The Two Dangers to the Fellowship Are Personalities Ahead of Principles and Complacency – John C.

About This Speaker Tape

John C. from Brownwood, Texas speaks at a Grants Pass roundup with 31 years of sobriety dating to October 28, 1951. A former professional fighter, Marine, and trial lawyer of 21 years, he arrived in AA devoid of faith, confidence, and hope after six and a half years of living under an assumed name, sleeping in jails and mission houses despite having once sat in the Mayflower Hotel advising cabinet officers and governors. He refuses to read a manuscript, opens with preacher jokes and a Columbus bit, and insists he speaks only for himself — no one is qualified to speak for AA as a whole.

He frames the program through Bill Dodson's teaching at St. Thomas Hospital: life is made of four things — thoughts, acts, habits, and character — and if you think like a drunk, you will act, habituate, and become one. Recovery reverses the chain. Accept, begin, continue. He warns against the two great dangers to the fellowship: placing personalities ahead of principles, and complacency — the old-timers with ten or twenty years who get the wrinkles out of their belly, the mortgage paid, and stop showing up for the newcomer. He tells on his own ego, his temper, his two degrees, and the night he stood in the same courtroom where he had once tried major cases and was told he was neither mentally nor physically capable of having custody of his small son for thirty minutes.

The emotional core is the fifteen-year estrangement from his wife Polly and son Johnny. Sober three years, he began going home to Maine every year or two. On their last walk toward the ocean in Belfast, Polly put her arm around his back for the first time in fifteen years and asked him to promise to take care of Johnny if anything happened to her. Days later, in a drilling trailer between Twin Buttes and Holbrook, Arizona — a spot where a mobile phone could barely reach fourteen miles — the horn rang clear from 3,200 miles away and Johnny told him his mother had passed at noon and asked him to come home. AA made him a useful and decent person who could stand beside his son at the graveside.

He builds an imaginary AA building with Higher Power as architect and the Twelve Steps and Traditions as specifications, refuses to ever put a roof on it, and closes with a Navajo prayer given to him in 1956 by Tommy Dwyer on the Arizona reservation — asking the Great Spirit for strength and wisdom not to be greater than his brother but to fight his greatest enemy, himself.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 John C. from Brownwood, Texas introduced; sobriety date October 28, 1951
• 3:00 Opens with the preacher's activities-for-the-week joke — reason he never writes a talk down
• 8:00 Columbus bit: didn't know where he was going, didn't know where he was, woman paid for the whole trip
• 15:00 Tribute to Al-Anons — Bill Wilson's words on family relationship as the most deformed vacuum
• 22:00 Lance and little Chris suicide-in-the-bathroom story — put towels around the door, it's making the cats sick
• 30:00 Tossed the 1941 Jack Alexander Saturday Evening Post article aside and drank ten more years
• 38:00 Bill Dodson at St. Thomas Hospital: thoughts, acts, habits, character
• 48:00 The two dangers to AA — personalities ahead of principles, and complacency in the ten-to-twenty-year crowd
• 58:00 October 13 courtroom scene — denied custody of his son for thirty minutes
• 66:00 Phone call from Johnny 3,200 miles away in Belfast: mother passed away this noon, please come home
• 72:00 Tommy Dwyer's Navajo Great Spirit prayer from the Arizona reservation, 1956