The Common Peril and the Common Solution – Larry K.

that had a wisdom that we in the United States and probably in Canada could have profited from. Fifty years ago, they foresaw that we would have some severe problems with our environment by polluting it. And they saw that the most severe problem would come from air pollution. So they had a town meeting to see what they could do to protect themselves in advance from it. At the start of the meeting, instantly, with no trouble, no debate, They agreed that the greatest threat to the environment, the air would come from the combustion engine and they banned it from then to this day. It doesn't make any difference if you live there or just want to drive through. Nothing with the combustion engines allowed in the town. No car, no van, no truck, no motorcycle, nothing. Their problem was having banned it, what would they use for transportation? And so for the rest of the day, they went back and forth over all these substitutes they could think of. And at the end of the date, by a pretty close vote, They settled on what they've used for the last 50 years. And if you should ever travel there, you'll see that it's still the basis of their transportation. They settled on the donkey. Since it is their only real means of transportation, it's very important to them. And if You go there and You look carefully enough, You'll see that the oldest man in town has his own ass. The oldest lady in town has her own ass All the young gals, all the young guys have their own ass now it's the only way people have to get things back and forth so they're driving their ass and they're pushing their ass and they are pushing their a** you can laugh but if you push your a** too hard it's going to break down on you now I don't know if you've ever thought taken the time to think of what your life would be like without your a*** but problems tend to back up real quickly and so what they'll do is they'll borrow somebody else's a** Has anybody else's ass ever moved fast enough for you? So you try to help it along Well, people don't like to have their ass kicked by other people Strangers So it leads to a lot of fight Important as it is There's a lot peddling ass in town And people don' t differ that much Young gals will park their ass where it doesn' t belong And the local cop has to come along and pinch it Once a year everybody parades their ass in public I don't know if you've ever studied asses, but they're not all the same. And they try to pick the best looking ass in town. When they've done it, you'll find asses may differ, politicians don't. You'll find the local mayor kissing ass for votes. Sunday morning? Sunday morning everybody hauls their ass off to go to church. And there is a particular event that leads to my sharing with you in the middle of the Catholic Mass one Sunday morning. An earthquake struck the town. Well, of course everybody ran out of the church to save their ass. Except for the priest. He had tied his ass to a tree on the side of the Church. And all those windows had been broken by the earthquake. Well, he was pretty smart. He thought he would just jump through the window and land on his ass. But what he didn't know is that's exactly where the main crevice of the earthquake was. And he fell in it by mistake, proving even a priest can't tell his ass from a hole in the ground. I'm Larry Kowalski, and I'm an alcoholic. And I got here because, among other reasons, I happen to be a Catholic priest who can't tell his ass from the hologram. Let me briefly comment on that. I don't use the title Father in AA, and I don't dress like a priest. I have several good reasons for me to do this. The first is I sobered up in a military town where we had a guy who introduced himself always as Colonel John until he got drunk and came back as John. And I hope I've learned his lesson that anything that separates me from the fellowship is deadly to me. That was my main reason for about 10, 12 years. Recently, I've got a much deeper reason. This is the first place I have ever felt beside one group, fully a part of. And I don't want to feel that you accept me for what I do, which would happen if you were to call me Father and I dress the robe. I want to be accepted for who I am, just be accepted for Larry. So if you meet me in a church function, I expect you out of dignity to the church and respect to call my Father. In AA, I'd just like to be known as Larry for my own good and for everybody else's good. Normally at this point one thanks the committee. I'm sorry, but I can't do that. I arrived here a day early and the committee seeking revenge on me for some reason I know not subjected me to LeVon at the airport. I don't know if you've ever had the experience and one can only call it that of driving with LeVond One wonders why they ever put a steering wheel in her car. That's an experience in itself Driving with LeVon on ice-slicked roads As the car waddles down the road Is just truly an experience Well, she drove me from Thief River to Middle River Where the committee was gathering to greet me Lynn walked up and gave me the official greeting of the committee She took one look at me and said, bullshit I don't know what she expected But I guess I wasn't quite it I guess she calls them the way she sees them I don't judge Having heard her greeting I can understand something I later heard Where she and Mike had had a horrid fight And he ran down And bought a cemetery lot And bought it He had a tombstone for it And had inscribed on the tombstone Here lies Lynn Cold as always she heard about this and in a fit of fury went down and she had carved on the other side here lies Mike stiff at last following that they turned me over to Craig I had the one oasis in this tale of horror Meeting the beauty of Twyla But Craig spent a day taking me through the wildlife refuge I think he's probably the only person in Minnesota Who can drive all day through the wild life refuge And not find a goose or a moose But I saw the same roads for miles and miles and so I'm here and then last night I found out that LaVon had eagerly volunteered to drive Barbara to the airport this morning do you ever wonder about somebody who invites a speaker to talk and then tries to arrange not to be there for the talk it was only the dick her husband out arm wrestled her and he got the right of being there this may tell you what you're in for today trying to kill me before I get here and then the greeting I got from Lynn and then LaVone trying not to be here this morning and then what she did this morning. I won't say that, but you can ask her how she welcomed the clergyman. I don't judge, though. Guess I'll have to go back to Oklahoma to see these Minnesota Canadian goose geese. If the plural of goose is geese, if the plural is moose, meese. I want to... I have a new way sharing that I've been using for the last two or three years. And it comes from almost the start of chapter two, and it deals around, circles around two phrases. And for some reason, I think I'm drawn to this because this section, almost from the start, has been one of my favorite sections, if not my favorite section from the big book. And it says, we're average Americans. And it's really neat because today, but probably one of the few times in my life, the word American has its full ring, not just being people from the United States. We're average Americans here. All sections of this country and of America, and many of its occupations are represented, as well as many political, economic, social, and religious backgrounds. Probably to interrupt a moment, the highlight of my whole tour won't be this conference, and this is serious. Cray was neat enough to suggest we go to a meeting Thursday night and we went up to, I'm going to pronounce it the Pennsylvania way. I'm a Yankee from Pennsylvania even though I've spent the last 20 years in Oklahoma. And in Pennsylvania we have a Lancaster but here you have a Lancastor. We made a meeting there and I got to really see the kind of meetings that I think most of you attend and I love it and I'm very happy I was here. I am now my home group is a rural meeting it's a little bit larger than the one we made but the same eight of us have been gathering for five years we've never had 19 people and I get worried they all wanted to grow and I prefer close intimate meetings where we can truly share because I've been years in Oklahoma City where you can go through the groups and never have the same gathering of people from step to step and so I can basically give people the same surface bull crap every single meeting But when I'm with the same eight people for five years, I've got a really certain, you know, they know the phony and they can kind of sense the real. And I had a real sense of your real. We certainly are different in our areas. I grew up in a coal mining town. You know, we gather together. Well, every so often I think the book has sentences that are classically understated, and the next one is one. We are people who normally would not mix. could you picture this room never on a Sunday morning but on a Saturday night if all of us here were on the week of our last drums how different it would be sure as hell wouldn't be mixing you know there'd be a hell of a lot of trying to make out some cons some rapes some stands some fights I'd be over in a corner in a total depression going catatonic and yet there exists among us a fellowship a friendliness and understanding which is indescribably wonderful. I hope you've sensed that. You know, it is possible to come to conferences hurting and alone. And maybe I can bridge a little of that for you this morning if you've been there, because I've been here. About eight months over, I went to my first conference. It was slightly larger than this or about the same size. I made one meeting and couldn't stay. I got too afraid of the people. Now I can feel the friendship and I can fill the fellowship. I've got to tell you this, because I believe it's very important that you hear where I'm at when I'm sharing. I've been flat this entire weekend as far as my feelings go. I had a raw throat, and for me that normally goes into a strep throat and an infection on Wednesday in Oklahoma. And I went to my doctor who's in the program, and I got something to fight an antibiotic, and they normally knock me. So I haven't really... What it does is it just puts like a damper on my feelings, and I've been going without a lot of great feelings. But I could see the fellowship, I could sea the friendship, I could se people going way out of their way to welcome me. I spent Thursday evening with Twilight and Craig. And you know, LaVon has done every single thing she could, almost, to make my stay great. And so has everybody else. And I hope you felt that we wanted to do the same for you. We're like the passengers of a great liner the moment after rescue from shipwreck when camaraderie, that means fellowship joyousness and democracy pervade the vessel from steerage that used to be, I didn't know this the cheapest way to travel across the ocean, so it'd be like the poorest there's a fellowship from the poorest to the captain's table the richest. Unlike the feelings of the ship's passengers however our joy in escape from disaster doesn't subside as we go our individual ways. And here's one of the two phrases the feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement that binds us together but that in itself would never have held us as we're now joined the tremendous fact for every one of us and here's the second phrase is that we have discovered a common solution we're the way out on which we absolutely agree and upon which we can join in brotherly and sisterly in a harmonious action this is the great news this book carries to those who suffer from alcoholism. And I hope it's part of the great news that my sharing this morning can carry. Sharing on the common peril and the common solution. You see, often in talks, what I can talk about and you can talk about aren't the things we share in common. The roads we selected to walk affect how our alcoholism will express itself. Probably none of you, I'm sure, have ever celebrated mass drunk. I have. So you could listen to me and that's one of the accidents and you could figure well in order to celebrate mass in order for me to be an alcoholic I've got to celebrate mass drunk and you can have to go on and die. I could hear you talk about divorcing a wife or abusing children and feel well in order To Be An Alcoholic That's What I've Got To Do We Can Spotlight The Accidental Probably None Of You Ever Hung The Prone Up On Somebody Seriously Suicidal Just Because They Wouldn't Have Been Calling You Possibly you two o'clock in the morning because it was more important for you to drink. I have. So you could listen to that. I could hear you say that you were arrested. I've never been arrested even though the police were out to get me for political anti-war activities, but just they weren't at the right place in the right town. They really wanted me and I drove home blacked out and drunk every night and they just were never along that route where they could get me. I would hear you talk about an arrest and figure somehow that's necessary to be an alcoholic and if that's the case, I'm going to have to drink and die, maybe, before I'll ever be an alcoholic. We have to be very careful when we say what all alcoholics do. I've had the pleasure of hearing between 500 and 1,000 fifth steps, and the only thing all alcoholists have done is drink alcohol, not even commercial alcohol. I listened to the fifth step of a gal who taught school, grammar school. She was an around-the-clock drunk and could never have whiskey on her breath. So she stayed drunk for three years on Listerine. She didn't even drink commercial alcohol. And until you hear this, you don't understand what a problem it was in a relatively populated area. Well, I could go in. I've been in a town of 80,000 when my alcoholism really exploded. And I went to a different liquor store almost every week. And I could walk out with several cases of liquor. And they could just think I drink a lot, but I throw a lot of parties. But you can't walk out of with three cases of Listerine from the same drugstore every week and say they had another outbreak of bad breath on my block. I've got to go out and store them. You know, people will say all alcoholics lie. They don't. All alcoholics steal. They don' t. I lied and I steal. So I'm not trying to escape those. But I've listened to steps of people who haven't done those things. And so I've gotta be real careful if I ever say something that all alcoholists have done. All alcoholists don't hide their booze supply. Because I never did. Because I ordered the church wine. And I made sure there were 52 gallons of wine as a backup for my booze at any time. Now, I didn't like wine. But at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, if everything else ran out, I guarantee you I came down the steps, got the key, went over to the church, got a gallon of wine, and I just went right on drinking. So you can listen to the differences. I want to talk about what do we have in common. What is our common peril? And the keys to this are in the big book, but I'm going to take them from my own life. And the first thing is so subtle that for 10 years I wouldn't have included it as the first part of alcoholism. And it's only by listening to people like Barbara last night and hearing the differences between Al-Anons and AA that it finally clicked to me what the first thing about alcohol is. And it says alcohol works for the alcoholic. It does something different for me than it does for Barbara or for LeVon or for any of you other Al-Ans who aren't alcoholic. Now, it does something for you that's very important to know. She said she would take a drink, Barbara, last night And then get, you know, just get sleepy. Probably the clue to this was listening to an Al-Anon talk about what happened after she had an accident. She'd had a car accident. She went home. She was all upset. There were a lot of things she had to do. And she took two drinks to calm her down so she could walk through the solution. Now, I remember the day I had my first big car accident, I sent out for a bottle, took a few drinks, and that was the answer. And that's the difference. for an Al-Anon alcohol is a sort of a lubricant to help them get through life and find solutions for me as an alcoholic when I took the drink that was my solution Clancy if you've ever heard of Clancy has an example he uses that describes this better than anything else an Al Anon takes a drink and it goes down and it go cluck it's done something I take a drink and it comes down and it goals now I'm out with LeBron or Barbara in a restaurant during my drinking days and we're both drinking we really don't understand we've got different languages going on inside us she's flipping away flip flip flip and if you flip away enough you'll get drunk normal people get drunk on New Year's Eve while I'm exploding and life is changing And science has come up with clues that really do show the answer. When an Al-Anon drinks, they get alcohol. When an alcoholic drinks, there's a good reason to think there's something strange happened because of the physical part of our body that I'm getting a barbiturate, an opiate. So it's like you get a drink of wine and I get a shot of opiate and that explains why it's physically addictive to me. It's a whole different world. Now that's the first part of the common peril. Let me tell you what it did for me. I have to be a universe apart. Now, here we're going to go into differences. What I was like, what it worked on for me, I have been a world apart from Becca. Eight, ten years ago, honestly, and this is eight, ten year into my sobriety almost, I would have hated her. Because, you see, she's so beautiful. And I know I can almost embarrass her saying that because I've heard fifth steps of people like that and they would often feel it's a surface beauty but you don't understand inside. But I grew up feeling ugly. I found a picture, and if we're close after the talk, I'd be happy to show it to you. Seven years old, because people never picture it's as bad as I say it. Seven years older, my ears stuck straight out like this, and they were about this big in proportion to my head. After sharing this for 12 or 13 years, when I got the picture and showed it around my home group, the first statement someone made when they looked at it and looked at me said, when did you have plastic surgery? Well, I never did. Somewhere in my early 20s, I grew into my ears. But prior to that, I grew up being called Big Ears and Dumbo And the phrase used to hurt me And it did hurt me And it made me feel ugly And I got a simple test that you could use To decide if you can accept your own looks And it's close your eyes and try to picture your face You see, 45 years over I mean, 45. 45 years old I'm 51 now About 10 years sober I couldn't picture my face I rejected what I looked like Because I grew out feeling so ugly now I took a drink and I didn't feel ugly anymore I took the drink and I felt so ugly that I'm not like those speakers who say they felt attractive it couldn't do that much for me but what I felt happened was a light went on inside me and you saw the magnetism of that light and you wouldn't look at my looks until I could be around you and not appear ugly it worked the drink was my answer I grow up I'm an alcoholic, a drug addict a compulsive overeater I have the Al-Anon personality I've been in Al-A-Non relationships all of the Al Anons that I know well can identify with the next part the ACAs, the codependents children of alcoholics basically a lot of the alcoholics can too the best phrase I've ever heard is the simple phrase from a psychology that was popular when I stopped drinking and it's still around transactional analysis It's, I grow up feeling not okay. And if I were still to stop right now and instinctively go inside, somehow I'm not okay, I don't belong. I really don't belongs in your world. Now, I had parents who tried to love, so I don' t know why with them trying to love I grew up not feeling loved, but I really did. I've learned a little bit lately through going through some therapy so I could grow faster that I grow as an orphan child. My dad was out of the home all the time My mother was too busy working to make the home ready for us, or the house ready for us, to have any time for us. And there was nobody around in my world growing up who had any time from me. I'm a middle child. I had an older brother and a younger sister. They were together, and I'm alone. Nobody ever taught me how to do anything. I just realized this in about the last six months of my whole life. The only lesson I got was we did housework for my mother, and it had to be done perfectly, and it could never be done well enough. And that's the one tape I carry in here. Whatever you do must be perfect and it won't be good enough and maybe that's why I started off feeling not okay. And nobody ever told me, there was no kids my age in my neighborhood at all. Nobody to this day has ever taught me how to throw a football. I was 40 years old and finally tried. See, if you have a tape that says whatever you do got to be perfect and you're not going to be good and if you don't try things. And so I never tried any sport except for swimming. And I was asked, well did you ever take lessons? and I started saying no, and I did. I had lessons as a kid for swim, so I knew the rules and I knew what to do. The only thing I ever did. To this day, nobody's ever taught me how to battle ball or throw baseball. Nobody's ever talked me how to shoot a basketball. I don't ever remember shooting a basketball at a hoop in my life. I taught myself to throw a football. But see, these rules are so strong that even alone on a court, to pick a basketball up and throw it at the basket if I miss, then I haven't been perfect and I'm no damn good. And I'll judge myself. And so I grow up like an orphan child, just feeling I don't deserve anybody's attention. And to fit in your world then, and these are traits that so many of us who are Al-Anons have, I've got to be perfect. Because I'm not okay even when I'm perfect, but if I'm less than perfect, I'm no damn good at all. And I've gotta be needed. See, that's how I'll fit in my life. If I fit in the world, if you need me, if somebody is dependent on me, or I'm involved in a project, and so I become a workaholic. Now, I would take a drink, And instantly, I would go from guilt to peace. From feeling not okay to feeling greater even than okay. And the drink was my answer. So I feel ugly and I feel guilty. On top of that, I concluded around the age of 12 or 13 that I was crazy. I listened to a series of great tapes by a gal named Tia Melody. And we're going to try to get them available through the taper here. a therapist involved in a treatment center in Phoenix who has a series of sex tapes on the abused child and her basic theme is that God intends for all of us to be precious and anything in growing up that stripped me from an experience of how I'm precious whether it's physical, emotional intellectual, financial sexual, that's a form of abuse and if you had asked me before I heard her tapes if I'd been sexually abused I'd have laughed at you because nothing could have happened in my home and I know today I have been deeply sexually abused in reverse and the scene that starts this was about the time I just entered puberty I came home one evening my mother was playing cards with some friends she stopped the card game took me upstairs threw the sheets off the bed pointed to a stain from a wet dream and said that's dirty ugly and sinful and I carry that tape inside what I am sexually what I have as a person then becomes dirty ugly and sinful and that's sexual abuse because that isn't how God sees the sex faculty at all it didn't seem well to help you understand part of my problem I turned five in July and started first grade in September so I graduated from high school at 16 and college at 20 and I was really a year younger than everybody else and I would only pretend that I knew what they were talking about they were going through puberty before me they had all their emotional experiences and it's like I just don't fit in the world and I have to pretend I belong. So, I'm sure I'm different. I'm the only one who looks I'm not the only person who feels not okay. This is the great thing, see? Standing up here now when I look at all of you, you look like you're all sitting around being okay. You've got it all together. And I'mthe only person who still feels that a part of me is flying off here and another part's flying off there. See, as other people share I'm judging my insides how I feel by how you look. And the second part of that that means it's an absolute no-win. I'll never do it when I'm feeling good. I only do it when I am feeling crazy, depressed, falling apart. And I look out at you and you all look okay and then I really don't look okay at all and I've got to be different. I've gotta be crazy. At about the same time, puberty, I started having suicidal thoughts and nobody ever in my life until I came into the program told me they had suicidal thoughts also. And let me tell you this, if you had them as a teenager they are going to come back in your sobriety and sometimes they're a sign of goodness. Someone I sponsored felt very suicidal recently and I pointed out what a good sign that was because she was alcoholic, drug addicted and something else and I said you put aside three of your answers so it's like a problem comes and you instinctively reach out for alcohol no, drugs no, compulsive eating no the only thing left in your programming as a child is suicide and so that temptation comes and the first thing about it is it shows your say and no to these other answers still And that's good for you. But I still have suicidal urges in my sobriety. I'm going to really do want to just end myself. But nobody else seemed to have that, and I felt, I thought I was crazy. I just thought I'd end my life permanently committed to a mental hospital. And I took a drink, and it was brilliant. Alcohol is the answer. Now those three alcohol may have drugged me too. The fourth was the real one. I grew up and never belonged. Didn't belong in my family. My brother and sister had no time for me, so I don't know how to make friends. Nobody in my neighborhood my age. I lived outside a Polish ghetto, and I went to school in a literal Polish ghetto where almost everybody else in school were together 24 hours a day. And I was the outsider. They didn't know me. I never belonged there. And so I'm never a part of. I'm always apart from. and my life would be if you cleared this table up here and I'm alone and you're all out there just around your own tables in little parties and you all have your back to me. Now, nobody dislikes me but you just don't have any time for me. You just don' t want me. And I'm afraid to make the leap. And I took a dream two wonderful things happened. You all first a bridge went down from me to you and you well turned around and opened your arms. Now that was real. As I started sharing at the start and told you why I don't use father because I want to be accepted as Larry, not as a role, I said there was one group that I did belong to and it's the first group I drank with in a bar in Pennsylvania when I was 17 years old. I was not on the outside of that group wanting in. I belonged to that group. And alcohol was my answer. So that's the 1st part for me of the commons peril. It works. It works in a way that it doesn't for other people. What it worked on for you and the particulars and how you felt it, I think, might be different. But if you drank and you continue to drink, it had to be because alcohol was working. Well, it certainly did for me. I don't want to get into somebody else's. The second trait, the part of the book that shares this is men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. I thought that referred to everybody until I read the paragraph wrong. It's just talking about alcoholics. We do have a different effect. Second part of the common peril is in the book, too. It's the trait of alcoholism, the lack of control, loss of control. This has two parts, and I don't know what you hear here, but in sections of Oklahoma, there's some big mistakes made about this. Everybody admits that there is a loss of controlled once we start drinking, the physical compulsion. And for me, that was when I started drinking at the end. It wasn't there always at the beginning, but I'm an alcoholic from my first drink, so you know. And I'm one that didn't like the taste of alcohol until right near the end I drank for that effect. I lived for that affect. But near the inn, any time I drank, I would wake up the next morning not knowing where I was and how I got there. I couldn't control. And basically, I'd hear myself go out and I'd think of the night before and I remember saying, I'm going to have one more and then I'm gonna quit. And meaning it. And then I'd remember that I said the same thing 5, 10, 20 minutes later. And thenI'd rememberthat I saidthe same thing again5, 10 or 20 minuteslater. And that's where the memory would end. And that was all the time. When I started drinking, I didn't stop. Now, almost every alcoholic I know understands that. What is deadly is a lot of alcoholics miss the point that the book says that's not the important one for us. The mental obsession is. and the book says we are as powerless over the first drink as we are over the second when we've taken the first except it's a different form of powerlessness and a lot of alcoholics don't know that I'm sober 16 years there is no more power in me to stop drinking today or to stay stopped or not to start drinking again than there was 17 years ago when I was drinking anything that's going to keep me from drinking has to come from outside, a power outside me. I'd like to change, I really would, one or two words in the big book. And one of them is mental obsession. Because for me, I think it gives the wrong opinion, impression. An obsession normally for me is something that a person thinks about all the time. Most of the alcoholics who have had time in the program, three to five years plus who go back to drinking, when they come back and tell me what they've done and really talk honestly never thought of drinking until it was in their hand. It's the opposite of an obsession. It's like the normal thinking doesn't work so that they started drinking without ever thinking about what they were doing. Now that's what I understand today is the mental obsession. I wouldn't think about how I had hurt my mother. I would just reach for the bottle and start drinking without thinking about it. With my friends, the same thing. I was ruining friendships. One of my last drunks, I blurted out something, blacked out, found out about it the next morning that was told to me in deepest directional confidence, one step short of a confessional. Broke three or four professional relationships, two or three friendships, and almost ended up my best friend's marriage. And didn't even think about it until the next time I reached for a drink. Normal body talk wasn't working. Normal thinking wasn't work. I was getting the shakes. I went to give communion at Mass back in the days when we used the small wafer on the tongue only. And right at communion time, the shakes hit. And as I like to share, I couldn't put that wafer in the hall and tunnel that morning. Real simple for me, I've always loved lying. Went up to the microphone and put on all my sweet little huggability and said, I just got hit with a bad flu bug, get the pastor to finish communion. There were two effects to that. One was I got a lot of sympathy from then on on the next Sunday. And the second effect was, from then on on Sundays, I was so bombed on pills that if you had set an atomic bomb off in that town, I wasn't going to shake. See, I'm a dual addict. My drug of choice is alcohol, but I use drugs as a backup. And I couldn't drink to the point of being stable on Sunday morning because people would object to the smell. But I could take enough pills to just be so solid and stolid that you just couldn't notice anything happening. And that's what I did. But it didn't, you know, my effect, the effect it was having on my health, that never occurred to me. The effect it would have on my friends, the impact on my reputation, they had a kangaroo meeting in the parish to throw me out. That never occurred for me the next time I reached for a drink. I was losing control. Now if that's all that had happened, I wouldn't be here. Because you see, a lot of medications have bad side effects. I've known people who have had malignancies and they take chemotherapy and they're told in advance they'll probably lose their hair. But the chemotherapy offers them a chance for quality life and they undergo it and they take it willingly. I would have taken the blackouts. I'd have taken everything else I'm talking about as long as the alcohol stopped working. But the last part of the common peril is the worst. And let me just also put an aside in case you were sent to AA by the courts or you were intervened on and went through a treatment center you may not have yet reached this phase. I don't care how you get here. If you want to be here, I want you here. But you may have to listen to some of us sharing this because if your disease hasn't reached this point it will if you go back. And if you listen to us, you may never hit that point. And the third part of the common peril is alcohol stops working. Now for me that didn't mean that I could drink a gallon of wine and walk a straight line. I couldn't. It meant that I would drink a gallons of wine or a Canadian whiskey was my favorite drink. I could drink the Canadian whiskey. And if you want to know how I drank, I'd get two huge glasses and they had to go down instantly so the explosion started. And then the third, I would want to start just drinking control to keep that effect going. Life began when the explosion occurred and I wanted to stay at that little, little point. I would drink the same amount And originally, as I told you, I went from ugly to electric. From guilty to wonderful. From crazy to brilliant. And from lonely to a part of it. When I crossed the line, none of those happened anymore. And the best way to show it is in the social area. I did my drinking at a place called The Purple Bunny Club. Now, I did this for a very good reason. and I'm a very understanding, warm person and we had I was in a military town we had all these military coming back from Vietnam with severe emotional problems and they'd want to talk to me and I felt that if I brought them into the parish house into my office that was so cold so I would take them out to a nice, warm spot where we could drink together yelling their problems over the sets of the band and of course they bought the drinks that goes without saying not at the end of my drinking at the ending of my drink I was drinking I was at the parish I was sitting in the parish and then I was drinking alone and then I was upstairs with the door closed and about a year and a half ago I was telling this to a gal she'd been there, she made the same journey and she said in the shades down I drank and I wasn't a part of it anymore I was lonelier than ever I drank and I felt crazier than ever I drank and I had so much garbage inside me that blacked out I was saying things to people I didn't like they would tell me the next morning that I had difficulty sharing in my fifth step with people I trusted I would get drunk and I would be ugly not okay crazy and lonely and that was the real hell because at that point I couldn't stop now let me tell something that's very important every so often I'll hear someone at a table say if the program didn't make me feel good I'll go back to drinking and when I hear them say that I hurt for them because if they've gone the route I've gone they just forgot the last thing I share I came here because alcohol stopped working. And in 16 years in the program, I've never met a person for whom it has stopped working go back out and come in and tell us, hey, it clicked in again. I got a second breath. It just doesn't happen. And so I know however I feel. And I went to a meeting seven years sober on the Thanksgiving day telling them I didn't want to be at their meeting because they were going to talk about that gratitude crap. And the only thing in my world that I could picture worse and the way I felt was to be that way with alcohol added on because it's a new level of problem. That's all. And I don't have a choice anymore. Alcohol is not a choice. It stopped working and it doesn't click back in. Now, that's the hell. At that point, it didn't work and I couldn't stop drinking. So I needed the common solution. I called, cried out for help and they brought me to AA. I felt that bad that I could not have come to AA the way almost everybody else I know has come. I marveled. I get to an AA meeting about 7.30, the meeting starts at 8 and there's somebody there for their first meeting and I can't believe it. See, I was told to come late and leave early and that's the only way I could have come because I couldn't talk to you at all. I was so hurting in here that I couldn'T come sit at a table and talk for 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes before the meeting began. I'd have had to have run. And yet coming late and leaving early I felt the first great miracle. I felt the fellowship. What I felt was we care we share so we care. And as a priest I want to go a little bit into this you've taught me through that the real understanding of love. See up until then I had thought that love was saying you're drinking, you're sitting here. We will love you if you move over and sit there. And that isn't the message that I understand the heart of alcoholic beats up. We understand. We understand why the alcoholics who are drinking this morning who didn't stop last night are drinking. We understand better than anyone else on earth. The Al-Anon part understands why that Al-Anon stands by the window three, four, five o'clock in the morning and gets in the car and starts searching. She understands what they feel what the woman feels as she falls apart or the man. We understand and we don't judge. Now maybe we can't allow them into our fellowship if they want to continue drinking but that doesn't mean we reject them or put any burdens on them at all. We don't ask anybody to promise to stop drinking. It's a requirement for membership but it's not a requirement for love. And see I understand I've learned from you the meaning of unconditional love just being accepted. People looked at me and they accepted me and they told me where they were at. The example I like to use on this supposing you thought you were the only person in Minnesota who had ever had sex with a bull moose not even a cow, a bull Moose and even we Okies know the difference and you carried this horrid secret around with you for years and years and years, and you go to a meeting this big and you finally blurt it out and you can get it off your chest and say I had sex With A Bull Moose Somebody back up in the corner Puts their hand up Says twice up in Canada Over here somebody says Once in Alaska And there's one guy over here Says I was a zookeeper In Pennsylvania And that's the fellowship And nothing changes And everything changes Now I like to use that Normally in my talks I switch to the moods here I use a white shark I like to use that because there is an example that is very real and I've seen this happen and I think it's the greatest love that exists that I see in the program it's when a woman at a meeting comes and they've just taken her children away from her she's new and the courts have caught up with her and they declare her an unfit mother and she's completely destroyed she comes to the meeting she starts sharing and she is crying you just watch the women around the table talk about the children they aborted the children they gave up for adoption the children that were taken away from them. And they're all just crying. And nothing changes, and yet somehow everything changes. That's real love. And see, the difference on this, and there's one example that makes it so real that points out what I think the churches do wrong and that we do right. I have friends who are functioning prostitutes. Now in the church, we tell someone who's a prostitute, we will love you if you give up your way of life. that really says we don't love you as long as you're living this way of life which means we reject you we hate you and that isn't what AA says and I've learned because I think every one of us alcoholics and Al-Anons have prostituted ourselves many of us sexually but many of other ways we've all prostitued ourselves again and again and agian for things we've needed growing up and I learn I've learn through the program what's wrong with prostitution and what's wrong with prostition is I cheat myself see I've learnt my value through meditation and I'm worth the universe. I'm worthy of God's love. And if I sell myself out for anything less, I'm telling myself a lie that I'm worthless than I am. And the only way anybody can prostitute themselves is because they believe that lie. The church looks at a prostitute of any kind and denounces them. We don't help them find their dignity. We convince them of their cheapness and make it easy to sell themselves. I have a golden example of this. I had the honor of going out to Albuquerque about a year ago right now and while I was there a young lady came to see me and she had heard some of my tapes a retreat that I give and she asked if she could talk she's beautiful in her middle twenties a blonde, long, long nice hair and the first thing almost that she did she asked me if I'd marry her and I looked at her with love and I just didn't respond to that question at all and then she said well if you won't marry me can I keep you as a kept man? Now, I thought that was a rather interesting proposition. I've got to tell you, I debated on that one. She was a functioning prostitute who in one instance was capable of giving a man back like $8,000. She just didn't want to do what he wanted. So she was worth what she looked like. Now, I handled her with total love and didn't react at all, even laughing, which would have been horrid for her request because I knew what she was doing. She heard the tapes and they helped her she wanted to say thanks and the only way she knew to say thanks was to give herself and marriage was a total way and then keeping me was the next best way she could really say thanks and I heard the message and I was very grateful for it the people in her group knew what she was doing and none of them ever commented on it because they loved her about three months later she changed their way of life you see at some point she couldn't find her dignity and continue to sell herself one of the two had to go and that's what unconditional love was and when I had no dignity when I thought I was not okay you gave me the first things of being okay by giving me love and that worked for me for about three months and then I went into a depression I'd had a cloud nine and it ended and I learned the second part of the spiritual awakening and that is the common solution from the fellowship and the love I felt there and I hope you feel all the love here but let me tell you the fellowship alone won't keep you sober next we need the spiritual awakening and I need that today as much as I did then I share on the steps if some of you have heard me share before in a way that's a little different because in my time in the program this is what most helped me not talking about the first time a person did a step because many of you have done them the first times some of us but to talk about how again and again and again in my sobriety I have to rework a step because that can have meaning for you today. You can be walking through some particular crisis and you need to hear maybe how others walk through the same pain and have to go back and redo a step they did before. Two years ago, I faced the possibility of dying for the first real time in my life. I have rare blood, so I love to give it. Every two months I give blood. I've got a B negative and I just like to hear them ooh and ah over me when I walk in. You can tell how humble I am, huh? I went to give blood and they turned me down for iron poor so I took some iron supplements and passed and then I went the next time and they turn me down still taking the iron supplements for iron core my doctor is in AA this is the truth Genghis Khan was more tactful than this man he came in a month before me so I meet him at a meeting and I tell him what I've just told you and he says hmm I don't trust their tests but in case they're right hmm iron poor blood middle aged man And that means you got internal bleeding. That means you've got cancer of the colon. And he walked away. About two minutes later, he came back. He says, you're taking those damn pills. Get off them for a week and we'll run some blood tests. And he walks away again. I had my funeral planned that night. It's going to be lovely, I'll tell you that. I mean, I go out in style. I had for the remaining week until they could run another blood test. And I forget to bring it up to date. Their tests were wrong. Somehow the blood bank has stricter tests, and I don't have iron-poor blood when I had to retest it. But anyway, staying with this, for the rest of that week, I had a reminder that cancer and dying is not more important than alcoholism in living. And I've been blessed. There are some disadvantages in being in rural areas. You don't get as many examples. I think there's a lot more good points than being in a rural area. I much more prefer to belong to a rural group than a city group. That's where I get healthier AA. So, I'm not pitying you. In many ways, Lancaster had everything I like in a meeting. And I hope you can really appreciate that at your meetings as long as you can get a little more variety of periodic conferences maybe for yourself. But I met two people, watched two people die of cancer. One of them was a total turd when he came down with cancer. A year sober, people would see his car parked at a meeting and they'd go to another meeting. And I don't know what changed, but he came out of the hospital. He had had a colostomy or whatever they call it, and he had terminal cancer. They couldn't get it out. And he had like about two years to live. And all of a sudden, he got out of himself and he was interested in other people. And I saw him in a wheelchair a month before he died, shriveled to nothing, and there was a newcomer. And when there was an newcomer, he'd pick up the big book. And he wouldn't even go 11 chapters. That's too much. From the wives on, he thought it was wasted space. He'd look at that newcomer and he'd say, The first seven chapters of this book, 103 pages, have the answer to every problem you've got. You could touch his heart. He wasn't in himself at all. He was in that other person. He became one of the five greatest people I've ever met in my life. When I would share a meeting, I would pick topics he would like. And as he was dying, he loved prayer and meditation. And this one I can't forget. Six months before he died, I picked prayer. We went around to him and he said, now here he is in a wheelchair, little sack over here, dying of cancer. And he says, you know when I pray today, there is absolutely nothing I need. So there's nothing I ask God for. My prayers are thanking God that I'm getting everything I want today. I have rarely felt as cheap in my life as I did that day because I had a whole list to give me. This man had peace, dying from cancer because he put the program first. I sponsored another person who had cancer several bouts and two of them she walked through well. The third one, when it came, she dropped every person she sponsored. She turned in on herself and she became a shriveled bitch and that's how she died. And I knew from looking at those two people that how healthy, how peace-filled I would be would depend not on my putting the cancer first but my alcoholism first today. And if I could remember what I am and what I need to handle it, I can grow in peace with anything. The second step came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. When I was 12 years sober, I did an inventory and I discovered that at the age of 47, 12 years old, but I didn't know how to relate at all, that a relationship for me would be to come up here and spend some time with Craig or Twilight or Linn or Mike or even LaVon. She's just so great. I hope you catch that. You just, you know, she's like your favorite hemorrhoid. If she's not around, something's missing. And life quite isn't the same. I'll get you, see? Anyway, touch them, run back to Oklahoma, pull into my parish house and live with the memory and call that a relationship. That's not a relationship at all. But you see, I never learned how to relate. And I'll get a little bit more onto that in a moment as to the why. Now, when you're 47 years old and 12 years sober, it's easy to give up and think, hey, I'm never going to learn how to relate. And to me, the second step is the dare to be perfect. To believe that God's power is stronger than any weakness I've got. And I'm going to be perfectly. You see, it doesn't deal with sobriety that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Insanity is off the Latin word for whole, entire. I'm happy I'm a Catholic where we believe that a few peoples are saints. But if we add to what so many Protestants tell us, that everybody who has God's love is a saint, we'd understand how to bring them together. And the second step is a guarantee that someday I will be able to love everything I am with God's Love. And that's perfection. If God is Love, being perfect is loving myself completely. Not changing myself to act. but to loving myself as I am. And when I look at the power, see, I count up from my second step 16 years sober, all the great things God has done for me. And then I look out this morning or last night and we don't deserve to be here. And I see that power intensified in every one of you around this table and it's like I can get a picture of how massive that power is and how little of it I'm using. And whenI'm walking through pain and walking through depression and when I really wonder is this going to go? The second step, if I'm ready to despair and figure I'm not going to change, This is going to stay. I'm not going to be happy. The second step is what I really need at that moment. So if you're sitting burned out or despairing or like in a depression today, my understanding is what you really need is the second step. This tomb can't change. God can handle that. And what he's doing for me, I believe if God takes a mountain out of my life, he doesn't want me to fall on my butt over a mohilt. And alcohol isn't the mountain. And the mohils are everything else. The third step for me made a decision to turn my life and my will over to the care of God as we understood him deals not with what I feel or think and that's what a lot of people think it does. I can feel whatever I want. I felt flat all weekend. I could think whatever I wanted. I could thing I was better than all of you. And I had at times I've been with people and felt better than them and I got a tremendous egomania literally to color a huge sense of inferiority. A priest I updated in an inventory once cried as I finished. And he says, boy, you've got the biggest evil I've ever met. Then he went on to say to cover the greatest sense of inferiorly I've never touched. So I'll get thoughts and feelings that I can't control. The third step deals with my life and my will, what I do. And for me, that means I turn my life and my will over to the care of my sponsor. See, I didn't find God. I've got a chain of command. When I came here as a priest, I stopped believing in God. I stole every cent that was in the poor fund for three years in a row in the church I was in. And it wasn't for booze. I had the wine supply. It wasn't för pills. I had a private supply. It was for sexual things I did to handle the same basic naked problem. So I didn't want there to be a God. Not only did I not believe in one, I didn' t want there te be one. I surrendered to a person who brought me to a group who brought m e to AA and that's the program and then one morning I woke up with a God. A totally different God. And I didn't run and say, this is the God of the church. See, I don't like sponsoring Catholics and I don' t like sponsoring Christians because as soon as they do the third step they think they've got to be perfect and buy everything they've bought as a child. I like to sponsor atheists and agnostics because they're easier to take to God. I don''t think God needs me to defend them at all. I've learned so many great truths from you. Imagine how weak a God is who needs any of us to defend them. So I don't defend God. And my program says that you either grow or go. You will either grow spiritually or you're going to go back to drinking. So I'm not going to do that. I don' t have to worry about what you do in the spiritual. God's going to guide you. And he'll get you to a church and a belief. He will give you the message when you need it, not before. And at that time, what you doing is important for you. I discourage Catholics from going to church when they're new in the program. Baptists, too. Because Catholics and Baptists when they do the third step feel they've got to turn their whole life and will over the care of God. That means they've gotta go back and do what they think their church told them. Where is the Catholic that ever comes to AA in their first marriage? They may be in their fourth or fifth and they think they've GOTTA hunt up that first wife throw her husband out and say, I need you because I've GOTTO work a program. Or feel guilt. Now, Southern Baptists aren't supposed to drink, smoke, damble, or dance. And most of them, like me, went for the group package. It was cheaper. So they come into AA and they quit drinking, but they got all the rest going. And they get hit with a ton of guilt. The ideal time to go to church is when you discover God, this is my view, so strongly in the program you can't say thanks in AA anymore. Not at full. And that happens to me. There are times I absolutely can't thank God enough for what I'm experiencing here. I've got to go to church and just let it out. So I find them here and thank them there. I could go to Church because I didn't have to listen to any of those dumb priests try to tell me what they thought God was like. Lecture at me rather than share experience. And a lot of them are dumb. I mean, just, they don't, well... Yeah, they are. Anyway. So I turn my life and my will over the care of my sponsor. He tells me what to do and I do it. He walked up to me once. The guy I got now, I've had him for 10 years, 11 years. Looked at me and he says, you dress like a Pittsburgh pimp or a Philadelphia fag. Change. That hurt. It wasn't funny when he said it. But you might see this, especially in larger cities. I was dressing to be on the outside and dying to be on the inside. And he said, change the act and dress like you belong and eventually you're going to feel like you belong. I got a 10-point diamond for 10 years sober. And I wore it and an AA talked it. He happened to be out and apologized for it. He nailed me quick. He says, don't you ever apologize for making yourself look good in AA. Because like this is the wrapping paper around the package that God wants you to see so that you'll become interested in that same package. And I'm most comfortable in shorts dressed now. Every so often people come to the rectory and I'm barefoot in shorts and they say, do you want to see the priest? And I say, step into my office and I get one of these. Is there another one around? But I do delight in dressing up periodically for meetings. Now, and I don't apologize for making myself look good because it's part of my program. I do what my sponsor tells me and that's my third step. And I get what he promises. The fourth step for me, I have to continue to take daily inventory. When I came in here, I mean an inventory. When I come in here my first inventory was 52, of resentment, was 52 pages long. and it's because I basically have a pretty bad memory. I needed to resent you because I felt you were going to resent me. Eight years sober, I had a resentment list 12 pages long. Now for most people, that would be a sign of a pretty sick person. But you see, I wasn't competing with other people. I was watching my own growth and my inventories were a challenge to see what was happening for me as I continued in the program. To continue to grow. And to go from 52 to 12 pages was wonderful. Twelve years sober, I went down and did an inventory and halfway through it, I thought my sponsor was going to throw me out of his house. He stopped. He says, Larry, Sean, do you realize this is the first time you're not blaming anybody for any of your problems? Now, I'll tell you what that translates to. At that time in my life, I was not resenting a person on earth. I don't know if you know it, but there's promises all through the big book, not just on pages 82 and 83. And some of those promises I could never ever believe would come true for me and one of them was we will cease fighting anything or anyone. Fighting was necessary for breathing to me. In the last four years that isn't so. Two or three people in four years have gone out of their way to screw me. I've wanted to kill them the first day hate them forever the second day and from the third day on I want to get rid of the resentment and it has nothing to do with him. I don't want to burn up that energy anymore. This is how I was able to learn that I don' t know how to relate. See, up until this point, when I was resenting, I could blame you for the wreck of my life. If you've done inventory, this may help you. I got a clue early in the program. Look at your first inventory and step back and ask yourself, what age person acts that way? Most of us stopped growing emotionally when we started drinking, ACAs and Al-Anon stopped a lot earlier. At the end of my first inventory, I'd looked at how I was acting and me and my sponsor agreed I was reacting like a three-year-old. And I have in my 16 years gone from there to where now I can be like an 18-year old, a young adult ready to learn to relate. And this is part of the problem. See, I never went through that normal teenage period when I learned the give and take of relationships. That's why it was so hard for me. i went through one period when i was rebelling against everything and on paper that looks bad people will think all of a sudden all this anger and they're they're regressing and that's not true i went to the period when healthy teenagers rebel against authority to become themselves and my anger was a good sign it for that it was a sign that i was growing and i walked through it and i don't have to rebel against the authority now because i have the freedom to be me And my continuing inventories help me see this. The fifth step is my being open. The fourth step gives me the freedom to see who I am. Let me show you four and five in there in fourth. I'm 5'10". Now, supposing to please this side of the room, I felt I had to be 5'11", and I tried to be that, literally, not just standing on tiptoe, but to stretch out. Picture the strain. Supposing to Please this side of the world, I thought I had a B-5-9, and I try to shrink in. Between that pressure and that strain, I can't know peace. And that's how I live. I hate kids. Priests aren't supposed to like kids. I don't care. I hate children. Now, that doesn't mean I kick them in church. Because I'm here, my parishes are not having the most exciting service the kids have all year. I had a Halloween Mass Sunday of this week. It would have been today. And the whole church is still with them. I want to strangle them all, I'll put cyanide in this. I've got big bags of candy for it. And I'll hold the child through the consecration and, you know, just look at the little kid and say, this is too heavy for me to hold alone. Will you help me hold this a little bit? You know, I can control my actions. I don't pretend I like them. You know? I'd like to dunk them and put them in a box until the next year and bring them out and dust them out again. See, it used to be that I would try to convince myself I liked them and that was a strain. Now I can be honest And my parents know I don't like it. I'm not impactful in how I say it, but they know my feelings. I don' t like visiting people in the hospital. They're sick. You know, and I don''t like being around sick people. I'm as regular as anybody you've ever met visiting the sick. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things my people I think most love about me. I can control the actions. But I don ''t pretend I like it.'' Freaks aren''t supposed to have sex feelings. Unfortunately, that message has never gone south of the belt. And it just happens. And so, you know, if I try to pressure myself and be what I'm not, I put great pressure under me. The fourth step is me looking at me and saying, this is who I am. I'm 5'10 in my zeal, in my dedication, in our greed, and that's all I have to be. I don't have to perfect. And the fifth step is my being the perfect, having the freedom to be me. We miss something in the program. Very often speakers say what it's like, what happened, and what it has been like lately when it has been great. That isn't what it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to tell you what it is like now. And that's why I am telling you that it is flat. I got a real worry this morning. Normally, I do an inventory the night before and I didn't do it last night. I hope it is just part of whatever is in my system. But I have noticed a little slackening in my steps and how I am doing my steps. And that could almost be a bad sign for me. And I need to tellyou that because it is embarrassing for you to fly me up from Oklahoma and to say my program is a little bit weaker than it was six months ago. But if I don't tell you that and you sit there and love me, you know what I'm going to hear? Yes, but if they really knew. And I'm gonna walk down from here and walk out feeling worse than I came in. See, when I tell you what it's been like good, your love doesn't do me any good. But when I've told you what I've just told you, now I'm free for the rest of the talk. And if you look at me and you love me I can feel it because you know as best as I am where I'm at right now. Two people I sponsored about nine months ago called on a Monday night. That's their normal time to call. They said, how you doing? They both asked that. And I said, I'm sitting here thinking of killing myself. You don't like your sponsor saying that. But you see, so first I told you I've had suicidal thoughts. They came back strong that night. I owed them that because I shared where I was at that day. The next day I had the most peace I have ever had till that day in the program. And a week later when they called and they felt how good I was, they got one of the most important messages I could ever give them. And this program walks people through the depths of despair and helps them come out the other side. I'm going to skip six. I'm doing too long. I want to go to seven because I do that a little differently. Humbly asked. Six is getting ready for God to love Larry completely. Seven is I take the initiative. Now, here it is because this is maybe I can help you. In 16 years in the program, everything I have humbly asked God to remove, I still have. Okay? In 16 years, everything that I've gone to my sponsor with and humbly asked for help with to be removed has been removed when I do what my sponsor tells me. You see, I have a chain of command. I never met God. I met a sponsor, a group, a program, and through that I experienced a loving God. It's easy for me to go direct to God and say my sex problems are bad. But the 12 and 12 says every one of the steps are designed to bring humility. And for me to have to have called my sponsor after a period of brilliant peace and say, you know, I've got my sex problems back, that took a lot of real humility on my part. And it's the door to peace. So for me, the seventh step is not just kneeling down and saying, God, would you remove this? It's going to my sponsor. I hurt that badly that I was unaware that you had feelings. As a matter of fact, we're in the eighth step. The eighth and ninth steps basically are designed to let me know that you've got feelings and to give me the peace when I work one through seven to listen to where you're at. My worst defect is my efficiency. When I'm doing a project, I can walk right over your body and never even say excuse me. It's embarrassing, but it's the best example I have. On a Saturday morning four or five years ago, I had a list of 20 things crowding the day. Number one was I was going to go way out in the country to visit a wonderful woman, not in the program, dying of cancer. I'd been going out on my way to her home two or three times a week. And I got over there and I walked in and her daughter was at the table and I said, how's Mary? And the daughter said she died around midnight. Well, my mind had crossed it off the list and so I turned around to walk out. But all of a sudden I got efficient again and I thought of Sunday and Monday and I asked her if she'd like me to do the funeral. The wake service has to be Sunday and the funeral Monday. And I walked out. I never looked at the daughter and said a word to her as a person. That's not human, and that's not good. I see this done in AA, where people will look at somebody and they'll say, boy, your hair is getting thin, or you're looking old, or you're putting on weight. You know, in Al-Anon and AA, you have the ability to hurt others faster and deeper than anywhere else. Because when I come to you, all my defenses are down. i went to a meeting 10 years sober and there was a gal there sober six months less than me she came in and she said this seriously she said you know i felt lousy when i walked in here because my hair is such a mess until i looked at larry's and now i feel okay and it's okay but you know she ruined my meeting that morning i didn't go there to be insulted the other side of that i got from another gal i felt ugly but all my life i've never had a car until I was 28, walked a lot. My legs are very well developed. Even now at 51 years old, they're not in bad shape. So it was the one spot that I knew I could get a lot of compliments on and I liked wearing shorts and it was hot in Oklahoma City. I went to a meeting. This gal who was a good friend walked up and she meant it. She said, Larry, in all the time I've known you you've never looked sexier. She didn't make my day. She made my month. And she taught me the value of an honest compliment and if I work 1 through 7 and I'm around you long enough I can listen and I can pay you a compliment and touch where you're at and that's what the eight to nine steps have allowed me to do ten is keeping it all going I'm going to get to eleven and then for the last thing I need to share with you on the common solution one through ten don't give a spiritual awakening steps one through ten flush out the garbage but they can't plug the hole inside Oh, there is something I've got to share on 10. I'm sorry, because it will apply to some of you. The 10th step in my daily inventory made me aware that I was going through a midlife crisis a few years ago. I had been sent 10 years over to the town of Sterling. It's a parish with 650 people, maybe 300 Catholics. After that, I saw I'm not going anywhere in the priesthood. And in my way of saying it, I'm a failure as a priest. I'm never going to get the cathedral after Sterling, Oklahoma. That and my age produced the midlife crisis. Now, with all of the people in this area who have walked through some of the farm crises, I'm sure a lot of them can identify with the same pain inside. Midlife crisis is a double sense. I'm a failure and my life isn't worth anything. There's no purpose to living. I've not heard anybody talk about this, so I want to tell you the two solutions I found. They're the 11th and the 12 steps. In the eleventh step, I experienced God loving me. And you cannot be loved by God and be a failure. In the twelfth step, I found my purpose. I honestly believe that if I'm alive today, there's one person on earth that needs to hear what I have to share. I believe that if we're alive, if I am here today, there's somebody here, one person that needs to hear what I'm sharing. The rest of you, I hope get something from it. I hope that one person I'm talking to heart-to-heart and that person will hear what I'm sharing. And if I can take a life and take it out of the pain I was in and let that person somehow walk into the sunlight, then I have a reason to live. I don't want to build buildings and I don' t want to write books. They've crumbled. But I think that love put in a heart can last eternally and it's a purpose for living. So I walked out of my midlife crisis once I discovered it was there and with a lot of pain and it wasn't a quick thing. It took like a year to a year and a half. I found that I'm not a failure and I'm not useless through the eleventh and twelfth steps of the program. My God is not truth. My God is love. I'm saying this because God can be either and both. Love is experienced in the heart, truth in the mind. If meditating is listening, then for me, meditating is listening to God love. I have very simple meditations Some of you may have heard the first that took me down this whole line. It's, there's a bad storm outside. I'm afraid of storms and I'm two and a half years old and I come running. And I jump on the lap of whatever authority figure right now is loving for me, for me to be my father. I see how he tried to love me. And he puts his arms around me. And the storm's still there, but it's okay. And the meditation is just experiencing that love. See, that's exactly what happened when I came to the program. I had the emotional growth of a three-year-old, and I came running to you afraid of life, and I jumped in your arms. You put your arms around me, and I felt that love. I went from there to a second meditation. If you have a two-and-a-half-year old daughter or son that has a deformed leg, and you just put her to sleep, what would you have rubbed with the greatest tenderness and cried over with the gentlest warmth? that meditation 12 years sober changed my experience of God I thought God loved me I knew that but I really thought till that day that God hated my defects and that meditation has told me to update it now that for 51 years God has been rubbing my defects with the greatest tenderness and crying over them with the biggest warmth because you see how other children are going to laugh at your girl and God saw how people laugh at me because of my defects. And you see how these defects will keep your daughter from running free with the other kids. And God sees how my defects keep me from mixing free with his other children. And God cares. My current meditation, most of the time, is just me and Jesus sitting across from each other at a table in a restaurant. All he does is stare at me. Sometimes with faith. I could take God loving me, but it was harder taking God having faith in me. And the hardest was God having total trust in me, Just feeling that. And then one day I felt him reach over and touch me. God touching me was so wonderful. See, it's one thing to know that God loves you. It's a whole different thing for me to know God likes you. And that's how my meditations are. That's the answer to living. That's real peace for me. My present meditation, I've been dealing a lot with this little child that was an orphan growing up. And in one of these coincidences, incidences, just at the time that I the day that I saw that I take a Bible story and I'll stay with it for a month or two even longer. And I just hit a sentence where Jesus took a little child and that's a nothing in the time. Children in the Roman Empire had no rights to life or anything. A father could take a baby up and throw it against the wall and there was no crime. Children couldn't own property. So a child is a nothing and it's a newcomer, anything. Someone who has no claim. But that day Jesus picked this little child up and put it in people's midst and the neat line was he put his arms around him. And I just felt him putting his arms around my little child because my parents didn't do it and I hadn't done it. I hadn'T rubbed that little child inside me up until that day. Now, there's one more part to the common peril and if I quit now honestly I'd kill you. I've talked about the friendship and the spiritual awakening. Listen to this. This is dramatic and I'm going to irk some of you but it's true. The fellowship will not keep you sober, the God experience will not keep you silver, the 12 steps will not keep you sovereign, and the big book will not keeps you sober. None of them are necessary to stay sober. How's that for a shock? I'm going to prove it. Bill and Bob, Bob especially, had fellowship and God in the Akron movements and they couldn't stay sober, they both went on and got drunk. Bill and Bob both stayed sober a year and a half to two years before they had the big book or the steps that's crucial although I don't think it's as important in this area as it would be in others where there's so many treatment centers what is the answer of Alcoholics Anonymous to the disease of alcoholism it's in this book this is a small version of the big books an alcoholic stays sober by working with other alcoholics that's what Bill needed to stay sober and Al-Anon will know peace by working with other Al-A-Nons Ray, the guy with terminal cancer found his peace when he got out of himself and worked with others I have seen people with profound spiritual experiences radical total changes drunk in six months because they weren't working with others and I've seen total losers if you'll pardon a total asshole stay sober but they're very, very busy doing 12-step work and sponsoring. One guy is nearly 30 years sober from my 16 years he's never had anything I've wanted but he stays sober because he carries the message and we're forgetting that because it's not accented enough. Working with others will keep me sober the fellowship and the spiritual awakening will determine the quality of sobriety that I got as I try to stay sober. that's our common solution common peril common solution I used to wind up always with Bible stories but I found a new story I like to use because some people kind of get turned off a little bit by the Bible and I want to respect everybody around the time when I was in the drug life and I did street drugs, I didn't mention that but around that time there was a real popular book Jonathan Livingston Segal and in this book Jonathan soars to where other people haven't soared and he comes back and he tries to invite other people to soar as high to break all of their limitations and so many people are bound and finally the flock makes them an outcast and they draw a line on the sand and they say if Jonathan's on that side you've all got to get on this side and a few seagulls cross over to be with Jonathan and finally he has this seagULL come limping across the line with a broken limb I heard a real macho guy at a young people's do this. I'm stealing his idea. Oh, let me hope we have a little bit of time. I want to steal. Barbara was supposed to say something yesterday that I've never heard shared anywhere else. And since she didn't get it on the tape and it's excited me so much, I wantto put it onthe tape for you. It's one of the most interesting differences between Illinois and AA. And it won't always be 100% true, but it generally is, from my experience, it is from hers. Generally, the last place an alcoholic works his program is at home. Generally, the first place an Al-Anon tries to work the program is at Home. That's a real, real interesting difference. Anyway, this seagull comes limping across the line and Jonathan says, what do you want? and the seagull says I want to fly and Jonathan says you can fly as high as you want I'm paraphrasing and the sea gull says you don't understand I have a broken wing and Jonathan looks at him and says you can try as high as you want isn't that the message of all of our fellowship you know you come as an 8th grader to Alateen and you're crippled in so many ways and you watch other kids soar and cry you come as so hidden and lone and isolated as an Al-Anon cut off from the whole world to Al-A-Non and you want to soar the way other women do you come as an alcoholic to AA and you just want to live and in so many ways we feel our wings are broken and we can't fight off and the fellowship looks at you and the fellowship looks at me and says you know you can fly and we come up with what you don't understand how crippled I am and the response is always the same because we know it you can fly as high as you want thank you