The Medical Side of Recovery and Dr. S. – 1961 – Sam S.

He said more than a few minutes about AA than I've heard said in a long time. And friend Henry, who said entirely too much about me, is the charge most of it up to Henry's good-heartedness rather than to the facts. But this is always a joy. I was with a gang like this in Baltimore last Sunday night, and I never feel quite as much at home as I feel in an AA meeting. After I had spoken down at the gathering in St. Louis six years ago, a gal came up to me and said, Doc Sam, you may not be an alcoholic, but you certainly do talk like one. And I said that was one of the compliments that I'd had in my life. And my association with this thing has been one of my joys and privileges. And it still is a wonderful thing to see this great tide of the spirit, really, rise and go higher and higher, not only in the number of people that have been touched, but I believe in the growth in the order of people that have Been Touched for a Long Time. Because as the bishop says, unless there's that kind of growth after, we don't stand still. You don't get hooked back on a racket someplace where you just stay sober. we're meant to go because there's his life in the spirit I had a call the other day from a friend of mine down here a little embarrassed that there wasn't going to be any honorarium for Cummings I said as far as I know there's never any honorarium in connection with Alcoholics Anonymous and I think one of the best things about it is that the finances have never gotten mixed up with it they're all in the news if you want to give you give out of your own heart things don't run on air anymore and churches run on Air but this is not the financial this financial business is not primary The commitment is primary, and you do what you want out of your heart afterwards. And I wanted that understood, and to say that I was thankful and happy to come on that basis, of course. I don't ever want to see that mercenary motive get into it. My goodness, if that had ever gotten into the thing in the early days, what a shamble would have been made out of AA. I think this group has, by the grace of God avoided, more pitfalls and mistakes than pertinently any group of people setting out to do a particular thing like this that I know about in here. And it's not a very long step for any of the rest of us. I don't see any difference between getting drunk on whiskey or gin or beer and getting drunk upon temper and lust and resentment and fear. I often tell about a woman in my old parish in New York who was a very old-fashioned right-hand top drawer lady, colony club and, I guess, a good Republican. And social register and all the works. I remember my search about 50 years at that time. One day she said to me, I wish you would talk to a friend of my daughter-in-law. I said, so why do you want me to see her? She said she gets drunk. She is an alcoholic. I said, why don't you talk to her? He said, well, you see, I've never had that problem. I said neither have I. But you've been saying to God for about 50 years every Sunday morning of your life that you are a miserable offender. Did you mean it? Did you not mean it because if you're a miserable offender along one line you can understand a miserable offend along another one and it isn't so much of a jump. And I said I guess my friend you get drunk sometimes too. She was horrified. Wanted me to tell her how I thought she got to Owe. I said, no, you wouldn't want me to say that. She said, yes, I would. But at that time, she was full of curiosity. I said well, sometimes a few of us get drunk on self-righteousness. That's why I think the church as the bishop has suggested has got a whale of a lot to learn. Not from us individually so much but from the incredible gathered experience of AA. would be God that those things were happening in every church that are happening pretty steadily and consistently in this fellowship of concerned and committed and beginning to be changed people not saints but beginning to be changing people that's what all of us can be and ought to be and if we think we're too much past that we're in real danger if I'm meeting a Methodist church I just sit here wondering how many of you ever thought you'd wind up in a church at all let alone a Methodists church I always tell the Methodists I wish that they and we Episcopalians had never gotten separated because they had to fire and we had to fireplace some Methodists have gotten so terribly respectable in liturgical these later years that I don't know whether they don't even fire enough tools Sam Jones used to give it to them he was one of them Sam Jones was talking in Baltimore a great many years ago. He was lambasting the message, he was a Methodist himself. Somebody says, hey, why don't you check out after we put Australians in our own cassock and some of the rest of them? Sam says, when I get through with the messages, I have to go to bed. Well, it's great to go after our own crowd. Now, there's just a couple of things that I'd like to go into a little bit with you this afternoon. And this first part may be carrying co-hosts to Newcastle, but it may not be. It concerns a little bit of the early history of, hey, you may have read it all and you may not have read but I took these notes one time when Bill was talking in New York and I kept them. He says this thing started in Zurich in 1930. I'm going to look at his notes a littlebit carefully. When a fellow named Roland Hazard went to see Dr. Jung, the great psychiatrist who died not very long ago. I knew Roland Hazerd well. He became a member of my church later in New Yorck. a little window just inside the front door of Calvary Church in his memory. He stayed for a year under Dr. Young's care, at the end of which he felt it was possible to be released, and he went out, and in a few weeks he was back again drunk. He went to Dr. Jung and he said, Is there nothing I can do? And Dr. Chung said, I've got to be frank, I never saw one alcoholic of your kind recover under my care, and I can't do anything for you. and Roland was shattered and he said isn't there anything I can do Dr. Young said sometimes alcoholics have a conversion that liberates them and Roland said where can I find such a thing and Dr. Jung says if you look maybe you'll find in those days the Oxford group was using our parish out in New York as headquarters it was the earlier and I believe better days of the old group days when I was closely identified with it and learned a good deal from it and he began to come down and listen to ordinary people talking in much the way you all talk about what had happened in their own lives. He heard about the old four absolutes. A great Presbyterian layman Dr. Robert E. Speer once said the summary of the Sermon on the Mount was absolute honesty absolute purity absolute unselfishness and absolute love. And he heard those four principles expounded and he listened to them. and he began to experience the liberation that he has often told me about himself personally. He got ahold of an old book called For Sinners Only. He read it on a train once from New York to Detroit and he said it converted him cold sober. Then a fellow named Shep Cornell and another one named Seba Graves joined him on his farm up in Glastonbury and these fellows had known Ebi Thatcher and Ebi had been raised in Cain in the old way I remember hearing Ebby tell the story about driving a car between two trees that no sober man would try to get between with a car and saving the front of the car into the corner of a lady's house and tearing down the corner of the house she was in the kitchen she was perfectly terrified upon which Ebby said oh Lord, just drop me for a cup of coffee and she took him to law not because he tore the house down but because it was impertinent and Roland Hazard had made a tremendous impression upon these people And he'd begun to find an answer in God. And Bill says that the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous was that the god of science had spoken doom, those were his words. The second factor was Doc Silkworth. I never knew Doc Silkworthy, though I had his funeral in Calvary Church. went to town's hospital in the summer of 34. And Dr. Silkware thought he might be one that would recover. And Lois, his wife, said to the doctor, he wants to stop, why can't he? And the doctor said Bill's habit is now an obsession, his will can't do it. No physical help alone can be brought to bear on the situation. She said, what next? And Silky said, I think you'll have to lock him up, or he'll go mad, or he'll die. Well, he left town sanitarium, and he was going all right for a while. Then Bill said it was on November 11, 1934. Lois went to work, and Bill set out to move over to Staten Island to play golf. It was a bus accident, and they had to stand on sidewalk in the cold. A fellow stand beside him and said, let's go in and get a drink. And Bill Bill said, I ordered ginger ale. Ben said, don't you drink? Bill said no, this is an obsession with me and I can't do it so I drink ginger ale but you go right on. They got back on bus and on the way to the golf course the bus stopped again. Ben said let's go in and get a sandwich. They were talking about shooting and picking and reminiscing about the armistice in France in 1918 about how good the champagne was in Bordeaux. Along came a bartender and put down two glasses in front of him and the waiter said to Bill this is armisticed they have one on house. And Bill said all right The other man said, are you crazy? But Bill drank, and that was the end of that. And the next day he was back in the airway of 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, which was the house in which they were at that time living. Then two weeks later, Ebby Thatcher came in to see him. And he offered Ebby a drink. Ebby said, I'm not drinking. Bill says, what's got into you? Ebby says, I've got religion. Bill said, don't do it, he was crazy. But Ebby began talking about the oxen booth about Rowan Hatt. And from the old group in its earlier days, Bill says that AA learned the idea of moral inventory, and then of confession, and of restitution, and then of carrying it out to others, and of dependence on God and God's guidance. Those five factors came into AA from the lots of groups. Eddie was talking to Bill over the kitchen table. Bill said, where did you find these things? And Eddie told him. And Bill began to come over and he said he never could get out of his mind the face of Eddie across that table. Eddie had had problems for a long, long time. And it looked like he'd begun to find the answer. Bill says at that time I was being made ready we had a rescue mission in connection with my parish in New York Calvary Mission down on East 23rd Street in what's called the old gas house district it was the place in those days when the elevator coming down uh 3rd Avenue went across 23rd street for a while then went down 2nd Avenue it was an awful tough old neighborhood and and my parish owned a loft down there on the bottom floor of which there was a little chapel. It wasn't much use. And old Harry Hadley, who was Father Sam Hadley you read about in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, himself an alcoholic until his father's death and then converted largely through his father. His father's desk was the wonderful superintendent of that mission and did a marvelous job. Did all that he could do, I think, in a rescue mission. and I thought it would be nice to kind of run a little annex to the rescue mission up in the parish house. I had a lot of nice gentleman drunk friends who had been schoolmates and college mates of mine and I said, we'd like to get a bunch of them together so they could help each other. We got them together and they helped each other all right, but they helped each other down and not up. I didn't realize how badly we were doing until one Sunday morning I went down into my church that was over the altar of the church a great empty cross, the cross without Christ. And what was my horror to look up at that thing and see shining right through the middle of it where the two cross pieces were the moon face of an alarm clock. And some of my boys had gotten gay on Sunday, Saturday night and the parish house was right down up against the church it wasn't very far to throw it he got mad at his alarm clock and that's where they stopped. Now, we were doing some good things, I think, for the stumble bombs down on 23rd Street and I'll always be grateful for it but I believe Bill and others saw that that was not the way to reach the ordinary alcoholic and I'm glad for the mistake that we made so they didn't have to make them. Bill went back to town after a while. One day he lay there in a great depression utterly agonized in spirit and desperate and he said to God he was ready to do anything if he could find the answer and he set suddenly the place went electric it was as if he was on a high mountain with a high wind blowing and in another world he said it was ecstasy and his assurance was complete and he was deeply aware of a presence that was doing for him just what he was asking be done and that was the change in him that made him realize that change could come to other people another factor that led him to AA was the effect of William James Gray's book The Variety of Religious Securities as I referred to a moment ago Bill read that book and found out that when people are in great need these transforming experiences come to people who surrender not people who say they surrender but people who let go people who are desperate enough to give up faith in themselves and say without God the situation is hopeless and with him it is not hopeless. Scientists said you can't do it yourself. The Oxford group had come in to bring the spiritual side of it, Dr. Silkworth had talked about the medical and physical side to it, and then William James fortified the spiritual spiritual, as that great book did fortify the spiritual, when a great psychologist understood and in a sense described in psychological language what religious experience is. Both of after that for a while because he was a messiah he had to get this thing across to all drunks in the world. Well all I got to say is I'm glad he did. You and I wouldn't be to get a day to add. Sometimes God can take the mistaken and egotistical good drives of a person and slowly refine those things until they become of great use to him and of great use to humanity, and that's what happened. And you remember that the first group of AA was not in New York, it was in Akron. Bill went on to say that there was a proxy route that took him out in behalf of his firm to action. He said he hoped to get control, Bill could mark the word, in a certain company that he worked for. He was at the Mayflower Hotel one Saturday afternoon with $10 in his pocket. The ballroom was filling up and he felt afraid. He said I was in a fair way to get drunk again. He felt the need of another alcoholic with whom he could talk so he'd forget his own troubles and try to help him. He hit on a church directory I know you think those things did much good standing on a counter in a hotel lobby, but he just wheeled around and ran his finger down and came to St. Paul's at the Episcopal Church, Walter F. Thompson's rector. And he took a chance, and he caught up with Walter. And Walter caught on very quickly. He said, I've got just the person to meet you. And he called immediately on Mrs. Henrietta Seidling, who was the daughter-in-law of old Seidlin, the head of the entire company. Bill said she doesn't want to bother with the drunk side of the afternoon. he said, yes you would. And they got together. While Bill was coming out there, he called Dr. Bob, who had been referred to a minute ago, and his wife Ann, and said, I've got a man down here I want you to talk to. Dr. Barthel, I got to see my patients. I've got five minutes. He came and spent five hours, and he said Bill was the only fellow he'd ever seen that had the pitch. And pretty soon, they asked Bill to come over and stay in their house, which he did, instead of staying in the hotel. Pretty soon, he began to go to work, went down to one of the city hospitals and got a hold of a fellow who'd been there for about six months. So bad they had to sat him down. They talked to him. The fellow's name was Bill D. He was profoundly changed and never left. And Bill said there were three candles lit in Akron that stayed lit. I won't just put one footnote of my own into that story. To set the record straight, there has gotten going in AA a kind of a rumor that I had a lot to do with the 12 steps. I didn't have any more to do with those 12 steps than that book had. Those 12 steps, I believe, came to Bill by himself. I think he told me that they came to him in about 40 minutes. And I think it's one of the great instances of direct inspiration that I know in human history. Inspiration which doesn't only bring material straight down out of heaven, but brings rather, I think from God, the ability to interpret human experience in such a way that you distill it down into transmissible principles. I compare it to Moses going up on a mountain and coming down with ten tables of the Law. I don't think that's the first time Moses ever thought about righteousness, but I'm glad he went up there and got those ten and brought them down and gave them to us. And I'm sure Bill got quiet for those forty minutes until he finished off these twelve steps, and I believe they have only been changed by about one word. said at the end of this talk, who invented AA? It was God Almighty that invented AA. But this is the story of how we learned to be free. And he closed by saying, God granted AA and the program of recovery and unity in service be a story that continues into the future as long as God needs it. Praise be to God for it, and for the life of that fellow and all those who were with him in the beginning of this incredible move. I want to say a little bit about the idea of practicing this in all our affairs, because I am convinced that while AA has been guided and entirely right, I think, to confine itself officially and for the most part to helping other alcoholics. I think there is wisdom in AA for everybody, and it ought to have a profound effect upon the churches and upon people outside the churches, upon anybody who wants to get straightened out and find a real way of life in the midst of all the subtle and open idolatries on which a lot of our modern Americans base our lives. So I'm going to tell you some stories a little bit later on of some other people besides alcoholics and some of the things that they're doing. but I want to say first I think there are four things that we face today which are your concern and mine and had better be our personal concern from here on out and the first is the communist sector my old friend George McLeod of the Iona community has been over in this country lately he said somewhere not long ago civilization is four days away from chaos he doesn't mean that chaos is going to be here four days from now I think he does mean that if the right factors were elusive, it would only take four days for what we call civilization to crumble and crack up into chaos. And I'm afraid that is true, and we do not know to what degree communism has got our communications, one of the reasons is we have no idea, already wired so that a takeover would be possible. I hope that's not true. But so did the people in Czechoslovakia and Poland and North Korea and the other places that have been taken. And wishing and hoping and hoping the other fellow would do it was not enough. How diabolic that thing can be, it seems to me keeps coming out. I saw the other day that Major Tito said we are a very proud premier crew chef called Gagarin and the Heavenly Brothers. I must let you in on a secret. We cosmonauts and many Soviet people call Khrushchev our Heavenly Father. Now, ain't that something? The hell of it is they believe it. They believe it a lot more than a lot of us Christians believe ourselves. And here is the old review of truth about life in that book. And it's free and it's wide open and we can all find out about it. And we can live that way if we want to. and here these fellows come along with pure materialism unadulterated atheism with all the methods of chicanery and mendacity that they are used to gain their ends and we sit by and wring our hands and say isn't it awesome next thing you hear is the enormous number of underprivileged people in the world I mean hungry people and unlettered people and half-sick people. We ought to have been concerned about them long before. They always were God's children. Our Lord's been telling us for 2,000 years inasmuch as he did it or did it not unto one of the least of these in the islands of the Pacific in the ends of the earth where you can't see him to where all kinds of colored skins at home and abroad inasmucha he dideth not he did not unto me inasmucht as he dith he dithe unto me They're his folks, they're his people, they are his children. We ought to have been getting at this thing long ago. But today the situation is acute because they're going to follow one thing or the other. They're going follow some way of life that we in the so-called Christian West show to them or they're gonna follow the other way that communist promises and then communism promises and does not perform. Which way it goes is pretty largely up to us. hear about this thing, but we don't do much. I want to say a little about that in a minute. Third thing is a largely unawakened America. Honestly, the number of people that are still thinking that the main thing is whether you drive a better car than the fly in the neck bracket down below you in the business, and the gals, whether they really finally get that neat coat, whether that hair really looks quite good enough for this reception, these are the things that really seem to make us tick. We're burning up and these are the values. A lot of us sitting in church, listening to it, letting it pretty well go over our heads. Made up our minds a long time ago, just about how far we were going to go, about how far we're going to let the Lord take us. And we stopped growing way back five, ten, 15, 20, sometimes 40 years ago. Now the fourth thing is a half-awakened church, because the church itself is more concerned with hundreds of thousands of dollars put into gorgeous edifices and parish houses that chairs intermissions. My church is a status church, according to The Status Seekers book. And we stand, I believe, 39th in the list of missionary giving. It's a scandal. Not a problem. It's scandalous. We just don't care. And we don't care because we're not anywhere near half-converted. That kind of a church? Of course you're over for communism. Anybody If it's got a real concern about the world, it's not going to take a church like that very seriously. Oh, I know we're very historic, we're correct as far as all that's concerned, but you've got to be more than that in this day. Now, what are we going to do with these things? Any answer to them? Let me give you some things I think we might do First thing is, I think we had better learn a great deal more about the relation of freedom which we all enjoy and all want to keep to states which we put a good way down the line our priorities. I want to read you an old quotation I'm very fond of. This came from James Russell Lowell when he was ambassador to Great Britain, way back in the not much past the middle of the last century. But it's as timely as if it had been written yesterday. He talks about these cyclical fellows that can get along without God. He says the worst kind of religion is origin at all, and these men living in ease and luxury indulging themselves in the amusement of going without a religion may be thankful that they live in lands where the gospel they neglect has tamed the beastliness and ferocity of men who but for Christianity might long ago have eaten their carcasses like the South the islanders, or cut off their heads and tan their hides like the monsters of the French Revolution. When the microscopic search of skepticism which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a creator has turned its attention to human society and has found a place on this planet ten miles square where a man may live in decency, comfort and security, supporting and educating his children, unspoiled and unpolluted, a place where ages reverence infants are respected womanhood honored and human life held in due regard when skeptics can find such a place ten miles square on this globe where the gospel has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundations and made decency and security possible it will then be in order for the skeptical literati to move as their inventors have used. I think that's a doozy. I'd like to see that avenue safer in the country. That's got some philosophy in it and America needs some philosophy as badly as anything I know. Let's get to this. Freedom, as we know it in the Western world, is largely a derivative of Christian heritage. The root is faith and the fruit is freedom. And if you want to keep the fruit, you better look for the root. William Penn said once, if men refuse to be governed by God, they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants. I don't believe you can put the real option in history any better than that. And the option is not between a society that tries to put God at the top and some nice liberal idea where you can bow God out and just live on nice principles that we've learned in a democratic society, they won't stand up. The real alternative to the thing that you and I know in the free world is what you got in the communist world. And you just take your choice. When the Archbishop of Canterbury was over in this country a few years ago, He said that a man today is a convinced Christian or a convinced communist or else he's an animal non-antichrist. Theoretically, that isn't so, but practically, that is so. And if you want to do something about freedom, you just need to be sure that you've got free churches. Churches where you can speak the word of God. Churches open to all people. Churches were created by God. Where human beings are human beings. It may be the last place on earth where they are human being. I'm not sure how much longer education is going to stand up and be counted in its evaluation of human personality, as religion seems to live away from our modern education. As for the Church, let me give you two quotations. Here's one from Emil Brunner. The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning. The noun and the verb are the same thing. What it is and what it does are inseparable. There is no fire without burning, there is no burning without fire. The noun in the verb is the same things. Church and mission are one thing. Not two things. You don't get a strong church and then go out to evangelize. If you're Christians, you've got to evangelize and that's the way you get a strong church. There's a wonderful prologue to J.D. Phillips' translation of the Acts of the Apostles. Best critique on a modern church I've ever read. There's an sentence in there that goes this way. These early Christians were led by the Spirit to the main task of bringing people to God through Christ and were not permitted to enjoy fascinating sidetracks. That's what's wrong with our churches. Fascinating sidetrack. bake sales, and I don't know what all courses in heaven knows what. It's not very nice if you've got time to do it, if you haven't got the main thing done first. But sometimes when you're doing these things instead of the main things, they don't do so well. There's a step between paganism and the church that I think the church itself little understands. It's really the step of rebirth. We take a person who's been a pagan and we make an official pagan out of them. We make a Methodist out of him, make a Roman Catholic out of his, make a Quaker out of something else. This is a quick process. Is that what should happen? Or should the first step be, look, are you going to become a Christian at all? After that we'll discuss the minutiae. Decide when you're going into service first. Then we'll talk about which regiment. And a lot of us got in on false pretenses. Did you ever find yourself painting the side of your house or a board fence? Going up and down, and a bug flew into the paint. You tried to get him out, turned it, hit him with a stick, and he was gone. going up and down and a bug flew in to the paint you tried to get him out turned the paintbrush around tried to give him out with the end of it that wouldn't work and you tried your fingernail that wouldn' t get him up then you just decided to paint him in that's what a lot of us did when we got inside the church and that's what the ministers did God have mercy on us they painted him in too now it isn't we're gonna wait till people get perfect before we take him into the church but there's one thing about being perfect there's another thing about being honest and really trying to get there i knew a theological professor once who got converted after he'd been teaching theology about 25 years he was about 50 years old when he got converted he said the trouble with him was he got sharks and iron before he got worse all of us in the church just need a little going over my friends you know that? And the longer we've been in there, the more we need it going over. The more we sit in that pew and just take an attitude toward what the man says up here in the pulpit instead of getting out there and sweating our shirts out like you fellas do for your people. What we ought to be doing for the needy people on the outside everywhere, if we were doing that, we wouldn't be in quite so much trouble. Let me just say this too. People are going to listen to us just about in proportion as they find in us joy in our faith, and relish in doing the work that we believe God wants us to do. That's true about lay people, it's true of ministers. My friend Ralph M. Young read chapter 42 in Grand Central, who was one of the great forces of Jesus Christ in New York City. Not so much numerically, years, qualitatively. Twenty years has that fellow been reaching people in Grand Central Station. It's not as impossible a thing to do as anybody can do, but he does it. He was turned in the direction of Christ by an old colored lady who lived in his apartment and used to come each Sunday and take a child to church. And I listened to her often one day when he was talking, described that old lady, and this is what he said about her. She had the gaiety. She was a live wire. Buoyancy, that's what I mean. It bubbled him. Never a dull day. You that kind of a Christian? Or are you one of these Christians that always kind of have a little trouble? I met one the other day. She's perfectly happy when she's just a little bit miserable. And she never kind of understands why these things happen to her because she's always been such a good woman. What are you going to do serving a man on the cross giving his life for the world at 33 and then you wondering why would you have been so good this should happen to me? Of all the fantastic ideas. Listen to this verse. This is Philip's translation of St. Luke 734. The Son of Man came enjoying life and you say look a drunkard and a glutton a bosom friend of the tax collector and the outsider Those are Jesus' own credentials. That's what he said about himself. The Son of Man came enjoying life, and you say, look, a drunkard and a glutton. A bosom friend of the tax collector and the outsider. Not much room for self-righteousness in that, not much room to gloom either. One of the things we need is small groups. One of the greatest things that's happened in AA, of course Is the fact that you get together in companies That are not large companies like this Where two or three people have to have it all their own way But little companies where everybody gets to say This trains people They find out what it is They find how you say it How you put it so another person understands it You get some guy or gal to talk too long You kind of pull them down You get another one that's kind of shy and doesn't want to talk And you pull them out And they learn and sometimes as the bishop suggested you got your pitch in a matter of a few days or hours and Christians were sitting around golly I had to man my church I said why don't you why don'T you win people this fellow's on my vestry oh he said I'd have to make a long study of the matter before I ever did anything like that I said would you please tell me what in H you've been doing in Calvary Church for four years I don't know those sort of jammers and jambers well Bishop maybe you can tell me but I like what it says about them They're always learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. Church, full of folks like that. Always learning, always listening. Never coming to an knowledge ofthe truth. You AA fellows get it sometimes in a week. You get the pitch. You find out what it is. You don't know all about it, but you know enough about it so you can be relevant and intelligent when you talk to somebody on the outside and begin to follow a track of it yourself. The cell group is of major importance. We've got a great professor out there in Pittsburgh named Achenheim. University of Pittsburgh. Man in business and also teacher. He put a lot in one when he wrote the sentence that I put down the other day. The cell group is the way to get and dispense information on God and country. I like that one. The cell groups are in many places the sign of awakening, just as definite a sign of awakening as it is when some of you hook up with an A-group. Now, practicing these principles in all our affairs, I read a piece what not long ago came from the Department of Laity of the World Council Church in which there was this sentence Is something happening in the name of Jesus Christ in your sector of the activities of this world? Is something happen in the way of Jesus In the name of Jesus Christ in your sector of the activities of this world It's a great thing to sit up and sing Like a mighty army moves the church of God And all these wonderful hymns And listen to scripture And pray in church But what do you do when you're outside? Can you talk to people naturally about it? Not in such a way as to drive them off But in such way that it gets their attention The president of Harvard University Said to his undergraduates When they graduated three years ago this month The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment. That comes from the head of the greatest institution in this land, I think, is something. That man's a Christian, no bones about it. The finest fruit of serious learning should bethe ability tospeak the wordGod without reserveor embarrassment. Can you do that? Or do you pull a long face? You AAs don't do it becauseyou learn not to. I'm talking about you church members in AA. Do you do it? Because, you know, it's possible to come through a gladsome experience, tough time first, and a glad some experience to get you into AA and then get in church and then you're kind of solemn and holy. And then, neither the Lord nor the devil has got any use for you. Bring humanity with you. Don't forget your joy and your humanness. But with that you and I have got to reach this non-Christian part of America. This part of my country doesn't care about the kind of thing we're talking about right here. Doesn't know, isn't aware that there haven't been a deal with his safety or the kind of a world his children and grandchildren are going to grow up in. I love to watch Raymond when they get started. Get started doing it in and through their daily jobs. In and through their daily... I'm not trying to make pictures out of Raymond. That's faith. I don't want to see them find my professional habits. I want them to let the Lord Jesus Christ come through their professional media and techniques and obligations, greetings. 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, Congress. I ought to get a friend up in Canada who's a doctor. He lives near Mount Smyrna, Toronto. Chronicle sick. Good doctor. He wrote me not long ago. Had a perfect grand time last night down at the university. Spoke to about 200 medical and nursing students. Gave them my Ben Casey routine. I give them some case histories I've seen in my practice, present the problem to them and ask, how would Dr. Ben Casey or you deal with it? Then finally give them a solution. That is, how God solved the problem. It's amazing how one can speak in the gospel message when their guard is down. I wrote back, I said, see if you can do more about your Ben Casey book. And he wrote back my Ben Casey routine simply this. I give several case histories from my practice. I give the problem and drive them to the person or person. This is a problem that has to be diagnosed and treated. What would the great Dr. Ben Casey do in this situation? What would you do? Then I tell him what I was done at one point in my career as an M.D. Then I told him that some characters got their hands on me, that's what a bunch of us had gotten known about 15 years ago, and I became different every day. Then I wound up telling him what actually happened in the lives of these people, but I was able to call him to great position in consultation. Our truth cases are entirely different and varied, and in telling the stories we're able to bring you a lot of state gospel truth. I guess this is sort of sneaking up on people, but they seem to take this medicine as if it were hidden in jam. Of course almost everyone who hears these stories has had the same problems in varying degrees. Good old Ben Kierkegaard, wish I had him in my clinic. Now there's no separation between that fellow's Sunday business and his Monday Tuesday Wednesday Friday business. He lived it in all one life. He practiced his principles very much like the ones you and I know, in his daily affair. Here's a young businessman in New York. I met him at a college where I was speaking about three years ago. We were in a fraternity that's not famous for its piety, but they He gave me a hearing for about an hour and a half, at the end of which God had worked an amazing miracle in that little group of people. I can't quite understand it, but it happened. So I looked to close that, and I said, Bert, I don't know what you like to do, but I'd like to pray. And I don' t want to do the praying myself. And if any of you sort of feel like praying, just say what you've got on your heart. It's about a sentence. Twenty-seven of those died prayed right in the living room the last time. This is one of those. He came up six or eight months later, and he hunted me up. We had a talk. He got on to what his needs were, what his problems were, and he made a kind of a decision. Then he didn't follow it up. And you can have an awful nice baby, but if you don't feed him and keep him warm, he's going to die. And he just didn't feed them or train them or do anything with his own soul, and it left. Came back again, we talked some more. Finally, he began to get started. Here are a couple of letters for him. I found the Lord has been a great help to me both downtown at work and at the apartment with the other roommates in guiding my life. It may take some time, but I think we'll eventually have four Christian roommates and a real group down on Wall Street where the Lord's guiding can help. He went out on a team of about 85 people who went from all over the East, really, up to one section of Pittsburgh on a recent Sunday. to just ingest that whole town. And we need some more of it. I had a letter from him and he said, this was a marvelous experience. Not all very far but wonderfully enjoyable and ever so much part of God's work and so secure and happy in his hands. Bruce put me on as part of the first at work team and I ended up leading a number of group meetings with other members of the team and even speaking to two Sunday school groups that were selling and really helped and God directed the whole thing. I'm presently thinking getting involved teaching the Sunday school here in New York and taking part in young adult group meetings during the week in an effort to do more and become more fully a part of God's work. I feel this need to know that if I don't, what little I am doing now will not be enough to keep me in this thing. Funny the way God works. The more I say yes to God, the more I do and the more I become involved, the more I feel and know that I must do these things or lose everything. It may be selfish but it makes no sense. Old 12 steps business. You see? Works for the rest of them just exactly like it works with you. one more story and I'm done. In your congregations, there are some unwilling people. You may see them sometimes and you may not see them very often. They may come under pressure. Some have been burned over that had too much when they were young. It was of the wrong kind. We had a kid in my parish out there in Pittsburgh, no longer a kid, he was a grown man by the time I got to know him. He'd been acquired by an accolade. He said he'd had enough to last him the rest of his life. Now, what happened to the fellow right there? I guess somebody was praying for that boy because he fell in love with a gal who was a Christian gal. She wouldn't run my church but she was a christian. Charlie's a great big guy about that big and Emily's a little girl about that big. How are they going to work themselves? She was rising up to make some plans about religion before they got married. for a husband and wife to get married. I never talked about these matters of the spirit until I was the last to get in it. And they're never going to leave until anybody else. They talked about it. Charlotte said, I'll tell you something. I go to church 50% of the time. If you come to me, if you stay away, I'm going to tell you 100% of time. And Emily said, well, I should agree to that. Charlotte says, my time includes weddings and funerals too. She said, all right, I'll take up on that. So after a little while, I began to see this couple come to church on Sunday morning. Looking like nothing so much as a small girl with a big, big, unwilling Saint Bernard puppy on a leash. Charlie looking absolutely wretched, more wretched than every step as he came down the aisle. Now if something happens under those conditions, it gets better it's worse. One sermon in the morning, Charlie got up. He earned a bit of his service. He got halfway back. And he stood up to him and whispered to everybody that was there, he said, I'm leaving this damn place and I'm never coming back. Now you know why I'd rather have a fun day of that than go out of the door and hand me a weak handle like an oyster don't say I enjoyed your sermon so much. I said, John, if you enjoyed my sermon, you didn't understand it. It wasn't meant for enjoyment. Now, I know, sometimes we mean that in all good faith, and you don't have to be too hard on him, but... In other words, give me a fellow with some sight in him. You can do something with him. Well, he did grow up, but he made his agreement with Emily in a couple of times. He was looking still very miserable. The entire family said, Charlie, look, there's a couple of people eating over in Edgewood. Let's go and find out what they're talking about. What are you talking about, Charlie? Talking about God for them. Charlie began to tear his head. He said, isn't there enough to go to church on Sundays? We've got to go on Wednesdays too. He says, Charlie what do you think those people do? She said, I don't know what to do. I suppose they roll on the floor and tear their hair and speak in tongues. I don' t know what they do. He said, you crazy idiot. You know those men downtown in business. You play God with some of those fellows on Saturday. You think they just go crazy when you talk about faith? Come on, give it a try. Leave the car running outside and go and get him if you want to but give it to try and Charlie tried and he found a lot of sensible people talking about life and God and faith and went back. Not long after we began a course that I like to give to get some of those bugs out a course in how to become a Christian we tried to give it to all our people before they were confirmed. One thing to keep about the Episcopal Church, another thing to take about Jesus Christ. They're not necessarily antithetical, but they're not necessary the same. And he thought it would be good for Charlie to come. He asked him to come, but this time Charlie wasn't quite so hard to get. And he came. Second time in, after the session was over, Charlie said to me, Could I talk to you sometime? I said, I'd love it. When are you coming? Saturday afternoon. took two hours off and sat down and talked to you. She said, how do you start? You know I've been bluffing all this year. I said, I never would. I started by trying to say what there was in my life that God didn't like. Somebody said, once we take hold of God by the handle of our sins, just as many of you have taken hold of God by the handle alcohol. Wouldn't have done it if it hadn't been for this. And in that sense, thank God for what you've been through. So you learned how to live, but found out not to live. Charlie told me what some of his sins were. We got out on our knees and Charlie gave his life to Christ in a very simple decision. Before that lad got off his knees, he turned sideway to me and said, when can I go somewhere and talk about this? Well then they'd gone through a great long stint of study or something or other. He was different than he did. And he was ready to try to talk about it just like we all are. I said Friday night over at You and Emily come, and they came. And they both spoke. They both witnessed this great stuff. Lovely stuff. Human. Natural. God with all truth. Conviction in it. Challenge in it, but no pride. I suppose most of you youngsters have talked sixty times together since then. I had Charlie with me down at a mission in Houston just a few weeks ago. He and his witness, as I was talking to him at church one night, tell about what had happened to us. Who do you think was in my church on Lenten Sunday, speaking in my pulpit, one year to the day that he went out saying, I'm going to leave this deep place and never come back? Who do we think was there in my pulpit? Charlie and Emily were in my pupit. Charlie was taking up about that much of it, and Emily was taking about this much of the other. But they had a word. It can happen. Charlie and him had been moved down to Orleans now. People say, oh my, what a sad thing. Wonderful couple, I shall meet with them. I've lost them. I've lost anybody. Not if they really changed people. If they got the fire of God in them, they'll set the fire alight somewhere else. Did you ever try to burn a lawn around a leaf and get tired of things kind of burning along very slowly and you picked up a rake full of them over here and put them down over here and then you took some of them and put em over here. You got the whole business burned? Well, if you've got fire, you can do that. about the place. It will burn where? And they weren't there in time until they had a group going and still going. People like that multiply themselves spiritually, like the early church did. Church exists by fire. Church exist by mission as fire exists by burning. Are you that kind of a Christian? Have you let this thing get out into all of your life? Yes, Yes, there's a corner of your life that will be for every day. Thank God for it. It's one of the things that ties you down to reality and keeps your feet on the ground. It's great. But your citizens, your housewives, your businessmen, you represent all sorts and kinds of people, you're members of communities and on all kinds of boards. Let's let this thing down into hospital boards community agencies and not just welfare kind of things business things so the spirit of God doesn't only get at the alcoholism or not it gets at the need and the selfishness and the bewilderment and the materialism and the bad judgment of people that can well take their country off its course and get us back again going in the way where English would go God help us to do it. What a view, man. What a viewing view. What a see. What a seeing. What a man. To say in a way that I have not grown would be ungrateful, ingratitude. To say to people that have not influenced me would be a lie. To say three things to seek to give these three men free will be part of my inspiration. These men have contributed greatly to me. When I first came in, Herbert Sprawl said the kingdom of God is greater than an Arabian church. It is also greater than alcoholic anonymous. I bought it. I believe it. I want to live that way. A little later, I got a book written by the same shoemaker that made a terrific impact on me. It said, Revive our church, O God, beginning with me. Put me right in the driver's seat. I had to do it. And I've tried. And I want to continue to try. I'm going to continue. I'm not going to try to continue to try because Henry Edgar told me one last week when I was in trouble with my heart, my soul 100 happy completely he said what would Christ do let's do that I would like to close this meeting by having you press wait a minute I have two announcements I got a car coming away the 1963 North Florida State Convention will be held at Southern Times, North Carolina. Date will be announced later. And here's the other one. Can you give me that information, sir? Where's the other one? The other one I can't keep getting out. Yes, you did. North Carolina General Servant 1963-64 Chairman Jack Gurley Newbern, Secretary-President Bader, Asheville, Delegate Mark Franks, Franklin, Oren the Delegates, Herbert, Stark. As you close this little prayer. May we bow our heads in prayer. Almighty God, give us the insight and the strength to change those things in our lives that ought to be changed, give us the ability to accept and to endure those things which cannot be changed. And above all, the wisdom to know the difference between these two, and grant that we may daily grow in grace and in the knowledge and love of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. May the Lord bless you and keep you. may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and to be gracious unto you may the lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you give you his strength and peace and faith and love this day and evermore