a piece of paper across the desk to me, on it were written two names. He said, these are two Chicago psychiatrists and we advise that you see one of them at once. I then did a very strange thing. He said, I pushed my chair back and I stood up and I said, I don't need a psychiatrist, what I need is God. I've no idea where this came from. I do know it was the first time in my life I had ever used the word God seriously. What niche in my subconscious this was dredged up from, I cannot imagine. Somebody has sowed a seed. This proves to me that it is only the seed, the seed sowing we Christians need to do. We do not need to worry about the soil or even consider it. The sower went forth to sow. Someone had given me a sense of something called God. The doctor looked at me in perfect astonishment. He had watched my spoiled behavior. This woman bringing her own linen sheets, her own pillow and pillowcases, and special cashmere blankets, my liquor bottle so discreetly put into silver decanters. He looked at me and he shook his head and he said, well, God wouldn't hurt a bit. I didn't do anything about it then, but I did say it. The doctor then suggested that I go away for a while, that I not return to my home, which was being held together with merely monetary details, economic last procedures. Well, of course, I'd spent my life going away, so I got in my Lincoln Continental convertible and I went to New York City, my former home, and I was drunk for six weeks. I wept on everybody's shoulders and told them what heels my husbands were and how much I loved them. And how much better a world it would be if they'd just let me run it. At the end of this time, I went to New Canaan, Connecticut, to visit a friend. And she said, Gert, before you return to the Middle West, there's a couple I'd like to have you meet. Well, in this small world, I already knew too many people. And I said, why do you want me to meet them? She said, because their lives used to be rather like yours, and a few years ago something happened to change their lives. I said, what happened? She was a little embarrassed. She said they were converted. I said, converted to what? My car had a convertible top. To my answer, converted to whom? She said, to God. And then I was embarrassed. This was not socially au fait. I had never known anyone who called herself, himself, a Christian. Who had stood up the way I do now and said, boy, I'm a Christian. Wow. No, I'd never known anybody like that. If I'd known a Christian, they never mentioned it. I thought about this a while, and then I remembered that my hostess did not eat peas with her knife, so perhaps these Christians wouldn't be too awful. And I got just as drunk as I could get to meet my first two Christians. Now that I am a Christian, I think this is a judgment on us Christians, not on drunks. If we were what we call ourselves, if we followed him after whom we call ourselves, Christians, sinners, bums, everybody who knew anything about him at all would be working for him, the Christians selling him, the sinners hoping to buy him. Nobody that I can find who was in the bum class like me, none of that bad little man, Zacchaeus, just loved that little man, just as bad as he can be. You're all Bible people. Smile, you know Zacchaeus. Sure. None of them were even remotely afraid of our Lord. It was only the goody-goods who were afraid of him, the self-righteous. Boy, we're way off the track. There should be something inside of us, something around us, if we were what we call ourselves, that would almost make people stop on the streets and say, Wow, what was that? A kind of a hum of a little extra motor, a kind of a joy that emanates, oh, not piddling, you know, goody-goody, halo-a-slant, pursed lips, people. God forbid. Our Lord must have been the most attracting human being that ever walked the face of this earth. Everywhere he went, multitudes followed him. Do any multitudes follow you? They don't me. The idea of anyone so lost as myself, so needing beyond the powers of even expression or thought, the only help that could be help, having to get drunk through fear to meet those who call themselves after him, who says that he is perfect, that he is perfect love and freedom from all fear. Of course, my first two Christians arrived. They were charming and I was drunk. They ate their dinner and I drank mine. And all evening long I bombarded them with questions about God. Oh, so they knew God, did they? Well, well. And did God speak to them? And if he did, what did he say? So they stood all this night, they stood all this nonsense, ad nauseam, and finally the man said to me, Gert, you do have a lot of troubles. Why don't you turn them over to God? Stop me. The only reason I can imagine that it stopped me was because he meant it. Things that are meant are believed. There sat this sophisticated New York businessman, actually believing that there was someone to whom I could turn over my problems. I looked at him and I said, you'll make it sound as though I had suitcases that were too heavy for me to carry and I needed a porter. He said, that's about it. Well, you see how blessed I was. If this man had reared back and said, well, now we hardly want to confuse our Lord Jesus Christ with the red cap. He'd have lost me right like that. Or if he'd quoted scripture. Now you people want to watch it. When you're dealing with one another, it may be all right to say, Leviticus 7, 1 through 9. When you're dealing with bums, it won't do at all. And whom are you out to save? That little old black sheep or the ninety and nine? Fishers of men whose pool? I've been at this for fourteen and one half years now and nothing else, nothing else. And I still don't know who Leviticus is. But I got this so late that I try to spend all my time with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ trying to find out what love is, how to live it and how to give it away. This is a full-time job for this one of you. This man let me have Jesus Christ on my only level of being able to understand help coming. He let me have him a porter because the removal of physical burdens was all I could conceive of. Two days later I returned to the Middle West. In my house was six weeks' accumulation of mail. I had to go to the hospital. I had to go to the hospital. I went through the first-class mail and I found a short note from this couple in New Canaan welcoming me home. This amazed me. Why did they care? They had only seen me one evening and I'd been a total mess. Why did they care? This was my initial introduction to the courtesy of Christ. They went on to say that every morning at nine o'clock Eastern Daylight Time they were sitting down to pray for me. This rocks me. Pray for me. So far as I know, no one in my whole life had ever prayed for me and God knows I'd never prayed for anyone. And I also remembered these people were not fools. They were not sitting down praying to nobody. They closed by saying that under separate cover they were sending me a little magazine then called The Evangel, now called Faith at Work. If I had time, they wished I'd look at it. I had time. I went through the second-class mail, found it, opened it up, and on the first page was a one-page article entitled It is Never Too Late to Start Over by one Samuel M. Shoemaker. I'd never heard of Sam Shoemaker, but then I'd never heard of any other ministers either. I read the article. I stood up and dropped the book. It's something I'd never done in my life before. I went over to my bed and got down on my knees. And I said, if you're anywhere around, I wish you'd please help me because I sure need it. And in about 20 minutes, it was all over. Of course, there are no words. All I know is that it was more like a spiritual shower bath than anything. I felt cleansed. I also felt welcomed. I'd never had a home, and I'd never made one. And I felt welcomed. I also felt forgiven. And I knew exactly who this was. I who'd never known anything about it or anything about God in my whole life knew exactly who this was. And after a while, I stood up and I said, thank you very much, sir. I don't know anything about this, and I'm going to have to start from scratch. But I'll tell you one thing. I'll never take another drop of liquor as long as I live, and I never have. And people are always saying to me, I wish I had your character. Well, I don't have any character. It doesn't make sense that a woman of 53 would get down on her knees and 20 minutes later get up with character. Something had been added, all right. A plus, and a plus is in the shape of a cross. And you and I call him Jesus Christ. And I started from scratch, you better believe. Within minutes, I thought there was a prayer I had to learn once. What was it? And I got as far as our Father who art, and then I thought, our Father. Not theirs, not just mine, our. And I thought of all the people in the world who never had a brother or sister. And I thought, well, I'm going to have to learn from now on what I can do to help them. Suddenly, I was sister to everybody, every human being. And for one split second, I thought about my own sex, women, and the things they had taken for granted that they should do that I'd never once thought of doing. I'd never seen a kitchen till I was 21 and that was in a store window. And so I thought about cooking. And I went to the phone and I called my book man in Chicago. And I said, Mr. Chandler, I want two books, the Bible and the joy of cooking. And he said, my God, what's happened to you? And I said, my God has happened to me, and he has. The third thing I wanted, first prayer, then the Bible, was a minister. I couldn't have cared less what denomination, and I still care nothing. We are either buses going on the same road with different labels, with Christ the chauffeur and his experience and his laws, the road rules, in which case we're all good, and if that is not so, none of us is any good. I wanted a minister, and I called a friend of mine who was a renegade Roman Catholic. I thought she might have bumped into one. Bless her, she didn't say, what do you want with a minister? But she did shock me by saying, do you want to go get her or a man of God? I said, I want a man of God. Well, I got one. No great shakes at homiletics. When he stands up and preaches, he gets off the subject and begins smiling at the Holy Spirit and is just dumbfounded when he turns back to find us still sitting here. But what love. This man is shiny with love. You can warm your hand at it. Well, I said, I want a minister. When I said, I want a minister. Well, I said, I want a minister. Well, I said, I want a minister. told him what had happened to me. He smiled and he said, oh, yes, when you get your Bible, you'll find Paul. Same thing happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, just as though we're the next whistle stop. Made it so real, so now. And I said to him, can I go to your church? And he said, yes, there isn't much of a church, there aren't many people in it. I said, God will be there, won't he? And he said, yes, he'll be there. So I went at 8 o'clock in the morning, 36 hours later, I at 8 o'clock in the morning. And I was the only person in the church except the minister. And it was the first time I ever heard the words we have heard and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done. And there is no health in us but thou, O Lord. I thought they were written for me, and I still think they are. But nine days later, they have come through. And we have before any time in life becoming silenced by absolute creativity. As some say, our hope and God's manhood has been built upon our lok 거죠. And we have, we have encountered Jesus who could answer, by praàoib Boze by Wr första Shaddaa luk opens to us irritated, clenched lips as though toshot by the wild grass in our midst. And I saw the night before and wake to me in my heart bro perimeter. And I saw the sky again, wild as it once was when I had been born, and I awoke in the sky, up in the sky and fro, its wings resound to bones, that sweet pieces clrals of white, orochise, posso сил Tagudegade adored pages. And see those whossible things take place now, lusciousphiles strange scaffoldes of lesser And so I knew who this man was. He was a Jew named Jesus who had died for a woman named Gert Bahanna, and I still think so. I would like to say that now that I began to know a tiny bit about who it was in front of whom I had three times said till death do us part, that I was allowed to make something at least decent and friendly out of one marriage. Prayers are answered, and I prayed my knees off, but very often the answer to prayer is no. This thing had happened to me. It hadn't happened to Bill Bahanna. He thought I was nuts. And so I got kicked right out, and I landed on the Mojave Desert in Southern California. And it was there I found the deeply spiritual program of AA. I had been sober five and a half years before I went to it, and I went to give instead to get. And I also found that money belonged to God. By now I knew the time and energy and whatever gifts I'd been given belonged to him. And here I found that money did. My father's brain had made me feel like a child. My father's brain had made me feel like a child. I never heard of this money. I never heard of a human being brewing up a brain. This brain was a gift from God, and I decided that some of this money better go back to the donor. One must be careful about money. Great stewardship is necessary. Money is a mere commodity like bricks. You can make a shrine with it, or you can slug people to death with it. But the more I said, Our Father, Our Father, the more I thought about my black brothers and sisters on the packed black continent of Africa, my yellow brothers and sisters on the packed yellow continent of Asia, India, Egypt, our own land, and thought about everything that they'd never heard of that I'd always taken for granted, I finally decided that if everybody in the world, everybody, everybody, everybody, everybody, the man who doesn't even own a spear, the blackest man in the center of Africa who doesn't know his own land is mostly free, everybody, had a house and a car free and clear, and $200 a month, everybody would have enough, and above all, nobody would have too much. This was for me, not for you, not for anyone else, just for me. But if I believed this, I had to act on it, and so I did. And then I bought a four-room house with one bath that had been rather like the gate cottages I had had before, and I sat back waiting to be made St. Gertrude. I thought, how can you miss, gal? You know who the boss is? You know Christ's laws of the road, and the rules. You not only bought this little house, you don't have any money, but you're happy in this little house. And then a man came in my house, and he looked at the living room, and he said, this is a beautiful room, what are the proportions? And I told him, and he said, oh, 800 square feet. Well, I'd never thought in terms of square footage, and then I did. I realized that if this one room was in a city slum, it would have partitions down it. It would be four rooms, and four people at least would be living in each room. Then there was no danger of my being St. Gertrude. I said to my father, look, unless this house is completely used for you, one old woman can no longer indulge herself. Well, when you pray prayers like that, you better do it. You better duck. There are some times that the five beds in my house, two of which are studio couches in the living room, they're all occupied, and we stand in line for the bath. Because I'd always loved men, and I never liked women much, I said, father, send me all the old bum men, all the old broken down men. You know what happened? I'm up to here in women. Didn't need to learn to love men, born loving men. Never knew any women. Scarcely knew my mother, never had a sister. What was 10 years of Latin and Greek and all the other business, I didn't have time to have any close women friends. You can't love what you don't understand or don't know. So now I've learned to love women, and miracle of miracles, some of them have learned to love me. One came for 15 minutes and stayed for 39 months. That's love. She was the town's bad girl when she came. An alcoholic and a thief at 14. You ought to see her now. I'm not sure. She's got a light around her. She's a trained nurse in San Francisco. And blessed are the people whom she nurses. This had nothing to do with me. I am nothing in the world but a cracked, chipped, rusty old pipeline. It just shows what odds and ends Christ can use. If any of you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I'm not going to be a judge. I'm not going to be a judge. If any of you come up and tell me that I'm wonderful, you better take the consequences. People are always telling me, oh, you're so wonderful. And I used to say, look, I'm not wonderful. It's God who's wonderful. But then they just leaned back and said, well, that just shows how wonderful you are. I'm not wonderful. I'm not wonderful. I'm not wonderful. My life is jam-packed. I get very tired. Sometimes I get very cross. And sometimes I get bored. And I say to our Father, God, would you let me off the hook for a weekend? And he says, no, no, you got on this late. Get going. That's what I'm saying. And I say to my father, God, would you let me off the hook for a weekend? And he says, no, no, you got on this late. Get going. And I say, no, no, you got on this late. Get going. And he says, no, no, you got on this late. Get going. And he says, no, no, you got on this late. Get going. I would not have it otherwise, of course, just more so. Talk's always the same. But then remember, so are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But then remember, so are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. My life really boils itself down to two questions that I ask myself at least every hour on the hour. The first one is, Gert, how are you doing with Jesus Christ? How are you doing with him? What's the score? And the other one is, is this for God or is this for Gert? If it's for God, we try to do it. If it's for Gert, we try not to do it. If we don't know, we wait. I want to close now with a prayer I always close with and I ask you not to bow your heads. This is the prayer of a long-dead slave. Oh, Lord, I ain't... I ain't what I want to be. Oh, Lord, I ain't what I ought to be. And, oh, Lord, I ain't what I'm going to be. But thanks, Lord, I ain't what I used to be. Amen.