The Loneliness That Alcohol Could Bridge – Larry K.

This is to you, Larry K. from Sterling, Oklahoma. Why are they running? There's a town in England that had foresight that maybe we could wish the rest of the world had had, and about 40 years ago foresaw the crises in ecology and pollution that we're trying to wrestle with. And they had an all-day town meeting 40 years to go to handle it so that it wouldn't affect them in any serious way. And in that meeting, very quickly, they saw that the main cause of air pollution certainly would be the combustion engine and they just banned it and as a consequence from that day to this day no one in that town has ever been able to own any automobile any truck as a matter of fact visitors driving automobiles and trucks aren't allowed in the town they've got a detour all the way around the biggest part of the day end of the meeting was spent trying to come up with some alternative means of transportation some alternative way to carry things to transport not only themselves, but all the heavy burdens that they'd have. And they looked at all the pros and cons of every possible animal they could use, and finally, at the end of the day, they settled on the animal they still use today, and it was the donkey. And it's very crucial to the economy of this town because everybody needs it for one reason or another to get around. And if you visit this town in England, and it's up in the mountains of northern England, the hills, you'll see that every single person must have their own donkey. All the old men have asses, all the old ladies have assies, all the young gals have assis, all the young guys have assises. If you look carefully, if you get right up close, you'll see that every single person has his or her own ass. Now because of their importance, they're pushing their ass pretty hard. And if you drive your ass hard enough, it's going to break down on you. Now I don't know if you've ever thought of what life would be like without an ass. But they're rather important. So you borrow somebody else's ass. Now, have you ever seen anybody else's ass move fast enough for you? So what you do is you prod it to move a little bit faster leading to a lot of fights because nobody likes to have their ass kicked by a stranger in public. Important as they are you'll find people peddling ass all over the town. Young gals are the same in england as they are here and a young gallo parker ass where it doesn't belong and the local cop has to come by and pinch it once a year because they are this important everybody parades their ass in public and they try to pick the best looking ass in town now i don't know if you're into asses or not but there really is a wide variety to them they come different sizes shapes and after they've picked the best-looking ass politicians are are the same in England and in America, and the local mayor will be kissing ass for votes. Come Sunday morning, everybody hauls their ass off to church. And the particular Sunday morning that led to the story I'm sharing with you, the town had an earthquake right in the middle of the Catholic mass, and 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, and those the windows on the side of the church were broken and he hoped to jump through the window and land on his ass and so scoot to safety as he jumped through the window he didn't know that was precisely where the main crevice of the earthquake was and he fell into it proving that even a priest cannot tell his ass from a hole in the ground I'm Larry Kowalski and I'm an alcoholic I also happen to be a priest who can't tell his ass from a hole in the ground because this program has introduced me to a series of steps the fellowship to the steps and the steps to the experience of a power greater than myself that I do choose to call God that I did not experience in any way before the fellowship and the program and the step I haven't found it necessary to take a drink or a mood changing chemical of any type today or any today since May the 21st 1972 12 years and 4 months of which I'm very very grateful before i start i certainly in a very very sincere way would like to express how pleasant my experience with dupree has been he and i shared a program together in san antonio and i had to leave before he spoke and that's kind of like walking out on god but i hadto get back to my own parish if you wondered why did god create it dupre it was just in case he ever needed somebody to do a fifth step with, I think. He had the graciousness of really telling me how pleasant the experience for him listening to my sharing was and I then got to listen to his talk on tape and I'd never heard him before and as I shared with him, the more I listened to the talk the richer it's getting and that doesn't always hang true for talks that I listen to from other speakers. I want to so much thank the committee and I want to get into that in just a minute before I also start if you have the opportunity to be invited to talk in AA sometimes you're received in a way that almost borders on rudeness I have been hosted only once as well as I've been hosted by Andy and Linda it just has been a real real treat and I've made to feel at home this is what I want start off with because Andy talked on fellowship and flying here even though I knew there was going to be a room full of friends that I haven't met. I very much wanted to be part of you and how astoundingly different that is how rare it is to have a committee extend an invitation for me to be anywhere and how extraordinary it is for me the field to feel that I'm wanting because you see I grew up with total and absolute loneliness not feeling like I fit anywhere in the world and this is sort of the topic around which I'd like to hang everything that I want to share with you the description that I have of the world before the program is I was on a cliff absolutely all alone and the whole world was on another cliff and the chasm in between was so deep and just so far apart that I was afraid to make the leap and it looked like the world was having a picnic and I didn't feel the world wanted me now there's a variety of different reasons for why I felt that in this first part of the talk I've discovered last year that I have a total al-anon personality and I have an al-anan relationship with the Catholic Church I am incidentally a functioning priest I will beg you please never call me father in anything that deals with Alcoholics Anonymous and I don't wear the the uniform not because I'm ashamed of them but because in the group where I sobered up in Lawton Oklahoma we had a Colonel John until he came back drunk and came back as John and I hope he made my mistake for me and I don't want anything that separates me from this fellowship because you see that loneliness that I felt was but you don't understand I'm different and what I'm experiencing was longer I'm privileged to be part of Alcoholics Anonymous is truly part of a fellowship where I'm not different and I'm not separate, and I'm not a part, but rather I'm a part of. And my disease doesn't touch me on the level of my being Christian, my level of being Catholic. It touches me onthe level of my being a person, the way it touches you, and that's how I want to relate. But I discovered that I do have the total Al-Anon personality, andI've had the privilege of having some Al-Alanon share rather deeply with me. And I know that as we who are alcoholic felt such a terrible, terrifying loneliness at the end of our drinking, so many if not all of the people who walk down the loneliness of Al-Anon experienced that just saying just not being a part of anything and being apart from every single thing I will hope that not a single person of you have all the reasons I had for being lonely but I know that most of you will have touched a lot of them I have an older brother who really has or had a sadistic streak and as a consequence of the way he cut me when I was a child pointing out how big my ears where I grew up feeling physically ugly and if you feel ugly you just don't feel part of a world that seems to be beautiful I had nobody my age that I friended with in the whole neighborhood I had to travel around with him and his friends and I couldn't do things the way they did I wasn't as athletic and I felt that I was a physical washout and I could not feel part-of-a-world that seemed to be able to do things physically something that some alcoholics and I know almost all Al-Anon's will identify with. I didn't feel that I had a right to exist ever in my life before I came to the program. I did not feel I had the right to occupy any space. You bump me and I am going to excuse myself. You pour coffee on me and say I am sorry. And I felt guilt not just for what I did, I felt guilty for being. And there is no way with this kind of guilt and not feeling the right to live that I could feel a part of life. Anxiety was with me all the time. On top of this certainly by the time I was 14 I condemned in my mind everything that I was and much of what I was doing. I was sick and tired of being sick and I grew up from about the age of 15 or 16 long before I turned to alcohol or drugs certain that I would end my life permanently committed to a mental hospital. Now that was no doubt at all it was just an absolute certitude and so I knew that was scarred emotionally intellectually sexually in a lot of other ways i hated what it was and i could not then come out of myself and feel a part of life god was no solution for me the god that i was introduced to in the catholic church and he isn't the god of the catholic church or any christian religion i hope of any religion but he certainly what i'm going to tell you is not the god that my church truly understands reveals himself to us but I was introduced to a God who happily back in the days when meat was forbidden on Friday would put you in hell for all eternity for eating three ounces of bacon on a Friday I was introduce to a god who happily would put me in hell and put you into hell if you were in junior high school and you kissed a girl over seven seconds the nuns told us that because it was sex outside marriage that wasn't just a friendship kiss and I listened to that and there was no way that God could be a solution to any of the loneliness that I felt because the God that I had was simply a God who was going to condemn me, and it was a certitude that I was going to go to hell. Even in the early days of my priesthood, I stole every cent that was in the poor fund of the first church I was in for three years running, and they don't make you saint of the year for that. Worst of all, I simply have never fit. I didn't fit in my family. I'm the middle child my parents had a room my younger sister had a room my brother and I shared a room which meant I just had a place to change my clothes and I was a nomad in the family home my brother could always get my sister as an ally against me and so growing up as a child when while we were locked in our own backyard my choices were to be with others and that meant pain, deep pain, physical and emotional, or to be alone. And I just, a while back, just going back over my childhood before I was sharing with some people, really thought of how lonely the hours of just being alone, playing in sort of a hidden area of our backyard under under sort of a porch and just living in my own fantasy world how many hours of my life that actually accounts for i went to a polish school in a polish ghetto and i lived outside the ghetto and almost everybody else in my class was in the ghetto and so i really didn't fit when i started first grade and the high school that i went To was in another part of town and almost everybody there had come up through the school system and I had been in a totally different school system. And again, I didn't fit. And it's the story of everything that I am. I just didn't feel that I fit in life. And I lived absolutely both alone and lonely thinking in every possible which way you really don't understand. I'm different. I'M ugly. I' m guilt-filled. I don't deserve to be. I am scarred. I AM marked. I Am wrong. I A M condemned. I I AM damned. And I tried everything to handle that. I tried money. I TRIED sex. I TRYED activities. I tried geographic changes. I tried professional changes. It was my sick reason for becoming a priest. I think God had his own. But I grew up in this Polish ghetto where priests were so respected and it seemed to me like they were a part of everything. And I had to become a priest to find out if you're frustrated, you become a priester, you come a frustrated priest. And that's all. And it was at that moment of my life that my alcoholism actually exploded. Because you see, I finally found something that handled my loneliness and it was alcohol. And that's rather important because a lot of people forget that many of us who are alcoholic, if not all of us drank because alcohol did something for us that it didn't do for other people. When I drank, I didn't feel ugly. I actually felt that alcohol was a bridge from my cliff over to the world's cliff. And I could stand there. Now I could never feel strong enough, get drunk enough to feel I was good looking. Burned into me so deeply is the image of how ugly that I was that I couldn't picture my face. It was impossible if I closed my eyes. Alcohol could make me feel I Was physically exciting, and that was enough. That was enough of an escape from the pain. And the guilts were gone, and the feeling of not belonging was gone, and I could feel that I really was part of this party. And I didn't feel that was condemned and scarred. I thought that I could add something to what the people were doing, and I really felt I belonged. Alcohol did this for me, and it's hard for me to understand that it doesn't work this way for what we in Oklahoma often call earth people. That an Al-Anon and I can have the same set of loneliness feelings, and that I can take a drink and the alcohol will do something magic for me that it may or may not do for him or for her. But after a period of time real hell began because alcohol that had made me part of life all of a sudden was causing problems that were making me feel lonely again at the very same time I needed it to try to get out of my loneliness. The alcohol would make me feel so physically bad, and I was alcoholic from the first drink. I didn't always get drunk, but I've had an alcoholic drinking pattern always. I didn't like the taste of alcohol i near the end got accustomed to it but i drank because i needed that effect and i drank with total panic until that effect started i would want at least three full water glasses of whiskey in my system my drink of preference was manhattan i'd take anything though because i need it get three in instantly until all of the things started happening until the alcohol started working until the effect started really being produced in me till the bridge from isolation to life somehow started being built but i started feeling so physically ugly and getting the shakes that alcohol was doing things that were cutting me off from the world and i was feeling guilty even when i was drinking now that wasn't conscious i wasn't consciously aware that alcohol had stopped working but in blackouts i would dump my garbage on people I would tell things to people I didn't like that I had difficulty telling to someone that I really respected in my fifth step And it showed that the effect of feeling so good being drugged to my guilt and my fear wasn't happening And in my blackouts, I was hating what I was and I couldn't live with what I Was and on top of this The alcohol was causing me to do things to ruin parties to cause fights to start becoming ugly and adding new levels of guilt The only area of my life that I respected was my ability to function as a priest and that was because I was so sick I was seeing a psychiatrist and loved to use psychiatry on people who were coming to me for help I couldn't manage my own life And I delighted in trying to manage the life of others the lives of other people in a blackout I divulged something that was told to me in deepest confidence by one of my closest friends in a counseling situation and someone told it to me the next morning i blabbed it at a party and i ruined four or five friendships and nearly destroyed a marriage and there was absolutely no way i had anything left in my life that with my mind i could respect because if i could do this blacked out i could start divulging things that were told in confession and there's just nothing left and all the isolation started coming back in people didn't want me around the part The parish I was in had a kangaroo meeting to throw me out. They didn't want me to be there. And I needed the alcohol for the bridge from loneliness to life. And yet at the same time, alcohol was knocking down the bridge as fast as it was building it and I was living in that isolation. And the last nine months of my drinking, I lived like a hermit. I stuck my head out of my room only when I had to because I just couldn't come out and face people anymore. and my isolation was complete and my loneliness had come back and I was just living in my own fantasy world. And that's where I was when I came to the program. I believe the 12 steps of our program, among other things, are specifically designed to attack my loneliness. And I want to walk through them with you and as I walk through the steps with you I'd like to point something out. I'm not going to tell you sometimes how I worked the step the first time because I'm going to assume that the great majority of you who take enough time and make enough of a sacrifice to come to a conference have worked your first step and your second step and your third step the first time. But if you're like me, what that step did the first term at some other time in your life reappears. And that step has to be reworked to build that bridge from isolation back to life, from loneliness back to fellowship. And for me it begins precisely with the first step of the program. And what it does is it identifies the specific cause of my real problem. So very often I had been trying to attack my loneliness while I continued to drink. And while alcohol is not the primary problem for an alcoholic, one of the real serious things we have to face is as long as I am drugged by alcohol or any other mood-changing drug, it's impossible for me to face life undrugged. And it's just that simple I can't get at the alcoholism until I take the alcohol out of my life I can get at my alcoholism I don't know about you as long as I am reliant upon any other mood change and chemical or plant in my life at all I've got to be where I'm at undrugged before I can start really looking at where on that so if I feel that my problem is my loneliness if I field at my problem is my guilt if I fail that my problems is my anxiety I'm looking first at the wrong problem and it's only when I really see that my problem is my alcoholism that I'm powerless over alcohol completely that I start off becoming part of a fellowship and I felt that fellowship from the first time I came to a meeting. I don't know why when no one else who gave me love could break through all my barriers from my first meeting on somehow I have felt that you care and you share and i have known that you want me on your cliff i saw this most clearly at a young adult meeting in texas we were having a real late meeting about two o'clock in the morning or three o' clock it ended up and i just happened to step out to go to the bathroom when the meeting ended and everybody locked hands and they started doing a skip dance to i've got a never-ending love for you and this is the first time i crystallized the image of the two cliffs because everybody was inside having that picnic and i was outside the big difference was this time i knew they wanted me inside and that particular moment i was out just because of my fear afraid to come back in and be part of the circle because i'm so emotionally well i've got my defenses up so much i just don't feel free to dance even drunk i couldn't dance and i wasn't going to feel free enough just to do a kick step the next afternoon when the conference ended i was inside and we stood up and we locked arms and we did a kickstep too i've got a never-ending love for you and i felt part of it's my disease that enables me to start feeling part of you but you know anything that causes me to put my attention on something else before my alcoholism starts separating me again whether the cause is good or bad about four or five years ago i was teaching in a catholic high school i got fired by those damn nuns while i was there i'm not bitter about the bitches that's okay god will get them in their own good time it did take me two years to work through a resentment and i really am not bitter about it at all and i do see what i did to deserve it didn't do it all but i did do some things to deserve anyway i was getting up at five in the morning and going to bed at midnight and i had about 20 minutes a day for myself and i really didn't have the time to meditate and into this all of a sudden my whole program started changing and i was going to meetings at exactly eight o'clock leaving at exactly nine i was picking apart everything that was said i was angry when people i sponsored called on the phone because there were interruptions i had no sympathy for anybody who came to me with a fifth step and the reason was basically when i looked at it is because i was putting the spotlight on other things i was going to bed saying of course i'm sober rather than my god i'm sober i was taking my alcoholism for granted and i was looking at the other problems how much was in my day and making them important and if i put the spotlight today on anything before my own alcoholism that i you know it is absolutely as impossible for me to be sober today as it was 13 years ago when i was drinking then i'm not going to first feel an identification with you and so everything i do with you becomes and inconvenience and I stopped feeling the fellowship. And if I can help you with something, I'd like to point something out that I almost never hear about the first step. It is absolutely essential but it is also absolutely useless. And our failure to point that out I feel kills people in Alcoholics Anonymous because if you're like me you can start at certain moments in your mind getting screwed up enough to think that everything you've learned in Alcoholic Anonymous will protect you from taking a drink which means i'm saying i've got power over alcohol and that puts me apart from you i don't need you i relate with you on an entirely different level when i feel that and what i had to do was just go back and take an honest look at my alcoholism and get tremendously scared of what alcohol would do in my life and then all of a sudden and I was part of the fellowship again, and I could feel that. So basically identifying my disease enables me to start knowing where I've got a bridge from. And the second step I consider in a lot of respects our most forgotten step came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us not to sobriety but to sanity. And it tells me that there is an answer, that whatever clip I'm locked on, there's an answer. And I don't have to stay there. I don't have to end up feeling different it offers me more than just not drinking it offers me sanity and I know from the Latin root of the word that sanity means health wholeness entirety it offers means the possibility to be totally healthy as a person it's a challenge for me to believe that whatever weakness I've got the power of God is greater than that and God's desire to heal me is stronger than my desire to be sick and someday this isn't going to be here i belong to a church that does believe the power of god enables people to become saints now now that's not important for many of you and it isn't important for me to know if i'm going tobe a saint before death or after but it is crucially important forme when i'm locked in a situation of despair to feel like it isn' t going to stay this way always and let me tell you about that from certainly the age of 14 on i have had major sexual problems in my own life And they've stayed into my sobriety. And about six months ago, I was walking through real heavy despair because I have fought this, I have battled this, I had asked God to give me help with it, and the problem was just staying. And I was reaching that point where I was going to lower my own goals and say, This is always going to be here. Now, I hope I'm never going to have to say that about any defect I ever have because that would nearly destroy a major basis of my peace. I don't care when something is going to go but it's crucial for me to know that at some time in my personal existence as Larry whatever is upsetting me now isn't going to be present in me in a way that I'm not going to allow myself to be fully loved fully accepted as a person and that's my second step and I had to work it and I worked the second step by counting every moment sober I've had counting every day and feeling that if the power of God has taken this mountain out of my life that isn't going to let me fall on my butt over some mohill. And I look at the dramatic thing that God has done in your lives and I listen to talk and I watch changes and I come to believe that God can walk me through this by watching what God is enabling you and me to walk through already. And it's the answer to my despair and it starts building the bridge. I will not have to stay alone. The third step is the actual start of construction. Made a decision to turn our life and our will over to the care of God. I want to tell you that the third step is not for me what it is for a lot of newcomers and alcoholics anonymous It doesn't deal at all with any feeling. I have I can feel resentment for all of you I got up here feeling tremendous despair today I really went into a depression after the evening meal for some weird reason I can see you those feelings That's okay. I can have whatever thoughts I want I can be better than people and I often do I feel better than People I sponsor I've got a fast man. I've gotta brilliant mind, and I also confuse it with reality can have whatever thoughts I want the third step doesn't deal with that nor does the third Step deal with my becoming a saint I hear people delay so much starting a fourth step because they're not working their third step enough I lied before my third step I lied after I cheated on the truth from the church cheated from people before and I cheated after my third step I hanky-panky before my first step and I panky pankied after my third step and i don't think the third stuff was involved in that at all because if it is, what's the rest of the program for? The third step simply says, it says nothing about God's will. Please note that. God's Will is not noted to the 11th step of the Program because if you're like me, you've got your head up your butt so far. When you reach the third step, you're incapable of understanding what God's Wil is. God's wil is going to be precisely what I want and that's dangerous. The third steps deals with my turning my life and my will over to the care of a power greater than me. Now, I haven't met God, so I've turned my life and my Will over to care of the vehicle that God came into my life through. I met a sponsor and believed in him. Then I met a group. I had a sponsor before a group, then I met alcoholics anonymous, then I met the program, and then one day I woke up experiencing God, something I didn't think possible, something that I never thought was supposed to happen. And for 12 years in this program, I have had reliable sponsorship. For 12 years of this program I have done every single thing my sponsors have told me. I have built the bridge as I have been told, plank by plank, and that's the third step. I make four meetings a week because I've been told to go to four meetings and the meetings are set. So I can always throw in another meeting but my committed meetings I don't decide to go to a meeting because you see I've surrendered my life and my will and I honestly believe when I have done this God will take care of me. I've done things to prove my sponsor wrong. Incidentally my sponsor is not a Catholic. Basically he's not even a practicing Christian. He has never been to college. I have 12 years of college straight A's, four years of theology and he's done hard time in a penitentiary. I like to think I'm an awful lot smarter than him and I bounce right off him. He's everything that I need. He is not delicate with me. He walked up to me in my third year of sobriety and he says, you dress like a Pittsburgh pimp or a Philadelphia fag. Change. Now, you don't understand how that hurts somebody who's as sensitive as I am. I changed the way I dress. I've done things to prove him wrong, and I've been angry when I've gotten the piece that he's told me I would get because I couldn't show him how wrong he was. I've waited months to start what he would tell me, and i've looked at why I couldn'T start what he told me when he did. But I've done every single thing I've been told. I surrender my life and my will to his care, and it is his responsibility to keep the alcohol out of my life, and to get that bridge being built. Basically, the first three steps don't really touch my disease at all. They keep the alcoholic out. They're not the bridge. And I start building the bridge in the fourth step when I make a fearless and searching moral inventory of myself. supposing to please this side of the room i felt i had to be 5 11 i'm 5 10 and a half and i don't mean standing on my toes i mean standing flat and i tried literally to stretch my body to be it supposing that i was 5 10 i felt like i was in the middle of the night to please this side of the room i felt i had to be 5 10 and i tried to shrink in and put all that pressure on me between the tension and the pressure it's impossible to know peace i've just described my life before Alcoholics Anonymous and the basic instincts that I've got in Alcoholics Anonymous let me give you some examples I hate kids priests aren't supposed to hate kids in my opinion all children have unmarried parents until they're at least in high school and at that age I can start relating with them but not before that and I would try to convince my this isn't something I decided it's just something in my own gut. I try to convince myself that I like kids because a priest is supposed to like kids. I don't. I can control my actions, I can't control my feelings. I don' t like hospital visits. I'm so insecure that when I walk into the hospital room of a stranger, I don''t know how I'm going to be received and thrusting my insecurity on the line time after time at certain times has completely paralyzed me. Six years sober for a brief period I became chaplain of a hospital and had to visit everybody. And I didn't know I knew most of those Catholic Protestants didn't want me coming in and I was sure a lot of the Catholics didn't and I finally stopped doing it. I would go to the hospital to make the visit and I would simply sit in an office because I was paralyzed by my insecurity from doing it now everybody knows a priest is supposed to be able to like the visit the sick so I try to convince myself I'm supposed to 5-11 on another side priests aren't supposed to be lusty and horny well I've got sex feelings priests arenít supposed to be greedy they're not supposed to be materialistic i've got those feelings and i would try to tell myself that i didn't so that i could be the size that i felt the world was telling me i was supposed to be and until i come to see that i'm five ten and a half as far as my lust goes right now that god will have me be the size he wants me to be i haven't always been five tenand a half at a certain time i was five three and another time i Was four three and three three and all the way down and god will have me grow in patience and God will have me grow in my chastity, my celibacy at the pace that he wants. And peace will only come when I see my size and start accepting it. And that's not an easy thing for me to do. It's not an easy thing at all. When Dupree and I had the privilege of sharing the program together, it would have been last February or January, I was walking through midlife crisis and I didn't know it. Right now I'm pastor of three churches. The Catholic Church in Oklahoma doesn't like me, and that hurts a lot. The people do that I've ministered to, I feel. I'm pretty honest on that. But the priests, I'm the bottom of the barrel, and by the bishop's opinion, I am the bottom of the barrow. I take care of three parishes. One has 100 people, the second has 140 people, and the third has 40 people. You may not have heard of Sterling, Oklahoma unless you're down into towns of 600 plus that want to stay 600 minus forever. And it occurred to me that when you're 47 years old and they give you Sterling Oklahoma, your next assignment isn't going to be the cathedral and i had to start looking at the reality that i'm a failure as a priest by priestly standards by the standards of you know other priests and i bought into that and i was going nowhere and i went into a depression because i woke up one day from a looking at a new booklet for women alcoholics that had some meditation i wanted to read one of these meditations there was this little poem that said hang on to your dreams for when dreams die life is a broken winged bird it cannot fly and i suddenly realized all my dreams were dead all the dreams of my youth of my childhood of my early priesthood they're all dead i'm going nowhere and i'm a nothing i'm in rural oklahoma and i am a big city snobbish easterner i grew up in pennsylvania about 20 miles from where harriet grew up and i not where i want to be and i m not recognized and and I'm not appreciated and I am not desired except by the people and I' m going nowhere and I haven't heard talks on midlife crisis in the program I don' t prefer to say that over change of life midlife crises have such a happier more positive definition it' s still the same damn depression but sounds so much better and I had to see it I couldn' t deny this and until I saw this and how this was affecting all my life I couldn't go anywhere I wanted to think I had dreams but I didn' t have a single dream and that's the beginning of peace just saying here's where I'm at because you see if I'm supposed to be a different person than I really am whoever I really are stays on my own cliff and this fake image is the person I'm going to put on the cliff with you and I can't get over to you until I know who Larry is besides not wanting to be who I am for most of my life I denied because I didn't like me I hid everything that I was from you And the fifth step is another plank in the bridge toward out of isolation when it says, admit it to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. I took everything that I hid and I showed it to another person and I was open and I had the ability not only to be me to myself but I hadthe ability to show all that I am to you. Now that great freedom I immediately start taking back. after my 19th birthday i psychotically blocked out aging and i acted dressed thought of myself as a 17 year old when i was 35 years old and came in the program that's what i was when i was 37 years old i was acting dressing and traveling around with 17 and 19 year old kids and when i saw this i suddenly had to age 20 years overnight and it wasn't an easy thing but but the program gave me the strength to do it. When I was teaching in that Catholic high school in my early 40s, I'm 47 as I told you, very proud of my age, I'm at peace with that. It's part of being 5'10 1⁄2", my physical age today. When I Was Teaching in that Catholic High School, all of a sudden I became real popular with the kids and by running with high school students I started regressing psychotically again. And I knew I had to tell that to my home group and I couldn't do it because it was such a shameful thing. And as soon as I couldnít do it I was alone and isolated again. And thank God I was asked to talk at another place the next day, and I was able to tell from the podium what I needed to share. And then I could go back to my own group and just be me and show myself, hey, this is what I'm walking through. This is my pain. And of course it didn't make a damn bit of difference to them. You know, they've always thought I was a little bit weird. It made all the difference to me because if I didn't say this, if I had to hide me, I can't come and be part of you. The sixth step, entirely ready. ready is not eager to have god god is not larry remove remove is not suspend all these defects of character i've misworked this step so many different ways i honestly don't have any idea what a defect is today i think what i consider my defects for a long time right now are really my assets the sexual hang-ups i have had have enabled me to listen in love to people i sponsor who come locked in any problem they're locked in an affair they don't know how they got in it and They want to get out of it, and they're locked in it. And I've seen priests who really don't have strong sexual drives, and I've see how intolerant they can be of the problems of other people. And I can use my sex hang-ups to understand what it is to be locked in a problem and to share with people. And I don't think that's a defect then, because the seventh step when it defines defects says, I pray that you now remove from me every defective character which stands in the way of my usefulness to you or my fellows. At other times, I've allowed those same-sex feelings to keep me from listening to somebody that I sponsor when they call on the phone because I'm too much into myself and my own lusting. Then it's a real defect. I believe that when I have enough love so that I can listen to you wherever you're at, God will remove everything that all these things that I don't like about myself. They won't be necessary anymore. But until I'm listening to you in love he keeps me humble enough so that I have to start listening to you. I start getting on my feet and I stop looking eyeball to eyeball to you when you're on your knees coming up from the gutter and he knocks me back down on my butt so that I can understand where you're at and I can listen with an open heart. The sixth step to me is the end of my schizophrenia in a religious way with God. You see, up until this point I would allow God to love the things, the time I would put into a sermon but He couldn't love the times I put into pornography. I would allowed God to love my moments of real generosity when I would take things that I wanted and give them to people with need. He couldnít love my greed when I really would want to cater to people who had money and not have time for people who were poor. God could love the real listening I did as a sponsor, but he couldn't love this efficiency trait that I have that when I'm embarked on a project, I'll walk over people and not know that they're there. And I heard somebody tell me about eight years ago that God doesn't love traits and patterns. God loves people. He doesn't like labels, thief and alcoholic. He loves people, he loves Larry. and the sixth step for me is my entirely being simply present as a single person in the presence of a loving god and trying to embody all that i am to own everything that i have and say this is just me and when i do that i get the deepest peace i can ever have right now in the program and i constantly have to rededicate myself to that because i'll do some damn dumb thing and want to limit god's love spotlight to actions and traits rather than to me as a person the seventh step is humbly ask god to remove these defects i'm going to tell you something that maybe will help some of you the way if this recent realization has helped me everything i have gone directly to god to removed he has absolutely failed to remove i want to repeat that everything i had gone directly to God to remove, he has absolutely refused to remove. Because you see, I've never met God. God gave me my chain of command. Sponsor, group, AA, God. And if I short-circuit that, nothing goes. Everything I have gone to my sponsor and humbly asked for help with, God has given my sponsor precisely the answer i've needed a short while back i went to my sponsor with my sex problem he's been hearing about it a long time i finally once again went to it with him and he says you know larry it's time to crap or get off the pot this is being cleaned up my sponsor is not a delicate person as you may infer from other things that he said he said you know if you're so into this sex thing why don't you jump into it hog wild you're trying to straddle a fence walking on each side jump fully into the sex thing and if you enjoy it that much swim with it and if should if you're enjoying it that much and it's leading to this much peace it means that you have to give up your priesthood so what jump in that absolutely astounded me and it was the beginning of the answer for about six weeks for the greatest time in my life this whole problem it's like i haven't had a sex feeling in six weeks this was at the end of the suggestion that he gave and my inability to do that and finally saying you know i'm if i've got to walk on one side of the fence i can't walk on both and then just finding the beginning of a piece i always have a problem after a major talk i've had in the past any big thing i've done in the church or in aa immediately afterwards i would flip out sexually as a way to hate myself and i came back two weeks ago from a conference in duluth and walked through with absolute peace astounded because even one of my big things was porno and there was a hardcore porno store up there that we don't have in oklahoma and what a golden opportunity that was and i didn't even want it it was just the way the big book talks about recalling from alcohol i was recalling some of the negative aspects of sex in my life yeah watch bridge after bridge let me plank after plank and the bridge being built if i'm going to be part of you i have to know that you exist and i lived with such pain that i couldn't know that another person had feelings and for 35 years 36 37 years till i reached this point of the program i dealt with things and people didn't appreciate my using and abusing them in this way. And the eighth step when I made a list I wrote the person's name and what I did and I wrote down all those names and I discovered that other people had feelings. And I want to talk about a little aside of this because it's an area that I feel very much we forget this in two ways in Alcoholics Anonymous. us. I come to AA with all my defenses as down as they can ever be. Therefore, I am most susceptible to be hurt. And I have been hurt by people commenting on my hair, people commenting on other things. I chaired a meeting once when we had two people named Joe and somebody was referring to Joe and he said, you know, fat Joe. And i stopped him and i said, no that doesn't go. He does and i just shared what i said. We come here to be built up not to be heard. And they said everybody calls him fat joe and see my brother always called me big ears and dumbo and his frequency didn't make the pain less it made that pain more and i don't feel any of us need to hear negatives and i'm going to tell you something about weight because i'm a compulsive overeater i've got eight years now in the program of overeaters anonymous without a snack let me honestly tell you by the time you notice i have put on weight my belt has informed me of it a long time and I really don't need your kindness in pointing it out I had a gal walk up to me remember I told you I felt so ugly I was going to say the only thing nice was from the waist down I have always had nice legs because I didn't have a car, walked a lot and I bike now and I was in Oklahoma City and this gal that I knew for about four years walked up at a meeting she says Larry I was wearing cutoffs and she said I've never seen you looking sexier she made my night she told me the value of an honest compliment And from that time on, I try at almost every meeting to find somebody and to pay them never a phony, always a sincere compliment. Their serenity, their eyes are sparkling, they're dressed, they have hair, and it's such a nicer way. I have also the other thing I want to share that tells me that other people in this one aren't always sensitive to where people are. Please don't ever say, at least I never, in an AA talk. i've heard so many speakers say that at least i never and then they'll pick something by their standards particularly shameful and almost every time i've hurt it a friend of mine or me was sitting listening and we had done it and that's such a slap in the face i guarantee you you have done things i haven't done i've listened to enough inventories to know that i also guarantee you i never listened to the life of a person that i could say walking in their footsteps i would not have done what they did i broke every rule i had and if i haven't done what you did it's because the circumstances weren't right i didn't need the money my sex preferences may have been different or i had some problem that day drank too much and just couldn't get it aroused we don't come to the program to be hurt in the eighth step building this bridge should make me be aware of where you're at and i hope you can hear that regardless of anything you have ever done if nobody else in this room understands you i do if you feel you're the bottom of the barrel i felt i was the mold underneath the barrel and i know what those feelings are like the ninth step the last plank in a negative way in a sense may direct them into such people wherever possible except when to do them so would injure them or others i want to talk on just a specific area since i don't have the time to go in to detail in the ninth step i want to talk about amends to the dead because you almost never hear this i've heard a lot of people saying they couldn't make amends for the dead i'm going to tell you from my own experience and the experience of people that i've shared with who have given me feedback they for many of us are the most important amends there are there's three ways i know of to make the amends and i'm gonna rate them the first and the least the best for me is you write a letter to the dead person. Now, if I've got amends to make to someone who's died, I almost always have anger inside me and I got to get that anger out first. And I screen that anger out. I become a little child and I don't write nice. These are angry feelings. I write the anger out and then I ask, I give forgiveness. Then I write what I've done and I ask forgiveness. Now I've never used the letter so it's hard for me to talk about in this technique. My best technique, my favorite one but it's not the best. The second best is imagination. I can use my imagination in prayer a lot. I picture the Lord, me and the dead person, and I say it all. And for whatever reason, when I've got this anger, I'm like a three-year-old kid stomping my foot and getting it out. And the dead person, I believe, is with God and filled with love. And so they're always ready to ask for forgiveness. And then I say everything I've got to say. And then I see if the Lord can bring us together in a hug. And if he can, it's all done. If He can't, there's either something I have not yet forgiven or there's something that's still holding me back that I'm ashamed of that I need to bring out. I sponsored a young man who made tremendous progress, experienced God and then went to church. And I warned him that if he dropped away from the program the experience of Alcoholics Anonymous was he was going to get drunk. He lasted eight months. I thought he'd last two years. Came back and he tried to get on the program and he never was able to get it. And he killed himself. that's the pro story that I've told up until this is just the second or third time I'm sharing the full story because there was something that until a month ago I didn't realize after he came back he wrote me two letters and called me once and he hinted around the bush that he wanted me as his sponsor again never used the word sponsor and never asked me and I've got this thing when I haven't been listened to I find it very bitter it's very difficult for me to forgive and forget and I was going to wait until he asked me clearly before I become his sponsor so I didn't meet him halfway. And I've carried around a guilt for his killing himself. And I worked that part through, but I did something deeper a month ago and it's all changed for me now. I went back into meditation and I gave him permission to die because I knew how important that was for other people. And from that moment on, I'm walking free and I can share this now. The most effective way is to go to the grave when no one is around and to shout out your anger and to ball out your guilt i've seen people whose lives have been dramatically changed by that i did it my father's grave and i just have such i feel my father closer to me today than i ever had in my life he's been dead 25 years i feel him present to me in love one point i want to make on this that i can't share from my own experience but it's so astounding that i'm going to tell you about it because it's been so dramatic in the lives of the people who have done it And it's for those of you who have experienced miscarriages and abortions, whether they've been voluntary or involuntary. Women have come to me, and they're not Catholic. You know the Catholics stand on this, so please don't hear this as a reflection of that. Women have came to me and they've astounded me because they've told me that they know the sex of every aborted fetus they've had. Now that I could guess to and figure that's a figment. But enough women who didn't know each other came back and then told me the second thing, and this is what really has knocked me off my chair, they know the name that fits every aborted child they have. Given that personal existence, I feel that if you've aborted a child voluntarily or involuntarily, your child is with God and your child's missing one thing, a parent's love. And so I would challenge you to take a little bit of time and go into prayer. Go into a church and go in to prayer. and you just tell your child you're sorry you've ignored her or him up until now and that you want to be a father you wantto be a mother from now on and you do that one by one with each child and I know there are people here whose lives will be changed if they try it will be that dramatic I've seen people who have built that bridge and I've see it go so I know that we have to continue to be constantly aware of where we're at I'll go to a meeting and all of a sudden I don't like anybody I'll go to church and I don't like anybody. And it takes me a week to two weeks of writing a daily inventory before I become aware of what the problem is. If I don' t like you, it's because I don''t like me. And what I've got to do is start liking myself again. The way I do this is I pull myself over into a corner and I just let God love me. And then all of a sudden the rest of the world changes. But unless I'm taking that daily inventory, I'm not going to see it. And my basic advice that I give myself and everyone else is I write mine and I use a stenographer's tablet and one side is just what I've done wrong on the other side just what i did right and I balance my natural tendency my natural dependency is to see no good so I forced myself to write the good and I just ended a whole month when I could not write anything wrong because I found myself being very negative and I had to balance the ledger steps 1 through 10 build the bridge but they will never answer my loneliness i think you know with me that sex is not an answer to loneliness nor is companionship sex is too fleeting and companionship when i try to use people to answer my lonliness i've either dominated them or i've enslaved myself to them and i've just leeched off them and it just doesn't work the answer that i have found to the loneliness that i live with is the experience of a loving god and that's prayer and meditation Prayer means talking. Meditation means listening. The best way that I can tell you the difference between these two terms is to go back to the way God came into my life, my sponsor, my group. If I stood before you and gave you the impression that from the time I came into AA, I've never lusted, I've ever cheated, I've not been a Christian, I've always never lied, and I've had no depression, you would sit there and wonder what was wrong with me, but you'd love me. You'd give me your look. And I'd walk out of here feeling absolutely empty inside because inside me I'd be saying, if you really knew, you wouldn't like me. two weeks ago I was a month ago I was going to Dallas to give a retreat on the principles of the steps of the program and driving down to Dallas I started thinking drinking in a way that I hadn't thought drinking from the end of my first month in the program that lasted Friday, Saturday Sunday and Monday by Monday I wasn't afraid of it because you see I can't control my thoughts and these were not voluntary thoughts and I'm doing the right actions and I believe if I'm doing the right actions God will take care of me but you know it's really a little bit difficult if you're invited to fly over a thousand miles to talk to a group to say a month ago I was thinking drinking for a whole weekend thoughts were coming but if I didn't tell you that and I walked out of here I can't feel your love now when I tell you that you might think I'm weird you might think I am dumb but you are continuing to look at me with love my telling you who I am is what I call prayer when I go to God and I tell him off if I am mad at him when I am telling him I am scared when I present the real person I am now to God that's the job of prayer That's all it is for me because God knows what I need more than I do My listening to God my listening to you is my meditation and my god is love more than truth Love is in the heart more than in the mind So my meditation is more than nice thinking as a matter of fact. My mind is a distraction to my heart The perfect meditation that I've got now this will only work if you can use imagination and not everybody can If I came down with a heavy cold today And you did you could get a penicillin shot and be cured I could get appendix illa shot can be killed because I had a localized reaction the last time I had penicilin one person's medicine won't be another's one person is the way to meditate won't Be in others, but I'm going to share three techniques with you because we almost never hear these The ideal meditation for me would be to stand up here and close my eyes and feel what is in all of your hearts For me and all of you want me to be sober and more peaceful And I feel that as light or warmth. And that's everything I look for. That is the absolute answer to my loneliness. I do this in other ways. I had somebody I sponsor who was reading a chapter of the Bible every morning and a different chapter every evening and getting nowhere in meditation. And I said, that's because your mind's too active. Cut that. Find a simple Bible story, a very simple one. Read that same story every day for at least a week and keep it open in front of you through your meditation time and by the fourth or fifth day your mind will know the story and your heart can start feeling it put God in there and let yourself be every person in the story let me give you an example because it worked very well the story should sit well on first hand and if the story is working you don't quit at the end of the week worked so well for him in the next five weeks five other people that I sponsored I told to try it five out of six of them were having fabulous results since it was working so well for them I thought I'd try it now that is honestly the truth and it's been the best effective method of meditation for me I'm using it now I'm still using it today a group of people bring a paralyzed person to the Lord for healing and the crowd is so big they can't get in so they climb up on the roof and they let the paralyzed person down and then the Lord walks over and here's an interesting line it says seeing their faith not his he says your sins are forgiven now please if you ever go to the bible or any book don't go to god phony supposing you were totally paralyzed and the lord came over to you and he said your sins were forgiven i'd have looked up and said hey i'm paralyzed i don't want this forgiveness crap i want i want to be healed you know look at me i can't do anything. Now, I know today, I know people who can walk who are crippled with sin, guilt. And I know people who are paralyzed, who are happy inside. So I know that the freedom is the more important thing. But if I were laying there on that mat, my first reaction would just be total shock. What's went wrong? But then he says, so that you know that I can forgive sins, get up and walk. Now that's AA. People brought me to the program and they believed when I couldn't believe. and you who are God's healing power present, you walked over and you told me your sins are forgiven. We don't give a damn what you've done. We understand you. And that enabled me to stand up and walk. And later on in the meditation, I see myself in every row. I've got to bring people to the program. I see my life in every way. I see yourself in every role. I'm going to be the Lord. Somebody comes to me for sponsorship. And I've gotta really listen to them and say, hey, your sins aren't forgiven. And you can walk. And in this story are the Pharisees who don't want stuff to be forgiven. and that's in me too what do you mean he's got serenity and he doesn't go to AA we all know that only those of us who are in Alcoholics Anonymous have serenety I don't want people forgiving alcoholics or sober outside the fellowship and I don' t want you having a hell of a lot of peace if you haven't done the fourth and fifth steps the way I did the fourth and fifth step and there's that snotty attitude in me and I can experience that and all the time I'm feeling and I stay with the meditation I can look at the ocean and I feel God I can see God I can feel God that's another form of feeling and that bridge is made the last step having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps we try to carry this message to alcoholics that's the end of the isolation you see up until this point I have been using you as the answer to my program my problems my loneliness and you can't be in the 11th step if I can experience the presence of a loving God all of this is reversed and my relationship with you is put on a new term I have something to offer you And my bridge flows not to build over to see what I can take from you, but I build a bridge to see what I give to you that God has given to me. And that's an absolutely different direction. I can offer it to you and you can turn it down, but the bridge is there. That's your problem. The bridge is here and I'm part of you and I am not isolated. 11 and 12 were the answer to my midlife crisis. It doesn't make any difference what the bishop thinks of me. Oh, it makes a little difference. But I get my serenity from what God thinks of us of me and my God is madly in love with me. And I get my importance and my dreams are rekindled by what I can do in the program. If I'm alive, I believe somebody on this earth still needs to hear the program as I've lived it and I've experienced it until I can only dream that I'm still needed. And that's the end to that. It's the answer to all of us. I told you how I felt isolated because I was so physically ugly. I was in Jonesboro, Arkansas just under a year ago and at the end of a conference we held arms locked arms and someone sang in a very prayerful way the Lord's Prayer and when it was being sung all I could picture was my face 46 years old and for the first time I could imagine I could not picture my face you see love heals and it was rejection that scarred and it made me feel ugly I don't think God makes anyone ugly we label he doesn't and I had bought the labels and your constant acceptance went from the spiritual to the intellectual to the emotional and it touched the physical. And I felt physically okay and that's tremendous. I'm wearing a ring. It was a present. It's a 10-point diamond from someone I sponsored when I was 10 years sober. And about two years ago I was at a conference and I started apologizing for wearing a nice ring and my sponsor was there and boy did he snag me and he said, don't you ever again apologize for making yourself look good. I'm proud of the ring. I'm proud of dressing up for you because you see I've got dignity These feelings of not belonging are gone and I belong and I'm where I should be these feelings of being condemned of being wrong or gone, I'm who I should And I owe it to God to make this product at certain moments of my sharing the best that it can be and I can do no more for you than to show you what this program is capable to do in my life and and I certainly do completely and fully and absolutely feel a part. A part of you, not apart from you. That's so absolutely unbelievable. So every part of my loneliness is answered today when I work the steps of this fellowship. I always, not always, I most enjoy ending with a story from the second part of the Bible, the Christian part, but don't worry, I'd never tell a story that was based on it Needing God There's a truth in this story And it's the truth that I want to share it with you for And if you don't believe in the Bible at all Don't worry I hope you'll believe in The Message Because it's so important for me The Lord had a friend die And he came to the place where the friend was buried Coming to the tomb, he cried To make sorrow forever dignified And then he cried out Lazarus, come out and Lazarus was brought from a cave to light from death to life and he was bound with little strips and he couldn't walk he just stumbled out and as he came out into the light the sentence that makes this story so meaningful is there the Lord said to them unbind him and let him walk free that story enables me to see the distinction between Alcoholics Anonymous and my God between my role in Alcoholics Anonymous and God's. You haven't called me from death to life. You don't have that power. You haven' t called me from darkness to light. You don' t have that pow' r. You haven''t called me from drunkenness to sobriety. You don''t have that powers. But when God touched me with sobriete and life and light, I was bound. I couldn' t walk. And He didn' t give me the freedom. He brought me to you. and he told you to unbind me and let me walk free. He told you with your love to help me build that bridge from isolation to life. You're not my answer but you are my freedom. That's why it's such an honor to feel that you want me here to be a part of you and a part of your celebration. God bless you and thank you very, very much. Thanks for watching!