Step 7 and the Horseshoe Forged in Fire — Sandy B.

one more all right well good morning everybody and welcome to the saturday morning live group
of alcoholics anonymous i was here last week where was everybody else
boy did i get a lot of phone calls about being a wimp
but i guess there was a good meeting here um anyway i do want to extend a very special
welcome to everybody here this morning if you're new to uh saturday morning live group why we hope
you get something out of it and hope that you enjoy it and if you're new to aaa you're just
arriving in this fellowship of ours why everybody in the room wants to extend a greeting to you
and let you know that we all know exactly how you feel everybody here went through that just
the riving feeling where you get here and you go, I don't know about this stuff, and I think they
made a mistake. They meant to get the other drunks, and I don't belong here, and I don't, I'm very
uncomfortable, and I'm fearful, and I don't like it, or I can't fit in, or you know, how long does
it take before I'm out of here? All of those feelings that are associated with being new,
and all we can tell you to do is just disregard those and keep coming back because there's a lot
of wonderful things in store for you here in AA unbelievable things that are going to happen as
you stick around all the winners that are here and on the other side of the coin there's nothing
but trouble if we go back out and try to engage Mr. Alcohol again it's just terrible things
Whatever's happened so far, there's a lot more just waiting out there because alcoholism doesn't get better.
It just gets worse.
It's a journey down.
So please stick around in spite of what your better judgment may be telling you and see what turns out here.
It's customary to start with our preamble.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strengths, and hope with each other
that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism.
The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.
There are no dues or fees for AA membership.
We're self-supporting for our own contribution.
AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution.
Does not wish to engage in any controversy.
Neither endorses nor opposes any causes.
Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
and you'll hear this read at just about every meeting that you attend and it
serves as a real good reminder to all of us exactly what a is what we're doing
here this morning and by last count at 250 other a meetings every single day in
the Washington DC area so that's a lot of people a lot of groups that are doing
what we're doing here and basically what happens is we're able to do something as
was a group that we wouldn't be able to do on our own. I don't understand that, but you
put us all together in one room. These are alcoholics and we're all screwed up on our
own out there. You put us together and instead of having a bigger mess, we have this miracle
known as AA, where somehow one drunk is able to help the next one and then we all win.
So when you become part of a group that's succeeding, you succeed along with it. It's
Paradox of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Now, we have a few announcements to get out of the way.
One, we actually...
Thanks, Charlie.
Now, if you haven't been here before, let me explain.
This meeting is a little bit different than most of our AA meetings
in that it's run in a classroom setting,
whereas the vast majority of our meetings are speaker meetings
or discussion meetings.
But we do have four or five meetings just like this one
where a person who's been in AA for a while will come and go through the step
for the entire period of time. I think all the other meetings do it three steps
at a time and then each month they go back start over again whereas this
meeting we go through one at a time one step every Saturday morning so that
takes 12 weeks and then we have one week on the traditions of AA and then two
weeks on the history of AA which is a lot of fun how this whole deal got
started and then we just start back through so that's what we do here we
hope if you're new that you find this useful today we're talking about step
seven which has a lot to do with humility and we'll get to that in a
little while but since there's always new people here I like to take five or
six minutes to just review the setting in which this seventh step comes and
And that is, it's part of this 12-step program known as Alcoholics Anonymous.
And if anybody asks you what AA is, it's the 12 steps.
That's what AA is.
That is exactly what individual members of Alcoholics Anonymous do in order to stay sober and happy.
And you've got to do both.
You can't just do one.
It's impossible to stay over the long haul sober and miserable.
That's what you do when you just stop drinking.
You walk around, drinking, and you can feel it.
And if that's all that could happen, it would be hard for anybody to stay sober.
So what happens in AA with these 12 steps, we actually get happy with not drinking.
And that, to an alcoholic, probably sounds impossible when you first arrive here,
that you would wake up on a Saturday and just go, yay, I won't be drinking tonight.
oh boy, I can hardly wait to be out tonight and not be drinking. I mean, that seems impossible.
But unless that happens, how in the world are we ever going to stay sober? It'll always be
a sacrifice. We're always walking around, poor me, I don't think all the other people are drinking,
and I'm not. So this is what the steps do. They enable us to be absolutely delighted with not
drinking and that is why we do them because that's the only way to have a
happy life if you're an alcoholic is to get rid of this problem with thinking
that you need alcohol it's always on your mind and so these 12 steps are
designed exactly to do that and I like to think of them as a game plan for
living that's what they are this is the plan in case you were in school and you
didn't attend class the day they gave Life 101, this is the deal.
This is how it works.
That's why we have a whole chapter on it.
This is what life is all about, and this is how you get through it and have a wonderful
time, and it's all contained in these 12 little steps.
But it's not an intellectual game plan, it's a spiritual game plan, and this is something
that most of us were not familiar with, and so there's a lot of things associated with
a spiritual game plan that's different from the game plans you've been using.
Somebody gives you a game plan for the football game, you look at it, oh yeah, I get the ball,
I go over here, he stops that guy, that opens this hole, so I can see how the plan works.
A spiritual game plan, you will not be able to see how it works.
You will read the 12 steps and they will make no sense whatsoever.
I'm going to tell you that ahead of time.
You're going to have all your problems, and someone is going to say,
these steps are the solution to your problem.
Oh, really?
Then you read them, and they're not going to look like the solution to your problem.
I'll tell you that ahead of time, because spiritual solutions don't look like they should work.
AA doesn't look like it should work.
You ever try to explain AA to your friends?
What do you do there?
We go down to the basement, and we go and have a topic, and we all talk, and then we go home.
Wonderful.
You want to come? You know, it's just, you could not explain AA to anyone.
They would have to experience it.
They would have to come and have it happen to them.
And the same thing with these 12 steps.
They just don't look like they're going to work.
First, drinking didn't look like it should work.
Did it?
Did it look like when you held up that first glass of booze and someone told you,
What's your problem?
You're afraid to ask someone to dance and you don't know how to dance?
Just drink this.
There is courage in here and there are 12 Arthur Murray lessons, all in this glass.
Now did it look like that was in there?
Tell me, really.
You smell it?
Did it smell like there was dancing lessons in there?
you if you never took a drink you could still be doubting this to this day oh yeah they told me
that when i was 18 dancing lessons in a glass funniest story i ever heard but what happened
when you drank it babu you remember that you're out there man you just intuitively knew how to
handle situations that used to baffle you it was a wonderful promises of vodka
so what we're saying is we're telling you up ahead of time don't be if you're new don't try to go
i'm gonna get this it doesn't make sense it won't so that's not just this is an package of
instruction this is what to do you don't analyze it you don't you don't study it you don't learn it
you do it and then when you do it the results come in you get happy serene sober and all these things
so that's what this is it's entirely different from anything else most of us have seen it is a
plan plants he talks about this my buddy on the west coast is these 12 steps are a series of
actions that we take that we don't believe in and then after we take them then you believe in them
so we have to do it on faith and we do it on the faith that we get by having other drunks
who tell their story and then we go i'm the same as that gal or i'm the same as that guy and he
says that he did this and that's why he's happy now and i can see that he's happy we have all
these aaa meetings and they're huge show and tell operations and people stand up and they got
90 days or 11 years and you get to look at what 11 years to bribe you get to see
the results of working these steps so it's really not that big a leap of faith
so we get attractive into trying the AAA program it's a program of attraction you
don't explain it to anyone because you never could you just say if you want
what we have this is how you get there and so with that basis then we can start
into the steps that they're not going to make sense but they are things that
we're going to do number one because we're attracted to what the other people
have and number two and this is where we have the edge on the rest of the world
because the rest of the world is trying to find answers to life and so on down
and they're attracted to people who have achieved some sort of spiritual
contentment, but we have the extra bonus that they don't have. We have alcohol waiting for us in case
we don't decide to try it. And it's out here waiting. If you're new, maybe we haven't told
you this, but around every AA meeting in the grass, where the grass is about this high,
are half pints of vodka, hundreds, thousands of them. And they just circle AA meetings,
waiting for somebody to come out and go the hell with this crap i'm out of here and then one of
them jumped up so you can see the bottle and you go my god i'm quitting aa and there's a bottle
appears must be god's will for me to drink and you go over there and what this alcohol is for
is to motivate you to try aa that's what alcohol is for oh you don't want to try it yet come on
over here. What about now? Are we reaching you intellectually yet? And this is the advantage
that alcoholics have that the non-alcoholics don't have. They don't have any, the feeding up
stuff on the other side. If they decide not to try to do something about their spiritual side,
it will just start getting real bad and they get sort of a midlife crisis there's no meaning in my
life and all that you can stay with that no meaning all the way to the grave and just sort
of be in sort of spiritual no man's land and breathe your last breath and your last thought is
wonder what the hell was going on down here you know what i mean and you leave this planet without
a clue. Now, we have this advantage of alcohol. Alcohol is out there going to hit us over the
head with a hammer unless we try these 12 steps. And so, that's the bonus that alcoholics have.
The first step, and this is interesting that if you look at spiritual programs,
that they're so similar throughout the world. And one thing that just about all of them have
is the idea of surrendering as a way of getting in. I mean it just seems like
human beings go out and they're just on their own and they're trying to do
everything by themselves and then all of a sudden you get to a point where
man, everything's too much for me. Everything is too much for me and
there's this feeling that I'm not going to make it or I just don't feel like woo
you know and if all of a sudden we come up against something and in alcoholism
we call it hitting our bottom and it is a realization that things are out of
control and our first step talks about that it says we're powerless over
alcohol in our lives that become unmanageable and we always talk about
this step no matter which step we're talking about on this particular Saturday
morning, because this is the doorway. This is how you get into this whole deal. And if you don't
come through here, none of the rest of it will make any sense. So the first step is the only
step that has to be done 100%. The rest of them are goals that we're shooting for. But the first
step has to be done 100%. We must 100% admit that we're powerless over alcohol. If you admit that
You're almost powerless over alcohol, or you're almost as bad as these other people,
or you have a brand of alcoholism that's slightly different than some of the others.
Yours is sort of the non-Skid Row variety.
You know what I'm talking about?
Even if you drank until you were 100, you'd never go to Skid Row.
You see what I'm saying?
You have a problem, but it's not like some of these other folks in here.
Now, you never share that because you don't want to hurt their feelings, you know.
So you just sit around, yes, I'm an alcoholic.
But in your mind, you are different.
And Clancy again talks about that.
Every alcoholic loser that he works with in the Midnight Mission out in California,
they all have the exact same thought.
And this is why it's impossible to reach them and they die of alcoholism.
And the thought is, my taste is different.
That's what will kill us.
If we think that your case is slightly different than everyone else, then that's like a death warrant.
Because that means if you're slightly different, then you need a slightly different program than everyone else.
You need a slightly different answer.
You may not really need a sponsor.
You'd like a friend, but you don't really need a sponsor.
You know what I'm saying?
And you're writing your own plan as you're going along.
You're coming up with your own program.
You're editing everything that somebody tells you.
And so you end up with what I like to call the almost syndrome.
You're almost an alcoholic and you almost need the program.
You almost need a sponsor.
You almost need to do the steps.
You almost need to pray.
You almost need a higher power.
And you almost get sober.
This close to almost getting sober.
Now, let me tell you something.
Almost getting sober is like almost having a parachute.
You know, I almost took one for this flight.
You're out there falling and talking to the other guy.
You know, I almost got a parachute.
Like, what the hell difference does that make?
Almost is valueless in here.
And so this first step has to be the 100% I am absolutely powerless over alcohol.
And when we say we're powerless, we mean when you're not drinking, you're powerless.
Most of the time we think about the fact that when you drink, you get all screwed up.
Well, that's a problem, but it's not a very big problem.
That's like an allergy problem.
Every time you eat bananas, you get all screwed up.
That's a problem until you find out what the allergy is, but once you find out what it
is and the doctor says, well, I'm doing some tests here and all that stuff where you break
out and you throw up and you have all that, it's all from bananas.
All you have to do is not eat bananas and everything will be fine.
So you see how simple that problem is?
All you have to do is say, hey, wonderful, and for the rest of their lives they just
go around.
They don't eat bananas.
Want a banana split?
Nope.
Just give me the ice cream.
How about a banana cream pie?
No.
I'll have apple pie.
It's simple.
It's a very simple problem.
They don't get together with other people who can't eat bananas and have little meetings
and, ah, a guy offered me a banana cream pie today.
I almost took it, you know, it's like, hey.
a zero problem. So that's why we say if your only problem is whenever you drink, you get all screwed
up. You don't need AA or anything. You just don't drink and you'll be happy. Well, I don't see too
many of us like that in here. When someone says, just don't drink and you'll be happy, we go,
wrong. Why do we say that? Well, it turns out that our problem, yes, we had problems when we drank,
But we had a bigger problem when we didn't drink.
Because if you recall, what happens when you don't drink?
You permanently stay sober.
Day after day after day.
And I don't know about you, but the reason I went to a bar was to take care of a problem that I had.
And that problem was sobriety.
I called the bartender over, and I never said these words, but this is what was going on.
I'm sober again.
Can we fix that, please?
I can't stand it.
If I stay sober another damn hour, I'm going to go crazy.
I need relief from sobriety.
And that's why I drank.
to take care of a problem that was there when I had no alcohol in my system.
So for us alcoholics, alcoholism has to do with a problem that exists
when there's no alcohol in the system.
A lot of doctors miss that.
They're always studying what happens when we pour a quart of booze into a human being.
The same thing would happen if we poured it into a non-alcoholic.
They'd get all liver damage and puke and have all kinds of terrible things happen.
It's just that they don't subject themselves to the amount of alcohol that you and I pour it in.
And the reason they don't subject themselves to that much alcohol is alcohol doesn't solve their sobriety problem.
They don't get a fix when they drink.
They just mess around with it.
It's not important in their lives like it is to us.
Alcohol was the answer.
Alcohol is not the answer to non-alcoholics.
They have a very casual relationship with it.
They screw around with alcohol like you wouldn't believe.
They just tip it and let it sit there.
Sometimes they walk off and leave a drink just sitting there.
You know what I'm saying?
I sit around people like that and have a lunch, and I start getting antsy.
They're just farting around with a drink they paid three bucks for.
After a while, you just drink the goddamn thing.
What do you do with that freaking thing?
What do you order that thing for?
You think it's milk?
I mean and to them it was just the same thing as milk so it's just for us it was
an entirely different relationship and so that's why we're powerless over it
we're powerless over the first drink our mind relentlessly tells us time for a
drink time for a drink anxieties building time for a drink you're not
gonna be able to think clearly but you have that drink your whole survival
depends on you having alcohol around just to handle emergencies you're going to need this
you better keep some money in your wallet you better with the package stores are closing for
the weekend you better stock up the hell was stocking up you know what i mean hey something
could happen where i'm going to need my friend you see what i'm talking about our problem exists with
no alcohol in our system that's what alcoholism is it is a mental obsession to constantly be
thinking about this and that's why we're powerless on your own and on my own with
just my own resources I will always take that first drink that's what my history
tells me so that's what makes me powerless over alcohol there's no way on
my own I can go through the rest of my life without drinking so I have to
surrender to that fact and that's what we mean in the first step once you say
you're powerless you have started a spiritual program because if you take a
a closer look at the word powerless, what does it say? It says, my problem is not ignorance.
My problem is not that I don't understand. My problem is I'm powerless over taking the first
drink. So if you rephrase that, I could say this is exactly what the first step says. It says,
unless there's a higher power, I'm screwed. That's what the first step says. I'm powerless
less over alcohol, which means unless the higher power shows up in this equation, there's
no way out.
That's what powerless means.
I am powerless.
My job and the whole rest of the AAA program is, where do you get power?
Where do I get a power that can take care of this powerless situation?
That's what we're doing today.
That's what we're talking about.
The whole AA program has to do with how to get in touch with a power that will come in to our lives and set us free from alcohol and free from a lot of other things.
So having done that, we then come to believe in a power.
We make a decision that a top priority in our lives every single day has to be staying close to this power.
In the beginning, we stay close to this power by going to meetings.
We have the power of the meetings.
We don't know what this power is.
there is no A.A. God. There's no definition of this power. We just have these principles that
show you how to get in touch with a power. After you get in touch, you can explain it to yourself.
You may explain your higher power as a God that you were taught about when you were growing up,
or you may just enjoy the wonderful results of this higher power and call it the spirit of the
universe or whatever gave us A.A. or whatever you want. That's up to you to explain what this is
that comes into your life, but there will be no doubt in your mind that something happens
when you try this, much as it happens when you go to meetings and when your sponsor's around.
You just feel more. All of a sudden, things aren't overpowering you at the end of the meeting.
The world looks different after you leave the meeting than it did before you left,
before you came to the meeting. The world is still the same. It's just that you are more now.
And when you walk out, it's you and your higher power.
It's you and the power of that meeting.
And when you take a look at the world from that vantage point, it's very comfortable because it's not just you.
That was our problem all along.
It was just me against the world.
And the way I answered it, it was me and alcohol against the world.
And then it was a fair fight.
You know what I mean?
Then we had the resources to deal with this, and I didn't have fear blocking me down.
I was able to function as a human being so it's obvious that human beings need more than just
themselves that's the message of all of this and we were on a search to solve this spiritual problem
and we solved it with alcohol we were on the right path that we needed something more than
just ourselves but we came up with vodka as our higher power and it turned out to be bad choice
of higher powers even though it was the correct analysis of the problem we got the wrong higher
power so we come in here and we start down this path and as i said we talk about making decisions
turn our life over and then we find out what is the deal about finding a higher power and we find
out we don't have to go anywhere it's already here it's already inside of us bill writes in
the big book the fundamental idea of god or of a higher power is born inside of us just like the
fundamental idea of a friend. So it already exists inside of us. The problem is it is blocked. It is blocked off from us having access to it. And it's blocked off by a thing called character defects, whatever you want to call them. These are the ego-driven part of ourselves that comes flowing out of our instinctual drives that we talk about in the fourth step.
And so we inventory all these things that could be blocking us from this power, and we call them character defects, for lack of a better word.
Sins, character defects, blockages, shortcomings, as the seventh step calls them.
The whole gist of sobriety, all the way up into prayer and meditation, is to open the channel further to this power, getting more things out of the way.
The entire program is this conscious contact in the 11th step, spiritual awakening in the
12th step.
All of that simply means an open channel, simply means no longer am I blocked off from
this power that comes in that enables me to see the world in a very comfortable fashion.
Remember being cut off in a bar?
Those were the death words, right?
You are cut off.
Well you could have said I'm blocking your channel and it's the same thing.
No more will there flow into you the power to enable you to be joyful.
No more drinks will be flowing to you.
And so when you get cut off it's the same thing in our character defect can choke off
this power that's inside of us.
So it's there, this higher power, it's always been with us, it's always there in full force,
but since we were able to block it, it caused us, honestly, totally honestly, to conclude
there was no such thing.
I never saw any evidence of a higher power, no, never saw one around here, and you could
have a lie detector on you and you would register telling the truth.
So it wasn't there, but it doesn't mean that it really wasn't there.
It simply means it was blocked out, and that all we have to do is take actions that will
get things out of the way, and we're on our way.
So we talked about in the last week, and then we inventory these things and talk about another
human being, all these blockages, character defects in Step 4 and 5, and then we talked
last week or two weeks ago about Step 6.
entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character. And we talked about how difficult
it was to get willing to get these removed because we like some of them. We like lust.
We like gossip. We like greed. We like envy. We like anger. Sometimes we like being angry. It
makes me feel superior to other people. It gives me a real burst. Those jerks out there.
You know, there's a certain number of these things that I like, and I'd like to tone them
down, but I don't want to get rid of them, totally.
And the sixth step is we're entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
So my ego stepped in and said, well, let's get rid of some of that.
And then we learned the lesson that there's no help available to get rid of some.
It'd be like getting down on your knees at night and saying a prayer that went,
God, make me be semi-honest.
Let me just rip off people half as often as I'm doing now.
You see what I mean?
I don't think those would work too well.
Because it'd be like calling your sponsor and saying, I'm thinking of having a drink.
And what's going to happen?
He's going to come over and stop it, because he's a power greater than you are,
and he's going to come in and insist on absolute sobriety.
So we found out in the sixth step, one of our dilemmas is the only help that's available is perfect help.
And that seems a little extreme.
And so we had to wrestle with that in the sixth step.
And then we get to the seventh step, humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings.
Shortest step in the book.
The fewest number of words, easiest ones to conceptually understand.
You've got some sort of a higher power, whatever your definition of a higher power is.
You've made a list of all the shortcomings.
You've gotten willing, to the best of your ability, to have these character defects removed.
And now all I have to do is humbly ask.
And I can remember the first time that I said humbly ask.
And my sponsor says, the heart of this step now is to understand the difference between just asking and humbly asking.
Now, suppose our assignment this morning was write a paper on the difference between just
regular asking and humbly asking.
I think this would create a problem as you sit there with the pencil.
Let's see.
The essential difference between asking, regular old asking, and humbly asking, I'd be looking
over at other people's papers, you know, to see if I could get some kind of a clue here
as to what that might be.
And Bill writes about that.
He says, humility has not had a big time of it in our society.
You don't see beer ads.
Drink Miller Lite.
Get humble.
You know what I mean?
And you don't see heroes on all the shows.
You know, just a humble little guy walking around with the lead in the show.
You know what I'm saying?
And just humility is just not being promoted.
Well, Bill goes on to write, no, it's not being promoted because mankind is convinced that through their own effort,
they will be able to make this a better planet, that eventually we'll have scientific breakthroughs.
And once we have these scientific breakthroughs, we'll be able to create so much food and wealth and prosperity
that there'll be enough for everyone, and that'll take care of all the problems on the planet.
And that's what man's pride is telling him.
And so we pursue this, and that's where we're geared up.
We're off to, there are certain demands that we have inside of ourselves,
and we go racing off to fill those demands.
And that's the way we see things from an egocentric point of view.
Spiritual programs, the spirituality is saying, well, there's a flip side to that.
Why do you want to go meet all those demands?
Well, I want to meet all those demands so that I could have contentment.
Well, the spiritual program says, what if we could get rid of the demands?
and I remember the first time I heard that
get rid of the demand
yeah what if we could get rid of
your demand to have a Cadillac
then
not having a Cadillac would make you
just as happy as having a Cadillac
oh I don't know about that
I don't know about that
I don't think I like that solution
I don't think I like that
oh really
well let's look back at the
solution to the problem of your desire to drink. When you had a desire to drink
your answer before was go get 8,000 gallons of booze and then you could
always meet your desire to drink. You just keep pouring it in whenever you had
a desire to drink. Program came in and said no we're going to work on the flip
side of that. We're going to show you a path you can follow so
your desire to drink will go away and it did that and you found wonderful freedom you found
contentment and peace of mind bill talked about the fact that prior to working a spiritual program
we only knew three things excitement depression or anxiety that's it you're either in one of those
three stages which is why i sought excitement because when i when i when the action was going
If the party was going, I wasn't depressed or anxious.
You know what I'm talking about?
As soon as it ended, I went back to depression or anxiety.
I never had a glimpse of what peace of mind was,
where you just sort of sit on a park bench and smile.
You know what I'm saying?
People who can do that are on drugs.
I don't care what you're talking about,
because I've gone over when no one's looking to a park bench
and sat there and it wasn't any fun.
Did any of you ever do that?
You said, what?
Just go sit?
Yeah, just go sit in the park and enjoy life.
So I'd go sit in the park.
I'm anxious.
I'm worried somebody's looking.
I'm worried I don't have enough money.
I mean, all that shit's going on in my head, and I'm sitting there, and the birds are flying by.
I'm worried they're going to crap on me.
I mean, just, you know.
So I had no glimpse of this because I was coming from that perspective of constantly
inventorying what was missing in my life and how am I going to get it and where do I have
a date tomorrow and am I going to be getting this and you've got to keep track of everything
because you're in charge and coming in here is total surrender to all of that and we're
going to try and eliminate all those demands on you.
So this whole thing about having things removed
was entirely foreign to me.
So we get back to this thing about humility.
We said now we're describing mankind and all that,
and we're going to invent stuff and blah, blah, blah.
And Bill writes,
Mankind's pride is saying we can get it done.
Look up in the dictionary under humility,
and it says a total absence of pride and i remember the first time i saw that i went
a total absence of pride like zero pride i'd be walking around with no pride i'd have no pride
in my work no pride in this no pride in that i mean that sounds communistic that was my first
thought i know what they're trying to do because i was in the marine corps at the time a few proud
and all that. And they're saying, no pride.
And I said, geez, if we had no
pride, we'd have no Marine Corps and the Communists
would take over the country. I mean, that's
how ingrained I was
into thinking pride.
It was the heart of my
ego was pride.
And, you know, when they talk about the seven deadly sins,
pride leads the list, and it's
not by accident that pride leads the list.
I've even
been to AA groups.
Maybe you've been there too,
where they've listed all the character defects back in the old days when they
just remember the group to hand paint them on a big piece of wood then go
around some of the old group mark my word they're gonna have things up 70
character defects on there and you won't see pride on there you'll see false
pride false pride is like the pride other people have as opposed to my pride
which is good pride. You see what I'm talking about? Even within the program where pride
had a PR man that's up there trying to get him in to still be good. Must be some
dimension of pride that is good. And I hung on to that by the time I was six or seven
years and I was still in my mind wrestling with there must be some
goddamn role for pride somewhere. Well, I'll tell you the role for pride. Pride is a
wonderful power to get things done if you're not going to use the higher power.
You know what I'm saying? Because pride is your own higher power. Pride says, I
don't need a higher power. So if you're trying to work a spiritual program, it's
the most dangerous thing to have because people think, why don't you go rely on
on your higher power and pride goes you don't need a higher power you don't need any of that
and so it works totally against us in trying to grow spiritually pride is always running in
closing your 12 and 12 oh you don't need to read that just rely on me where's your self-worth
where's the old that wonderful thing i always thought that the greatest drinking song if i
still drinking my philosophy would be i did it my way that great song i did it my way didn't that
sound good just i did it my way didn't rely on anybody i'm in jail i'm gonna die soon but i got
here you know what i mean it's like you didn't see me chickening out and asking for help anywhere
along in life i just screwed up all by myself and there's something wonderful about that we think
that when we die,
people are going to write folk songs about him.
He went to jail and he never asked for help
and what a hero.
He was wonderful and he hung in there
and that's the way we see the world seeing us.
And then we die and they write a song.
What an asshole.
All he had to do was raise his hand
and we would have saved him
and given him the kingdom of heaven.
but he said, yeah, so you.
I'm going to just be me.
Yeah, well, you are.
So we know that.
We revel in admiring the ego.
But it's killing us alcoholics
and we have to do something.
So humility is an awareness
of the nothingness of ourselves
and the totality of a higher power.
And the problem with the seventh
step, the essence of the problem, the real difference between humbly asked and regularly
asked. I remember the first time I was trying to, I said, well, I'm going to ask to get these
removed. And I'm going up in my bedroom, shut the door so nobody will see me. I said, what are you
doing? I'm asking to get these things removed. I didn't know how to quite explain that to anybody
because I wasn't sure what was going on. So I got up in the room and I said, humbly. So I guess I
should be sort of humble while I'm asking. What the hell is humble? And I remember seeing a movie,
I think it was Big Crosby and somebody going my way, and there was a nun in it,
and throughout the entire movie, she was humble.
I remember her face.
It had a look on it.
So I figured, get your list of what you're trying to get rid of,
and get in front of the mirror, and get humble.
Ah, God, ah, God, no.
Ah, God, no.
And that was humble.
I didn't know what the hell humble was.
I had no idea what humble was, and I'm sure a lot of you don't either,
and that's why you're laughing along with this.
It's getting rid of self-centeredness is what humility is.
It is getting rid of the perspective that we have as a self-centered person.
Self-centeredness would be like a pair of binoculars that had been in the ocean
that had frozen on the close-up zoom,
And that's where a self-centered person is.
The first thing you have to do is become a horseshoe.
We're just going to change you.
There are certain steps you go through in order to become a horseshoe.
And you're out of here.
All right.
So they grab one, stick it in the fire until it gets red hot,
put it on the anvil, blam, blam, punch holes in the hot water,
back in the fire, the smoke is coming up.
Finally, they hold it and go, now, there's a horseshoe.
And are you ready to get out of here and get on the horse and go?
And they're all looking in this discussion, well, maybe it ain't that bad up here on the shelf.
There are a lot of second thoughts about whether I want to do something about my life.
And so humility, the difference between asking and humbly asking,
is it is fully explained what's involved if you ask.
Yeah, it's a process like that horseshoe just went through.
Now, do you still want to ask?
And if we still want to ask, fully understanding what's involved,
then we're coming closer to this humbly asking that I am,
yeah, I understand exactly what the whole deal is, and I still want to do it.
We're out of time.
We've got a great way to wrap this up with the Lord's Prayer
for anybody who would care to join in.
Father, for heaven's sake, give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory
forever and ever. Amen.
Keep coming back.
It works if you work it.