The Paradox of Powerlessness and Victory – Karen T.

Hi everybody. Well, I sure do. It's nice to be so good. You know, it used to be if somebody said, would you speak on a morning program? I'd think, my God, who wants to get up and talk about drinking early in the morning? And then I thought, well, I used to do it, you know, so at least I can get up and talked about it. I would like to, so I'll be sure not to forget to do, say thank you very very much to Roy and the committee for asking me here. I had a wonderful time and I think the program has been thoroughly interesting up to now. You know, I read something one time it said if you have to speak in front of an audience tell them if you're nervous that gets some sympathetic with you on your side So I thought I had to try something a little different. What if I were to tell you I'm not nervous? How would you feel then? Well, I don't really see any reason why I should be nervous. I know what's coming. You're the ones that should be nervous. I'm no comedian. I have two funny things. That was one of them. The other one comes toward the end. And after hearing Jack and Clancy if I knew a few jokes, I would keep them to myself. I would know when I was out of class. Well, to begin. Although I think of this discourse as a desire for completeness, you might want to call it Fools Rush In Where Angels Fear To Tread because this is about the spiritual nature of our program of recovery and that above all can be very private territory. I want to make sure all of you understand I am simply sharing the evolution of my own answers to these two questions. Question number one, what on earth is the meaning of that frequently heard but rarely explained statement this is a spiritual program? Question number two, How on earth can these principles help in recovery from the desire, the need, the compulsion to drink? In St. Paul Minnesota where I got into AA it was the custom for newcomers to attend with their sponsors a series of beginners meetings before affiliating with a closed meeting group and one of those discussions dealt with the spiritual aspects of the program, and of course I went to that one too. But nothing of what was said at that particular discussion penetrated my mind, and there is a pretty good reason. My husband and I both worked for a hearing aid manufacturer up in St. Paul. He was the manager of the department and I took care of all the office details for the department. Okay, when I walked into that beginner's meeting there stood just a guy named Joe. He was going to lead the discussion. He was one of our employees. I think we both went into shock. I know he did a lot of stammering and the boss's wife was sitting there wishing desperately she was somewhere else. I hadn't been around long enough to know how seriously people would take this business of respecting your anonymity, and I thought this thing was going to go like jungle fire through the entire plant tomorrow. Of course, I should have realized that if he had run around telling, guess who I saw in the evening last night, he would also have to say he was there. But my brain was paralyzed at the time. And besides, the talk about the spiritual side made me fidgety. Like many people in and not in AA, I confused the word spiritual with religious and thought they meant the same thing. And I have for a long time avoided people who seem to demand argument or agreement on religion. Therefore, while I even boycotted a piece of literature which stated that this is essentially a program of conversion, because I was allergic to that word. My prejudice was unreasonable but it did exist. Later on, I understood that conversion can also mean change. The very first closed meeting that I went to had step two as the subject came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The comments were somewhat outside my comprehension But something I had read years before popped into my mind, so old being brash I stuck in my two censors. Every cloud feels a stir of might and instinct within it that reaches and towers and groping blindly above its polite it climbs to a soul in grass and flowers. That's what I said. Yeah, I imagine the older members that weren't betting too heavily on my chances of making the program, poetry yet from a Johnny Kim lately. But what the members were unaware of was that I knew you could impress people by talking out some great thought or quotation suitable to the occasion of course without giving authorship credits. You can get a reputation for being beeped that way but it was just a lot of reading and remembering a little. I was really quite pleased with my contribution to the evening's discussion, and I didn't think that poetry was going to destroy anyone's chances of making the program. I did go home literally shaking my head in disbelief. I had some time before started a diary of AA meeting afterthoughts, and I wrote that night that I had come across a strange phenomenon a bunch of grown up people who sat around conversationally discussing God I had heard no theological pitch and no dogma or creed had been offered to me and apparently there was some connection in these people's minds between powers greater and the handling of a drinking problem it had been a relief to find out AA was neither for nor against any religious system. AAs didn't seem to care whether I went to church or not. They did suggest it would be helpful to store up a little belief in something, especially in myself, and they did imply that alcoholism is a lethal business and any means available should be used to arrest its progress if I wanted to live and do well. Since I'm the sort who wants speedy results and something of a non-consummate and having already freely acknowledged i was an alcoholic i went leap-throbbing through the program i started with steps eight and nine amends and restitution and then i did a backslip and did a snappy inventory in step four then i figured i was about ready to stop on an armband and go forth and rescue the suffering alcoholic but i kept running into those peculiar phrases a power greater than ourselves, and God as we understood him. Apparently this higher power business couldn't be sidestepped forever. I thought well if I have to admit anything I will claim agnosticism which really fit because that seemed you know kind of nice and broad-minded and saying I don't know for sure would be a fail-safe course and would leave room to jump in either direction if I wanted to change my mind in a hurry as in impending doom or sudden death. From a Yale questionnaire that was answered by 5,000 AA members several years ago came the conclusion that most of us desert our training along lines of faith early in our adolescent years. Now this is not exclusively an alcoholic tendency just about every child goes through the process. It just seems to last longer with some of us children than with others. Maybe it starts when we rebel at authority. Maybe it stops when we find out that Santa Claus is Papa. Maybe it's starts when you can't understand adult ideas and are not yet able to think out our own. Such beliefs as I had grown up with were not my own anyhow, just stuff other people had told me and I never got around to examining the concepts I had inherited. I just stopped thinking about such things in my very early teens because I had something far more engrossing to devote my time to. I was studying to become an alcoholic. I was sort of pushed into homework on these parts of the program by being asked to help discuss, in those beginners meetings, the spiritual steps of the program. I was still very new to AA at the time and I thought since I was the least likely one for the job, it seemed like the heart leading the blind. But the very wise man in charge of the discussions told me to do some thinking and reading if I wanted to and who I know when I felt ready. A line in the big book was the straw to cling to where it says even the willingness to believe is enough to start on. And that's about all I brought with me to AA, a willingness and rather limited at that. What the greater power was and how it worked this miracle of sobriety in the lives of alcoholics who hadn't been able to stay sober alone I had no idea. I had been given the unexpected enablement to say no thank you I don't care for a drink even when the thought in my mind said Lord I wish this were so. I had had an electrifying realization a few weeks later at discovering that that wish had come true and I no longer cared for a drink. But since I had borrowed this method of quickly turning down a drink from another AA member, I figured this was just the result of the process of AA. It was about six months if I remember rightly before I could say the word God without choking a little. Yet that seemed to be a word I had to get into my vocabulary. It just came the closest to describing what I was trying to puzzle out. But I felt guilty, just saying the word. I was afraid a thunderbolt would descend and hit me right on the top of the head. Then along came step three. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him. Now actually, that didn't bother me very much. I had no understanding whatsoever of God, and some of the other members seemed to be making a big deal out of this particular step. But my decision was just stick another O in the middle and decide you're going to affiliate yourself with good, and that's the way I handled it. One member did suggest that the letters might stand for good, orderly direction. Step six increased my inner tension somewhat. It was like cracking open a door to some mystery, for here I would have to declare I was ready to have my character defects removed. But along the HP, I hadn't said go yet. That's in Step 7. And so it became Step 7 that looked to me like the point of no return. This was it. Something is going to give and I suspected it was going to be me. I worried diligently about what would happen if I asked him to remove my shortcomings. Would I lose my precious, positive personality? Would I sacrifice the ability to be righteously angry? Would I just sit with folded wings and sing hymns? I was bugging my long-suffering sponsor with questions like, Do you think of God as a person? Or maybe as cosmic consciousness? And if so, what's that anyhow? So finally, she said, I reminded her of a story about a little girl who was busily concentrating with some crayons and paper. And her mother asked her what she was drawing. And the kid replied, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the mother said, but we don't know what God looks like, dear. And the little girl replied, when I get through with this, you will. In the turbulence, some provocative ideas were shared with me. For example, what you think God is or is not neither changes nor establishes the nature of God. What you think only changes and establishes the nature of you. And it may be more important to know that God is than what God is. And someone else said what colossal conceit it is when we earthlings claim to have rejected the almighty God. In reality, we can only reject our own inadequate concept. Look further. So I thought well all right if he made me the way I am I'll probably stay more or less that way. After all he was omnipotent and could have made me appear in the pod to begin with. and with the impact of a star show exploding in my mind I thought what I had been blind to I expected something to happen how about that if I declared I was willing and ready and said go I expected something to happen I believed this unknown God would manifest his power would touch and would change this life great Scott I had a capacity for belief. Long dormant, unused, but there it was. I was puzzled when members spoke out the spiritual side and the spiritual angle as if it were some well-defined idea that everyone understood the same way. True, we all had a drinking problem in common, but with such a variety of personalities and experiences and upbringings, as you find in AA meetings, surely each one's thinking would have to be different. Maybe the very fact that there are so many points of view and so many angles is why it's impossible for one person to tell another one how to do it. So I figured I'll just have to dig around a little more on my own. And what follows is a disjointed sort of map of explorations into foreign territory. Everyone has a higher power of some sort. Money and accumulating things seems to represent the God almost to some of us at some times. Public opinion, what people will say about us is the God at times. Alcohol becomes the God too. At least it was for me for a long time. For was not this the thing I have argued most highly and placed first in my life? Did it not confer very special blessings to be found nowhere else? Perhaps the person ought to ask himself, what throne do I worship at today? Each person has a central core. It could be fact. It could be biased, which permeates and colors all thinking and behavior. What occupied this position of priority in me? My life was built around bottles for many years. I gave up my most concentrated attention, and it ultimately became the primary driving need. By very slow degrees, and over a goodly amount of time, I felt a desire to try to dress my life into channels that might be God-centered or at least God approved if I could understand and discover what those might be. This result was not an overnight decision, there were preliminaries. I had to get acquainted with myself before I could relate me to other people even and then to my surroundings and to the universe and to God. The start was recognition and my arrogated self-sufficiency was a delusion. Thinking about drinking actually helped to make that clear when I realized I had never gotten drunk by my own effort. Someone had to plant the grain, the earth had to nourish it, the sun had to ripen it. Then came harvesting and distilling and bottles were manufactured and filled and shipped and sent to stores. All I did was by the result of considerable effort and influence and pour it down my gut. Since I was alcohol dependent, I was also people dependent. They held great power over me. I had taken my problem to the marketplace and let them supply the solution. Nor did I regain control once the alcohol was mine inside me, quite the contrary. I had known long before AA that I could not predict my behavior nor how much I would consume once I started to drink. But admitting this to other people made it different somehow, and from this admission of powerlessness a closed mind started to open a little. A change in thinking had occurred, a conversion if you don't mind the word. It was fairly easy to accept the evidence that there are vast unseen forces at work in the physical universe, putting the seasons in order, keeping the stars in their places, making the sun go up on time. I got a small idea of infinite space through a problem I ran across once. So suppose when you're on a train going 60 miles an hour and you take off from Earth, how long would it take to reach the nearest star? The answer was 40,000 years. I dip shallowly into fascinating information which is everyday stuff to sixth graders today about how all matter, all life, all elements are arrangements of atoms, protons, electrons, neutrons, quarks whatever those things are and that endless combinations are possible. Now I am remarkably ignorant on these subjects and I was astonished to read that our own earth may be be 4,500 million years old, give or take a few millennia, as nobody knows for sure. Trying to relate these mysteries and astronomical figures to myself, I seemed quite insignificant. But still, I was a conscious being, and important at least to myself. Haven't each of us marveled at the wonders around us, this gorgeous stage setting through which we move? In our own backyards we may see a rose, beauty personified. We look up at the sunset sky and the danger almost hurts. We look down and see love and trust in the eyes of a child or puppy dog. Have we marveled enough at ourselves? We are a fantastic, unbelievable collection of wonders. It would probably take a building a block long and many stories high us to how the machinery of mechanical reproducing some of the functions of the human entity we are made of the stuff the stars are made of and yet we think we apprehend intangibles we imagine we create and since no thing can start from nothing from whence came that first essential drop of water that first atom of carbon started everything maybe mine was a complicated route to finding my own answer to the question, is it a universe or chance or purpose? I had to vote for purpose. And then the question came, there's not this magnificent gift of life and the structure that houses it deserves better care than I have given it. I could not convince myself any longer that it was given to me just to misuse and destroy. By even shallow observation we can find at least three sides to the nature of human beings we observe we see the bodily aspect we observe the evidence and mental processes which include our ability to remember and learn we can also find clean evidence of the inner spiritual person if we know what to look for and normally a person develops in the several areas through experiences and how he handles the problems of living. The compartments aren't boxed off, they relate and overlap, they affect one another. Any potential that we have must be used if it is to remain alive and to grow. And any potential or talent we have can also be ignored and left to atrophy if that is our choice. All of us are doubtless obsessions of inspiration, of understanding that we become aware of with something other than the usual five senses of hearing sight smell taste and touch there are things we can't point to but we apprehend with the innermost beings such as the urges who lift us up and make us want to be better today than they were yesterday such as our capacities for tolerance and love for charity honesty integrity, sincerity for compassion and kindness. Counting up attributes that we recognize in ourselves and in our soul men but we can't locate the source within ourselves of a single one of them. It's everyday stuff though not too easy to explain but everyone understands these evidences of things not seen. Sure we can apprehend our spiritual self once we know what to look for and then we can bring it out of the realm of the supernatural and start to use it where it will do the most good in our daily lives. If, like it says in our big book, we are willing to grow along spiritual lines don't we need to determine what those lines are that we're willing to go in otherwise how do we know if we're making any progress? Maybe it's getting a cart before the horse when we plead for miracles and revelations when we haven't even used the gifts we already have. Is it our business to see what lies dimly ahead or to do what lies clearly ahead? Now how does a person begin to evolve, reach for himself, these parts of the program? Well ideas do seem to come when you want them enough. A sentence started to haunt my mind. I will lift up mine eyes unto the heroes. At work my desk was near a window and providentially there was a little hill outside and when I needed a small retreat, usually to keep my mouth shut and think truthfully before speaking, I would glance out this window and let the words sweep out my mind. I will lift up mine eyes into the hills from whence cometh my strength. I thought this was a kind of prayer in asking for guidance and lifting up above the present level not to stay out of the world but to get the strength to live in it properly. Now there are times when the role of an alcoholic is plumbed full of recurrent thoughts of booze and drinking. So lift up your eyes for the near time, time to replace the drinking thought with a thinking thought, time replace the God of undoing with the God of being. The whole of this quotation is, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my strength, it comes from God. Then a fellow member really startled me by saying that the inventory step, Step 4, is one of the most deeply spiritual ones in the entire program. I lifted a skeptical eyebrow at that, but when I got home, I did dig out my little list of viabilities and few virtues, and was a trifle embarrassed to find out that he was exactly right because all the traits and characteristics I had written down were of the spirit, of the inner person. Hidden qualities that they had made themselves manifest through feelings and words and deeds. Although there were dumb qualities like deviousness, self-centeredness to the nth degree, impatience, intolerance, there were a few acceptable ones like friendliness and cheerfulness. My personal inventory had drawn a life-size picture of what I had been as an active alcoholic, and at the same time a picture of what I no longer wanted to be. And this is the point at which movement can begin through the realization that I no longer had to describe myself only in terms of my defaults. I could change. The ability is there to lift ourselves from disorder and destruction by developing our own chosen character building blocks, the inner resources that all of us have some of. It began to look like the program of recovery wasn't just recovery from but also recovery of. Of dignity, of worthiness, of the feeling that we are here because we have a purpose to serve. I went through the dictionary too, from abstinence to lust, and listed every good spiritual quality I could find. And in considering these, a thought came into my mind that these good attributes, that must be that which is of God in man. And I felt that the urge to expand and make real these intangibles was an action of the Creator upon that which he had created and instilled within us. I did have sense enough to know that just deciding I wanted to develop the better self would not necessarily accomplish the fact. I would have to start with what I had to work with, and use those feeble potentials in broad daylight over and over and over again because that's how habits are formed, whether they're good habits or bad ones. Having gotten what seemed like a good clue to the practical side of spirituality I decided well I'll practice on gratitude first because I didn't feel deeply grateful. I didn' t feel deeply anything. I had been numb for so long. Now saying thank you sounds like you're grateful. So I did that first though, to excess of course. I thanked everybody for everything and it felt good to me so I decided to branch out a little. It struck me the problems shared in meetings seemed to deviate. At least everybody said they felt better when they went home than when they came in. And happiness shared seemed to multiply. If something nice had happened to some guy we all jumped out in and drove along with him. Now how to incorporate this process into my daily life? This seemed to require people, and I didn't have many friends left to practice principles on. I had dumped them all up. I worked in a big building in Minneapolis at the time, and i thought of a workshop project all for myself. I would plant myself outside the doors in the evening while my husband went down to the parking lot for the car. I was really lying in wait for people to come through the revolving doors and I would silently command them to see me and I would smile very friendly like with God bless you in my mind real strong and they smiled back and for a second or two I could see the lines of tiredness disappear in their faces. This was tremendous, and so greatly encouraged I carried my program into stores and boxes. I became a grade-A pest insisting upon opening doors for people, holding babies or packages, or even getting out of my seat on the bus if I had one. Some days I might elect to sing out good morning to everybody I met on the way to work, combining this with the smile and boasting treatment. They always returned the smile and the greeting although some of them looked like I don't know who that was. Even if some days all I had done was clean the bottom of a bird cage, I was still totally convinced that the world was better off with me sober than drunk. If I hadn't been of help to anyone at least I hadn t harmed anyone either. and I learned a few things from these maybe childish efforts you always get something nice in return even when you're trying to be unselfish and another thing if you want to know the truth of any idea you must work with its positive side you can say no and stop an idea get in a track even before you consider it and that's closed-mindedness the refusal to expose your mind to anything new or different. But to know if an idea is sound, to find out if it's meant for you, you have to work with its positive side and give it a chance to prove itself. That goes for AA too. After all, you can always change your mind back to your old way of thinking if you want to, can't you? And so it happened that a chanced remark, oh I wonder if it really was a chancd remark, of an AA member made me understand that Step 4 can be the beginning of knowing what these lines of spiritual growth are. An alcoholic trying to shed destructive habits, trying to follow after the things that make for sobriety, trying utilize the program in his daily life is indeed embarked upon a spiritual journey. The whole thing 1 through 12 inclusive. At some time or another each of us may have asked ourselves, what do I want out of life anyhow? It's a fairly safe bet that we would answer something like peace of mind or self-respect or confidence. Maybe the need to feel we're here for some good reason. These are all spiritual aims and if the paths we have followed, the thoughts we have entertained, the things we have done have not gotten us our reasonable expectations from life, why not draw different paths? Now this must not be mistaken as a suggestion to switch from one religion to another and has no connection. What Pellseam indicated is an examination of our personal philosophy to see if it's good enough for us to see it has grown up along with us. A person might reasonably wonder why push yourself along these lines all you have to do is not drink isn't it? Right oh that's all you have to do is get sober and maybe that will solve all your problems. Good luck, and I hope so." It didn't solve all of mine. It got me physically dry which was something of a miracle in itself and then A gave me the courage to look at what I had let myself become and to see that other supportive habits would also have to go since they belong to the active alcoholic personality that I could no longer endure. So why direct myself along these lines? Well, consider that alcohol was once my very dearest companion before it decided to show me who was boss here. Once I could choose how much I would drink too, you know. Came a time though when alcohol took charge and my efforts at control were pointless. By then I was hooked on this stuff and that is the nature of addiction to anything and ignorance of its operation will not exempt anyone from the consequences. Along about here comes the decision, what are you going to do now? And a choice has to be made because this isn't a fence you can sit on very long. I could continue to take it or leave it alone. I could continues to take as long as mind and body would hold out or I could learn to leave it all. A choice had to be made. I could not have both. So which is it going to be, sobriety or drunkenness? Sanity or irrationality? Life or death? There was no longer a middle ground. Coming to AA meant I wanted to forsake alcohol and how to do this on a continuing basis I didn't know. In a moment of very great receptivity in the depths of a hangover, I had accidentally read an article on alcoholism in the American Magazine for August 1950. It started out with a man waking up on a bus and not knowing how he got there and then backtracking through his mind painfully trying to find a moment of lucidity that engaged my attention immediately. I was very well acquainted with blackouts And the article told how in some people a little chemical fire sort of seems to get started when they drink and they keep on drinking more and more often into oblivion even though they may not have wanted to, even though, they hadn't meant to. And that's how I found out I was an alcoholic from that knowledge after 28 years of pretty constant and increasingly heavy drinking i was unable to get sober and i stayed that way for a month but i was getting very uneasy about being able to continue on this path what did i know of sober living anyhow the problem of what to do with sobriety was what brought me to aa it may be the problems of drinking that precipitate us into AA. But it's the problems of sobriety that keep us here. And when I arrived, alcohol had defeated me physically. I could no longer handle it. Alcohol had defeated mentally. It handled me. But as long as hope remained alive, alcohol did not have me defeated spiritually. That had not been sacrificed upon the altars. So this long-neglected force had to be called into my battle against alcoholism. I had no other power to use against it." Someone wrote that in growing up we go through three stages that might be described like this. As little children our attitude says, please help me, I can do nothing much by myself. And then we become adolescent and get 100% defensive, find a big chip for our shoulder and our attitude proclaims to the world I don't need help from anybody and nobody's going to tell me how to run my life. Now if a person progresses normally he enters the adult stage where his attitude says what can I do to help you? And he realizes we have been set in the family of man to share one another's burdens as well as joys and that all lives are made up of both that we in our turn are meant to help others because we have been helped so many times in our alcoholic thinking some of us may overstay ourselves a little bit in the middle stage demonstrating that they don't want help from anybody and nobody is going to tell us how to run our lives until finally it becomes clear that nobody could run our life not even ourselves Maybe then be ashamed to back up a little bit and becoming, as little children, ask for help. The changes are that more than any once we have appealed to something somewhere to get us out of the mess. Maybe in the depths of the hangover when we were scared of living and feared of dying, we called for help and help came didn't it? We are here! I don't recall ever saying thanks whomever afterwards no living up to my share of the magnificent bargaining that went on at times like that because with restoration of health came restoration of my beliefs in my own indestructibility perhaps you too cherish the heritage and the illusion of independence in the growing up years or we tolerated the disciplines of school and being told what to do for a while, but comes the day, boy, when we are on our own. Masters of our fate, captains of our destiny. And if you were like me, proceeded to give a lengthy and dramatic presentation of total inability to dial up the one thing I had been given to manage myself. How narrowly we romp, or maybe bulldoze is better word, through a lot of precious time demanding proof of everything paying homage only to the evidence of our eyes. So did you ever look down and stretch your railroad tracks and see the rails come together in the distance? Looks like they do. What about the sun it appears to move around us over 12 hours or so but it doesn't. Our planet flows in space we're told we have no such sensations. We see a blade of grass and miss entirely the blueprint in the seed, even with a microscope. Can we believe only the evidence of such limited sight? Supposing I were to say to you that you are invisible to me, that I can't see the real you. Yet is it not so? For what do I know of your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, your ideals, your inner strivings. The vast universe in which you really live and move is chock full of motivating powers greater than ourselves, not outwardly visible nor well understood. But I don't have to understand things to use them. I don t understand electricity, no magnetic forces, no gravity. Nobody actually understands those things you know they are simply absorbed in action and used for too long perhaps some of us have believed that science understands the fire of things and is keeping secrets from us the folks it is not so science describes and seeks to understand the how of things to predict probabilities based on theories hypotheses repeatable controlled experiments it is given to no man to understand the why of a single solitary thing that happens in this universe not yet consider all that has been prepared for us if you want a mystery in advance of our need, awaiting recognition and acceptance. There was AA for example. For many years I was in need of AA. I didn't even know it existed. And it was here, ready, waiting, prepared, and all I had to do is seek and knock and ask. It even offers the book of revelations that has a blue cover and the title Alcoholics Anonymous wherein is the chapter entitled How It Works. If you want to explore the inadequacy of words, try to explain why it works without acknowledging inspiration and bubbly love. Group therapy won't quite explain how hope and courage and understanding reach out and touch learners who have never attended an AA meeting. Contemplating the mysteries, I finally stopped trying to explain the unexplainables. I stopped asking the eternal why, why, why would that close down the corridors of alcoholic minds? Because I found a satisfactory reason for my having become an alcoholic. I think it was because I could learn some needed lessons through this experience better than any other way. I don't believe I was accepted with alcoholism, you see. I don' believe alcoholism chose me. I chose it, and I made room for it in my life. Most of us arrive at AA when we are flat on our particular bottom, hardly daring to look up. And the paradoxes seem to begin when we don't know which way to turn next. We stop fighting, and that is a movement toward victory. We acknowledge our powerlessness over alcohol, and at that point alcohol begins to lose power over us. Well, we're not granted immunity if we continue to drink, But we can learn that, in its place, alcohol does not have control over us. And the proper place of alcohol, as I see it, is in someone else's bottle, in someone's glass, in someone life. AA teaches us gently but persuasively that replacing bad habits with good ones is the most effective way of getting ourselves back on the path we feel at home on. we decide to rejoin the world and become acceptable citizens, maybe we should remind ourselves that life attracts like. If we want to gain rewards like trust and love and confidence, better we should understand growth in the spiritual realm. It is only there such qualities can be found. For too long we broadcast seeds of chaos and expected to reap serenity. The crop doesn't come up that way. What we need to sprinkle around are some seeds of order and keep our antennas, our spiritual antennas unfurled the better to receive the messages that surround us. The ongoing job seems to be to get an accurate picture of what each of us really is and then just be that. This is a direct way of being at ease with yourself and your surroundings. when your inner thoughts and desires are naturally and smoothly translated into outer action and behavior. What a relief to drop the camouflage and just act the same way you're thinking. The imprisoned larger self seems very eager to respond to the call, will the real me please step forth? And then you're at home in this universe, in your very own place, knowing that you don't have to be, indeed you can't be, any better, nor any worse than anyone else. You cannot be compared, nor contrasted, nor judged by what anyone is like because you are not like anyone else! You need only be yourself and show that must be what God expects of his creation. And from such conviction comes serenity and a feeling of security, and you can get on with the business of living. You have something special to give to human history, and it is only yours to give the capacities of your own real unique self. This is not meant to be flattery but to suggest down-to-earth appreciation of our merits and the miracles within us as well as our own limitations. Being aware that alcoholism and an overblown ego work very well together, I remind myself with regularity that I am an alcoholic, and I am content to have it be so. But I am also a wife, and a secretary, a grandmother by proxy, a cook, a seamstress, a defender of bird and small animal, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, a creature dependent upon God for every birth I take in and push out. I'm an alcoholic sure enough, but that's not all I am." Undertaking to change ourselves when we are adults with our diplomas somewhat set in our ways can indeed be a worthy project big enough near enough to impossible to challenge even an alcoholic and so we allow that this time and place in life hoping to learn how to stop drinking or maybe just how to escape the penalties of drinking and we're encouraged to listen sometimes with misgiving and we do experience varying degrees of returning health through not drinking. With some sober time the fog lifts a little bit and mental faculties start to operate again. We had to be willing to try. We have to be willing to work for those things. They had to be earned, which seems only fair. So what about that spiritual sickness part dangling out there? Shouldn't we have to work to have that alleviated too? Some of us go around yelping for proof positive that God exists. How about considering that he might like a little proof positive that we are trying to get into fit condition to receive this divine revelation. To me now, and it sure did take some time, the idea of God as loving father, creative intelligence, infinite but still interested in me and all my ways fills in the missing parts of this enigma of life and i have a desire for completeness but don't take my word for it indeed you can't take my word far you have to be curious enough to test it for yourself before to mean anything to you i can't feel at least i hope not that anyone has been bothered by my thoughts or feelings on this subject because i am not in the least interested in converting anyone to my point of view. Most days I don't know what I think anyhow it's a changing thing and I realize that in no other area of our program is it so necessary that each seek his own path. Extends this from the prophet says it so clearly, no man can reveal to you ought say that which lies already half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who is truly wise does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind for the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man and even as each of you stands alone in god's knowledge so must each of be alone in your knowledge of god and your understanding of the earth well i said absolutely nothing new nothing original i borrow from every one of you what I can use, I take freely. Any change in thinking that has come to me through AA started with someone else. A spoken word here, a written one there. But the combination of me and those ideas is new and they have worked together to widen my world. And now I get to tell my second joke. Once upon a time there was a king who got very tired of his courtiers coming and giving long winded explanations of problems in the kingdom. So he devised a plan to cut short some of these long reports. He insisted that everyone who appeared before him stand on one foot and if you will observe I am standing on one foot. Some of you may be surprised to find out this didn't turn into a sermon, some of you may be relieved to find that it didn't turned into a sermon and if anyone mistakenly decides that it was a sermon it was not intended as such. I do get emphatic at times but I have just been telling you about some the things I found along the way. I have felt free to share my thoughts with you because you have felt fee to share yours with me and I am grateful for these privileges because they have helped me to become and to remain as of this day part of this fellowship. Our beloved Brotherhood of the Second Chance. Thank you. I don't believe that lead needs any comment from me. It's a very moving view of her life we saw. i would like to share something she shared with me last night at supper i thought it was so cute she said you know we kind of goofed We could have had this conference a week ago. She celebrated her 25th anniversary last Saturday.