Why the Order of the Steps Matters – 1965 – John P.

On your right-hand side, as you're going out of town, you'll find the Army. Now, for the man who has come a long way today and is going to leave about day but tomorrow, I give you my friend, and your friend, John Parks Bell. When I got up here, I found Duke had left me a piece of paper in honor that says KISS. I didn't know Duke cared, but he says that stands for keep it short, stupid. It is customary for all of us who address AA meetings to identify ourselves. A man usually says that my name is so-and-so and I'm an alcoholic. But this, of course, is subjective. I prefer to give you a more objective identification, which I can relate by a story that happened to me when I was serving in Honolulu during World War II and was invited to a luau. Now, a luai, as many of you know, is an Hawaiian term, and it means a pig roast, but they apply it out there to any kind of party. I got there, most of the people had already arrived. The hostess says, well, it's about time you got here. Come on in. And I walked in. All the other people were milling around and she clapped her hands and she said, now pay attention. At the end of the room, you'll see that long table with two punch bowls on it. One of them is for most of you. The other is for John Lee and pregnant women. I think you'll admit that we alcoholics sometimes fall an interesting category. I would like to talk with you tonight about the 12 steps simply because no matter what anybody says, successful sobriety is dependent upon the extent to which we can come to understand these steps each for himself, to work out an application to our own life which we are unable to follow. They are not, to be sure, a creed. They are even a must. They are presented to all newcomers, as you know, as 12 suggested steps to recovery. And yet you cannot escape the fact that as you go to AA meetings, whether they be in East Texas or New England or the West Coast or Canada or around the world, that people are staying sober as they learn to apply these 12 steps to their lives and use them as a basis for their living. And one of the great things about our fellowship, an essential thing about our Fellowship, because it makes it possible for all of us of very many varying backgrounds of racial, ethnic, religious, political, social, and so forth, enables us to stay together and work together, is that each of us is given the privilege of interpreting the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for himself. We discuss it with each other, we make suggestions, we have speakers, as I am here tonight. and tell you their ideas but it really doesn't matter what I think about the program as far as you are concerned. What is important is what you think about the program and how you adapt it to your own life. We do have complete freedom to express ourselves and our point of views and our attitudes and my words tonight carry no more weight or influence except their own persuasiveness as my ideas may appeal to you. One of the things I feel quite strongly about in the program is the order in which the steps appear. Now here I differ from others in AA, many of whom I've heard speaking in AA meetings and say it doesn't make any difference what order you take the steps and If you don't understand this one, skip to the next one, and so forth. I'm going to try to show you tonight, if I may, that these steps have a reason for their order, that each step flows out of the one preceding them, and it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to follow a step way down the program before you have wrestled with the ones who preceded. My second personal point of view is the pronoun which is used. Now, in the printed sheet which is before you tonight, you see the pronoun is we. And this is true because we are a fellowship. We're all in this together. We're both in this fellowship. We're also struggling helping each other to attain sobriety and it is perhaps proper to express the 12 steps with this pronoun. But this isn't the way the program is followed. The program is following with a pronoun I. Nobody can follow this program for me. Nobody can take these steps for me, it is I and I alone who must work out an understanding of the steps if they are to be effective in my life. I shall, of course, listen to what other people say, I shall read and talk and discuss, but In the last analysis, the whole validity of the program depends on the use of the pronoun I. With these preliminaries, let's get into the program. I admit that I am powerless over alcohol and my life has become unmanageable. To me this is one of the most difficult steps in the whole program, and yet I have often heard and sometimes to my great dismay people saying rather glibly, oh this first step was easy. I didn't have any trouble with that at all. And yet as one works in Alcoholics Anonymous or in allied fields relating to the problem, you become quickly convinced that this first steps has a deeper significance and greater importance than is often assigned to it. Part of it, I think, stems from our concept of the very word admit. Those of you who have heard me speak on this before know that I stress this and perhaps I beat it to death. But I do it out of the conviction that this is very important. When I admit something, I am responding to pressure. In my earlier days, I worked as a newspaper man and as a reporter many, many times. I wrote articles similar to those that you see in newspapers every day. John Smith was arrested by the police, and after questioning, he admitted that he had committed whatever crime was involved. Now, if you know anything about police procedure, even under the refinements which our Supreme Court has imposed on our police, you know that an immense amount of pressure can be applied to the police to procure that admission and isn't this what happens to us in the first instance we get backed into a corner by our drinking no matter how much we may say i can take it or leave it no matter however much we explain that i got some bad ice last night or no matter what we may explain it away on the boss was misunderstanding and my mother-in-law came to stay or this or that happened we finally are produced we're finally put in a situation so we finally throw up our hands and say all right i admit it i'm an alcoholic it's an act of the intelligence somebody stands before you perhaps at a meeting like this and describes what happened to him during his days of acute alcoholism And as you compare your own experiences with his, you say, yes, they tie up. I can see it now. I guess I'm an alcoholic. But it seems to me that this step is to be effective for each of us. We have to move farther than just the intellectual act of admission. We haveと develop an attitude toward our alcoholism, toward our helplessness. And the word to use is accept. Acceptance is purely voluntary. You can't make anybody accept anything. When you accept, it indicates that you no longer resent the fact that you are an alcoholic. How often we counsel new members about the dangers of resentment, but so frequently we forget the the most dangerous resentment of all, the resentment of the sheer fact that we are alcoholics. We say to ourselves, Why did this happen to me? Do you mean to say that my wife can drink or my son can drink or this stupid putzer that works to death next to me can drink and I can't? It isn't fair! Why was I singled out? And while we go on publicly admitting that we're alcoholics inside, we're still very angry that this has happened to us. This is, I suspect, the first place that a new man should learn to apply and say the serenity prayer. Accepting the fact that he's powerless over alcohol, a fact you cannot change. But when you accept The process is described also by the word which is here at the top of the paper handed tonight. Self-surrender must always be regarded as a vital turning point, as giving up. We may not like it. We may think it's too bad. We may recall with nostalgia the days when we could take it or leave it. But this process must be experienced, it seems to me, if we are to move on into the rest the program and apply it successfully to our lives. I admit and accept the fact that I'm powerless over alcohol, that my life has become unmanageable. Now if we're to stop here, we've got no more than diagnosis. And as any physician will tell you, Diagnosis is essential to the successful treatment of disease. But diagnosis alone produces no improvement. We must move on to the next step, and here you begin to see the force of the logic of which I was speaking beginning to take hold. If I admit that I am powerless, that my life has become unmanageable, unless I am completely irrational, unless I'm truly out of my mind, I'm not going to be content with this state of affairs. I'm going to try to find a way in which I can develop some control over my life so it will cease to be unmanageable. And so I come to believe that a power greater than I can restore me to what? To sobriety? This isn't the word in the program. The word is sanity. Now, I'm sure you've thought about this and wondered, since this was a program to get people sober, why didn't they use the word restore me to sobriety? Does this mean that we think that all alcoholics are insane? Here again it's the word and its basic meaning that figures here. Sanity is used here not in the sense of contradistinction to insanity, but its basic meeting which is whole. I came to believe that a power greater than myself could make me whole again and all of us looking back to the days of our drinking will recognize that this is our basic need because if it does nothing else alcoholism fragments us we become like Stephen Leacock's famous horseman that mounted his horse and galloped madly off in all directions We have been torn apart, we have been warring inside ourselves. The conflicts that we have with the outside world have been nothing compared to those which go on within us. We have felt incomplete. Something has been lacking. And so we need a power greater than ourselves make us a whole person again. You can't stop here, because here again you have no final answer. You've had the diagnosis of the first step. You found the source of help in the second. But unless you do something about it, your state is really no better than before you came around. You are like a man who is living in a house that has no lights. And you learn that down the street is a power station. So you are aware of your darkness, and you know the power station is down the street. You are still going to be in darkness unless you do something about it. And the third step is the answer to what you do because you have come to see that your life is unmanageable, that you're powerless, and you've learned there's a power available. The third step is to hook up with that power and make a decision to turn my life and will over to the care of God as I understand it. Here is the first cycle in the AA program. It's a cycle which is repeated constantly through the program. A discovery of what's wrong, the finding of the solution, and the third, the application of that solution. by turning my life and will over to the care of God as I come to understand him. I'm going to bring this power into my life that will give me control over my life again under the direction of that power. You might, if you wish, describe these first steps as the novice, the entry, the apprentice steps of AA, the getting in. So now you're in and you're sober. What's going to happen? We all know the first exciting, thrilling days of our first relationship with AA, The sense of being accepted, yes, of being loved, of people who we never saw before but who apparently care about us very deeply and are willing to do anything for us. The ability to tell the most frightful things in our lives without judgment or condemnation from others. And this produces a kind of an excitement that we haven't known for years living as we have on the very fringes of society. But we're also wise enough to know that this can wear off. We can't live on this mountaintop of exhilaration forever and that something more has got to happen, and then follow the steps which might be described as clearing away the debris, the clutter, which is accumulated during our years of acute alcoholism. And here again, you see, we start with this cycle. I make a searching and fearless moral inventory. Not somebody else doing it, but I do it for myself. I look at myself honestly for the first time with eyes that aren't bloodshot, and I see myself in other ways than through the bottom of a glass. How we take this inventory is up to the individual. There are one or two places in the country, I understand, where to get into AA you have to submit an inventory. I've always thought this was a rather violent interpretation of the AA program, but if it works for those people, who am I to say that it's improper? Once in all ignorance, I made remark before the very group that said that it wasn't greeted as you can imagine with tumultuous applause but the purpose of this is perfectly obvious if we are going to recover we have to find out what we have work with we have begin with not where we're going to be or not where we've been, but where we are at this moment. And the word which is used is a business term which is familiar to all of us. The inventory which every successful merchant takes periodically and which now through computers nowadays the big stores do instantaneously. So even if a pair of shoelaces is sold as that sale is rung up on the cash register, it's flagged at the computer which tells the boss how many pairs of shoelaces he has left, and if a danger point is reached, the computer will tell him to do something about it. Our lives are much more important than shoelace. Inventory isn't easy. Oftentimes in mistaken modesty, a kind of reverse hypocrisy it seems to me, we clutter up pages after pages with all our shortcomings and weaknesses and inadequacies and failures. And this isn't hard for an alcoholic, as you know. Then we come to the virtue side, the plus side, the fast-moving items, you might say, in our inventory, and we can't think of them. This is folly. No person is wholly bad, just as no person is holy good. We all have strengths, we all have weaknesses, And this is the value of making the inventory just for yourself, because you do not need to be accused of immodesty if you put down certain strengths you have. But if you can't think of anything else to do, write down four big letters. Life. L-I-F-E. Because this is The Greatest Access, which we have in our inventory, the source of our hope and the basis of our expectations. We can't stop here. I've known people who have been so depressed by their inventory when they stopped taking the steps at this point that they went out and got drunk. It sometimes is shocking to us to see ourselves in black and white for the first time, especially since we are so able to deceive ourselves. And so we must move on from this inventory. Again, this is a diagnosis of what's wrong to do something about it. And so I admit to God, to myself, and to another human being these weaknesses that I have discovered as I've made my infant heart. Now all of us can understand the reason for admitting it to God. He's the one to whom we've turned our lives and wills. Sometimes men may say, why do I need to tell him? He knows all this anyway. We're not doing it for his sake. We're doing it für ours. And another would say, as I can understand about talking to another human being about this, because we all know the relief that comes when we're carrying a burden of guilt around and to be able to sit down and talk to somebody who can accept us as we are and who can listen without judgment or without criticism. But, says the person, why admit it to myself? Didn't I do this when I wrote it down? strangely enough no there's a psychological difference between my writing down I am impatient I push people around I drive people and saying yes I see this is one of the things I do it's something I shall have to wrestle with as long as I live it will continually get me in trouble and I must be prepared constantly to the results which will follow this phase of my makeup. In recent years, there's been a good deal of discussion about the validity of Freudian psychology, which has placed most people's thought on an ineradicable stamp on American thinking. But this is changing. And a minister named Maurer, who is also trained in psychology, has come to the conclusion that in many aspects the Freudian approach to mental illness has been totally wrong. That man is not just at the mercy of his subconscious, that he is not just the creature of childhood experiences, he does not act the way he did just because he saw his father kissing the crook, or because he was breastfed or bottle fed. But a great deal of his sickness arises from the fact that he has done wrong things, he knows it, he feels guilty about it, and he doesn't have any way of getting rid of that guilt. And this very acute observer points to our fellowship as concrete, tangible evidence of the proof of this, and he says one of the greatest strengths that Alcoholics Anonymous contains is that we do confess our sins to each other, our shortcomings, our failures, and are forgiven by each other. And hence we get this enormous sense of relief which comes from no longer having to carry around a burden of unresolved guilt. We don't stop with this, though, either. to become willing to have God remove my defects of character and ask him to do it. In my earlier days in AA, when I knew a good deal more about the program than I do now, I thought that the men who wrote these steps actually just took one and split it up. I figured when they got the steps all done, they added them up and they had 11 and they thought probably this wasn't a very pious number. So they split this step in two to get an even dozen. But I know now I am wrong. I was wrong in this judgment. The men who wrote these steps were very sound. Actually, they are expressing a profound theological fact. Now don't be alarmed by the word theology. Theology is merely the study of what man knows about God and how God has revealed himself to men. And you and I, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or no, are all theologians. The man who stands up before you, as men frequently do, and says, I am here sober tonight thanks to the grace of God and AA, is making a theological statement. One of the things on which theologian generally agree is that among God's priceless gifts to men is free will. Now, don't misunderstand this. This doesn't mean that we are all totally free. I cannot be in Longview, Texas and at my home in New Jersey at the same time. I am bound by the laws of space and time. I'm also bound in other ways by age, by background, by training experience. But I am not an automaton. I am not at the mercy of blind forces working upon me which I am powerless to resist. I am affected by my environment, be sure, but man is the only creature who can affect his environment and who can change it. And one of the things that the AA found is discovered about the way God deals with men, that it is perfectly futile to ask him to do something for you that you don't want him to do. There's a wonderful story, and it's quite true, about Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, one of the great Christian fathers, about the 5th century. Augustine was quite a rip in his youth he had plenty of money and he lived high, wide, and handsome the whole gamut of the flesh parts of his town in Egypt and he would have qualms of conscience as even I suppose the most abandoned roué does from time to time and he'd pray oh God make me chaste but not just yet God is perfectly aware of what we want, and he is not prepared to answer a prayer no matter how fervently uttered if it does not express our true desire. It was this that led me to understand why so much of my frantic praying during my alcoholic experience, went to my mind unanswered. Because I was constantly in the position of the school boy who hasn't studied for his exam and asked God to let him pass the test the next day. All I wanted to do was to get me out of the jam I was in, not to stop what I was doing which was putting me in the jam. Through our inventories we may become aware, for example, very common form of dishonesty. All of us who travel on expense accounts know the lure of that, and I suspect the most frequent form of dishonesty most frequently practiced among men in our country today is the padding of the expense account. It may well happen that a man coming into AA taking this inventory recognizes this as a defective character, and he may ask God to keep him honest. But unless he's willing to give up what he's getting through the padding of his expense account, the extra spending money, the extra things he can buy, no attention is going to be paid. There's a great danger, too, in prayer because the Lord apparently often answers our prayers in unsuspected ways. I can't help but think of that hymn that many of us sing in church. Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold. Wouldn't we be terribly surprised if the Lord took us seriously on that one? The late Peter Marshall preached a sermon on the perils of prayer emphasizing this point. And he tells about a businessman man who, besetting sins among others like mine, was impatient and he recognized that this was a basic flaw and he asked the Lord to make him patient. And about two days later he was blowing up at the stupidity, as he saw it, of his secretary. And it suddenly dawned on him that it might be the way that the Lord was teaching him patience. The point of all this is that if we want God to remove these defects of character, these flaws, these weaknesses, which we discover through our inventory and which we know are constant cause of difficulty to us, we must be prepared to pay the price which may be imposed. But you see we don't live in just one area. All of us live in three areas of our lives. We have to live with ourselves, whether we like it or not. We've come into this new relationship with God as we are slowly beginning to understand him, and we must live with our neighbors. And just as through the inventory we have tried to set ourselves right so that we can live with ourselves, and through these steps I've been talking about are trying to make our relationship with God better, so we have to clear up the hurt and the suffering and the anguish we have caused others insofar as we can. And the process is exactly the same with people as it is with God. We make a list of those we've hurt and become willing to make amends to them. And then we do so except where prudence would indicate that we should not. There's no value gained in going to a man whom you may have slandered and say, Bill, I'm sorry I said so-and-so about it when you're not sorry at all. More More than a perfunctory excuse is when you bump into somebody in the corridor is required here. Here again, you see, it must be a genuine desire that I have because I am truly sorry that I've hurt this person to let them know that I'm sorry. All of us who have tried this have been thrilled by the response which follows. We have met almost enthusiastic reception from people we thought were our enemies, and we discovered that they weren't hostile to us but it was because we had hurt them that we thought they were hostile. You see, this is the queer thing about us. If I hurt a man, I lose him as a friend because I hurt him, and if I want to make a friend I'd do a favor for somebody. This is the way it works. And lots of people we thought disliked us or were against us, were hostile to us, have never been at all. It has been our own sense of having hurt these people which has led us to believe that they felt that way. Of course, this is not universally true. We find some people who will not forgive us. But we've done the best we can. We no longer need feel guilt for this. Honest contrition. is all that can be expected of us, together with such amendment as may be necessary. This, of course, includes the repayment of financial obligations we have been paid. This is a tremendous thing, as all of you know, I'm sure. My course down the street to Philadelphia used to be a zigzag. As I ducked across the street through in-the-store fronts or up alleys to avoid meeting somebody that owed $10 still or $20. So when I went to these people and told them that I remembered the debt and I was going to pay it when I got back on my seat, I was unable to walk down the street unafraid because I'd begun to act like a responsible person again. Well, we've been through our novitiate, the first three steps. We've cleared away the debris and we've laid a foundation now for our continuing life of sobriety, not only in AA but in the community at which we're a part. And now comes the final part. I was working at the clinic for alcoholics in Philadelphia. I talked to all the patients, which was impossible for me to do. And over and over again, when I was talking to these men, I'd ask them if they'd been in AA. And very frequently the man would say, yes, I was in AA and I said, well, how'd you like it? He says, oh great, I went for two or three years and I thought it was simply wonderful. And then he stopped and I'd say, yeah. He'd say well, then I then I stopped going. And I'd said, oh, why was that? And he'd hem and haw because he knew that I was an AA and perhaps he didn't want to hurt my feelings. I'd tell him, come on, tell me, why did you quit going? And he said, I got bored. He said, I got so I knew everybody's story in AA as well as my own. And if I thought if I heard Bill's story about being locked up 26 times the number of times Marge was married and what Lucy did and what Sam did that I would go crazy. This is where we as groups need to take inventory. There is no doubt that the recital of alcoholic experiences is essential, particularly at public meetings. It is essential for two reasons. Because it provides a catharsis for the man speaking. It is simply wonderful to him that he can stand up before a group such as this and recite the things he has done and know that nobody is critical. And at open meetings, it provides an identifying point for the newcomer in the audience. But the AA program is not just drunken travelogues, and if this is what the AA meetings degenerate into, we shall have more people dropping away, not from hostility to AA, not because they don't believe in it, but simply because they have not received what we all need for the continuance of our sobriety. The last three steps seem to me the continuing program for the life of sobriete, and I believe that any person who struggles with these steps and continues to think about them will never, never be bored. I continue to take inventory and when I'm wrong, promptly admit it. This is the area of diagnosis again and is the area of where I live. I must continue to examine my life. Some of us find the period when we get into bed just before we drop off to sleep a very convenient time to review today and think, did I hurt somebody? Was that the right thing I said to my secretary or my associate or my wife? Or I did something today I'd never done before and it seemed to work. This is good. I better keep this in mind. This isn't an effective thing to do. And where hurt has been inflicted, inadvertently or not, and I think you will find as I have of the deepest hurts I inflict are those I never meant to. Oftentimes acting out of what I can see to be the best interest of other people, I have done things which hurt them severely. It doesn't matter whether I was right or not, the important thing is that I've hurt somebody and I must try to clear this up as quickly as possible before the hurt becomes aggravated, and the estrangement between us permanent. We talk a lot, of course, of 12-step work, but it seems to me the founders of AA have given us one of the most successful rules of living in the 10th step, and if we would be more conscious of 10th-step works, we would be able to carry the message far further. I startled a friend of mine one day we'd had an argument the day before about something and well, those of you who know John Lee know that he's often in error and ever in doubt and so I pronounced my judgment with the usual sense of infallibility and that night I discovered I was wrong The next day I called her up at her office and the secretary answered the phone and said Ms. So-and-so is busy And I said, well, tell her I just want to speak to her a minute. I said I've got a tenth step call to make. Of course, this intrigued her curiosity, and she got on the phone. And she said, what's this tenth step business you're talking about? And I just said, Well, I was wrong yesterday when we were talking about Dutch and so on. I just wanted to call you up and text. And she says something that really startled me. She said, You know, you're the first man in AA that ever admitted that to me. He was wrong about anything. Of course, this may be why she's still single. I don't know. But seriously, this is vital. My church is engaged in the study of a proposed new confession. And it'll excite a great deal of argument, and I don't know whether it will be adopted or not, but the concept of our duties as members of the Church as this confession ceases is to be ambassadors of reconciliation. The thing the world needs is obviously this. We're torn apart by various divisions over political, social, and economic national causes. It seems to me that we in AA are particularly called upon to be ambassadors of reconciliation. And the only possible way I can reconcile any differences I have is to go to such persons with a sense of my own fallibility, the fact that I can be wrong, that I am constantly in need of forgiveness. This makes it possible for the other person to listen to me without the feeling that I am making assumptions of any kind of moral or intellectual superiority. Now, this inventory business does not mean egotism or self-centeredness. People say, well, if I think about myself all the time, then I'm being a selfish person. This is Tommy Rock. If you aren't concerned about yourself, your self is never going to improve. You are the only person who can improve yourself. This self is the only thing I have to work with. It's the only think I've got to work in AA with, is self, I, me. And I am the only one who can do anything about it. This does not mean that I think about self and take inventory all the time as exclusion of my concerns for others, but as I consider my own needs and my own shortcomings and my mistakes and failures and yes, imbalance them against the way I may happily be growing and getting stronger and a little bit smarter and a little bit perhaps more compassionate understanding, this self gets better and has the capacity to be more useful. And since, to each of us, our self is the most fascinating thing really in life, if we are following this step wisely, intelligently, day by day, there is a small chance of our being bored. The next area of life in which we must continue is our relationship with God as we understand him, whom we recognize back in Step 2 as the source of our help to whom we turned and Step 3 to whom he helped us. To whom we admitted our shortcomings and who we asked to help us. Are we going to turn him off at this point? I continue, through prayer and meditation, to improve my contact with him, seeking knowledge of his will and the strength to carry it out. You know there is no subject on which man from the dawn of recorded history has talked more, thought more, debated more, or written more than on the nature of God. To be sure, he is described in countless terms, countless adjectives, countless symbols. But there is something in us that enables people to say that man is incurably religious. It is this sense of incompleteness, this groping for something outside ourselves to make us whole. Men seek to find it in many ways, as you know, through search after power or wealth or position or love, constant searching and seeking. Augustine later described it beautifully. In his famous prayer. He says, Thou hast made us for our souls, for thyself, and our souls are restless of incompleteness. It's groping for something outside ourselves to make us whole. Men seek to find it in many ways, as you know, through search after power or wealth or position or love, constant searching and seeking. Augustine later described it beautifully. In his famous prayer he says thou hast made us for our souls, for thyself, and our souls are restless until we find repose in thee. It seems to me just a simple act of gratitude. If we believe that we are here tonight thanks to the grace of God and AA, we should, it seems to be, be eager to find out more and more about this source of our power, the occasion of our sobriety, the strength that we find to overcome the desire to drink the direction which he has given our lives the new values which we now increasingly discover the word meditation suggests more to me than just sitting and thinking by ourselves if I just contemplate what I know about God I merely deepen my own errors and confound my own ignorance even the greatest computers are valueless unless information is cranked into them and so we need to read and to listen and to study and it seems to me that if we were to write down what A.A. has discovered about God out of the experience of its members. Not what somebody has told them, not what some preacher has said to them, but simply what they know about the way he has worked in their lives to found growth to take place among all of us. each AA group in the country were only just, for example, one meeting a year, if this seems too much, were devoted to this 12th step, this 11th step through the members speaking out of their own experience what their knowledge has been. If we were to spend all our time on this till our dying day, we should never discover more than a fraction of what is to be known. There's no chance for boredom for any individual or any group who devotes itself to this step. And then there's the final one. Now, I suspect that here as elsewhere, many A's think of the 12th Step as carrying the message to other alcoholics, and so it is. But there's an introductory clause here which sometimes isn't expressed. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of the previous steps, then we have a message to carry. I better not say this because you're in Texas, because here I am, but I was told of another group, not in East Texas, where they had a lot of what they called two-steppers. Maybe in Dallas or Houston, you know, not here. But anyway, these were people who took the first step and leaked immediately the twelfth, and put on their fireman's hats and dashed madly around the country, dragging people out of bars, speaking before churches, Rotary clubs, and so forth. They got drunk themselves and didn't help very many other people. And they wondered why. The 12-step tells us why. Because the experience with the previous 11 steps gives us the message. What is the message we are to carry? Is it that alcoholism is a disease? Yes, to be sure. And for a long time, we in AA were the only people who were carrying this phase of the message, and we can be profoundly grateful that as a result of our efforts and the efforts of other people who have become interested in our problem, that it is now being increasingly recognized as a disease in medical schools and theological seminaries and universities and colleges and in many of our public school systems. This is not the whole message. What is the message that when I got drunk I did a lot of silly things and got in trouble? This is hardly surprising to many people because they know this quite well. And all the message is actually a profound scientific fact that people can recover from this deadly, serious, complex disease whose cause still remains obscure, but from which recovery is possible. Simply because people do not understand to any great extent as yet the seriousness of alcoholism, because it is still regarded as simply a place of willful misbehavior, the fact that this discovery has been made is not greeted with a great deal of surprise. Suppose tomorrow that research men were able to announce that a cure had been discovered for cancer. This would be banner headline news in every newspaper, television, and radio station in the world because the whole world knows that cancer is a killer. And yet our disease is far more crippling, far more costly, far more devastating in its effect on American society than cancer. And so we must shout from the housetops at the top of our lungs that people do not have to go on drinking, that recovery is possible, and we know that recovery as possible for the great majority of alcoholics who can follow our program and are willing to do it. The final part of this step is easy to forget because it's the toughest one in the whole 12. Practice these principles in all my affairs. Well, this is a little bit fascinating because as you look back on these sheets before you, you don't find a single principle in the 12 steps. This is not, as I said earlier, a creed. It is not an expression of belief. It is a series of actions which we are to take now to be sure. These rest on principles, But who is to pronounce these principles? Who is to discover them? How am I to practice these principles in all my affairs unless I study the program very carefully to find out what's involved here? We know and we hear constantly honesty. For one, prudence is in here. Concerns, passions, another. But how many AA groups do you know that have devoted an evening to discussing what principles lie underneath the AA program? Here is a way of life for as long as we live, it's a way of life informed as we improve our conscious contact with God as we understand him. It's a way of life in which we expect responsibility, accept responsibility for our behavior toward others with a constant sensitivity to their needs and their hurts. It is a way of life we shall have to follow as long as we live if we wish to remain sober. Did this prospect bore you? I've been in AA, as Duke told you, for a good many years, and I've been talking about this program for a long time. The thing that excites me about it is its depth, its Tonight I had the pleasure of having dinner with Jack Norris, our great and good friend. He was telling me about a new book which has come out, and I'm not going to tell you any more about it because I think he plans to tell us some more in his talks tomorrow night. As he outlined it to me we just sort of grinned at each other, because here in medical language was AA. Have any of you felt, for example, as you listen when you go to church and the minister may read something from Paul's letters that he sounds as though he were speaking before an AA meeting? The fascinating thing about alcoholism is that it gives us the total experience of life in, a fancy word, in microcosm, in the small. The alcoholic packs into his tortured, harassed, anxious, frightened existence virtually every human experience. After talking with alcoholics for ten years at the clinic, I once remarked to a friend of mine that the the only bit of human experience which could surprise me now was a pregnant man. You and I have reason to be grateful. I know, although many non-alcoholics do not understand why a man can say glad I'm an alcoholic. He doesn't mean he's happy over the experience he's had. He doesn' t mean he is happy because of his behavior. It doesn't mean he was happy because he's hurt people. It isn't happy because he's lost opportunities. But he is deeply grateful that out of this this torture experience, has come a new understanding of himself, a new understanding of his friends and neighbors and acquaintances, a new understanding what it means to be a man, and a new understanding of the relationship with God. During World War II, the first time I was sent out to the islands. We sailed on a ship and we were told before we set out that she was packed with detonating charges for bombs. These are very sensitive devices, as you know. And it wasn't very reassuring when about the third day out the word spread around that information had been received that Japanese submarines were in the vicinity. And sure enough, one night about 10 o'clock, the alarm sounded and we were all summoned on deck to our appointed places. We had our instructions. We just stood there on the deck. It was a beautiful, clear moonlight night which added to our apprehension because we well understood that if there were submarine in the area, the skipper could line us up very well against the moon. We stood in absolute silence. The only sound was the water moving under the ship. It seemed like forever we stood there. Finally this misorder came and we went down to our quarters. As I crawled into my bunk, I was, quite frankly, bathed in perspiration and the anxiety and the fear. And I thought to myself, well, I'll never get to sleep tonight. But then I had this experience that as though somebody just said to me, it's all right, John. And before I've dropped off, I remember that famous poem. I know not where his islands lift their fondest palms in air. I only know I cannot pass beyond his love and care. Thank you, John. Down front these fellows have made recordings here tonight and will I'm sure make others throughout tomorrow and Sunday. By all means, if you care to keep this message in your mind, try to get one of these recordings. Hello, Marge, this is Charlie. I'm still rejoicing over the success of your wonderful conference down there. It just was wonderful. And I know you did most of the work in getting that together. You are to be commended, Marge. and Gene didn't say enough Sunday there to start to repay you or compliment you for your efforts and what you did there. Marge got quite a bit of blank tape here GMC spoke, I think he spoke 68 minutes. I had to put on a piece of extra new tape in order to get his all-in on 1200. Well it wouldn't go on 1200 but to get on one seven inch reel. So this little extra ditty I'm going to put on a couple of little short stories as related by Tom Shea of actual experiences that he had in his Al-Anon work. Very long ago, and a man heard that I was there, church about the size of this one, and I was holding a meeting that particular night, and I had just started to preach. In fact, he was a bit late getting there, and he came into the door, and it was obvious that he was drinking, and he came in and sat on the back seat of the church. One of the ushers, realizing that this man was drinking asked him and walked back to him and said to him you must leave. I did something that I've never done in my life. I said to this man, I do not know you but I'd like for you to come and sit on the platform with me tonight. And after it was over, he came and he sat up here in his state that he was in. And when we were ready to leave, this man had hitchhiked 600 miles and he was about 300 miles away from where I was speaking on this particular night He walked into a bus station and said, I want to get to such and such a place where such and such a man is speaking. Can I get there? I do not have a bit of money. I do NOT have a thing in the world. And the man in the bus station said, Where and who are you going to hear? And he said, Well, I'm an alcoholic. I'm in trouble and I'm going to here Tom's ship. and of all of the things that happened on that particular night the fellow who was at the ticket counter was a man that I helped sober up something like 12 years ago and he bought him a ticket to this small town about the size of McKinney and an usher was about ready to ask him to leave You see, we get to the place sometimes where we are more concerned about our own feelings than we are about the person we are attempting to help. One of the things we need to get away from in our communities today is being embarrassed in finding ourselves in a situation where the alcoholic may be involved. when you can get over this embarrassment, perhaps then you will be able to render a ministry in the community. And this is what I would hope the Council on Alcoholism would help to do in your community, but to help me to remove the stigma where you would no longer be ashamed when this happened. And you know, it's strange how cruel we get in our community sometimes. Let me tell you about a story that's related in a similar way. I was in another small village preaching one night, and I'll never forget this as long as I live. The church, right next to the church was the parsonage, and next to the parsonage was another house, and in this particular house there lived, according to the community and the church people, and I heard about this after I'd finished preaching on Sunday night and stepped outside. There were a group of people talking about the lady and her daughter who lived next door to the preacher, and they knew that she was an alcoholic, and they knew that she was a drunkard because she never walked outside the house and no one had ever seen her. They also knew that she was terribly immoral because every night at 10 o'clock, a man would drive up to the house and would stay till about 2.30 in the morning and leave to complicate matters and to make the talk worse. It so happened that her 17-year-old daughter left on the day that I happened to arrive in the city, and everyone knew why she had to leave. So I said to the preacher, have you been by to see your neighbor? The preacher said I wouldn't be caught dead in that house, and I knew why. Not because he wouldn't be willing to minister, but because of what a public opinion would say about him if he went into the house. I asked also one of the presidents of the Women's Society. She had been by, and she said about the same. as I went from store to store I heard the story so the next afternoon I decided I'd go calling and I knocked on the door a lady came to the door a very charming person and I said I'm Tom Shipp from Dallas, Texas I'm holding a meeting here and I wanted to come by and get acquainted with you and let you know I was thinking of you because I understand that your daughter left town and she couldn't answer. She broke down in tears, invited me in. I walked in and I sat down and after she regained her composure she said, I can understand why you're here. This must be an answer to a prayer. This has been the hardest day of my life because my daughter did leave. I didn't tell her why everyone thought her daughter left. And then I said to her, I'm sorry to hear about this. Why did she have to leave? I said, well, she tried everywhere in town to get a job here, but nobody would give her a job. In fact, they wouldn't even talk to her. You see, we had to move back here because my father owned this house and where we were living, we could no longer pay the rent because I had to give up my job because of the illness of my mother, who is here now. She's 80-some years old and she has the kind of disease that if I leave her for one minute she may strangle to death. Therefore, I can't leave her one minute. And I haven't been out of this house in eight months. And I don't know what I'm going to do because I was depending on my daughter to bring in the groceries. And the reason why she left was because she had to earn a bit of income to help supplement the income that we now have. Not being able to get a job here, she had go to Kansas City. And then she said, and I said to her, would you like to go to church? She said, I'd love to. and i said well she said but i can't and i said but I'll get someone to come and stay you know how much it took that night for me to get someone to come and stay in that house for two hours fifty dollars and she said you know I don't know what I would do if it weren't for my brother who drives 120 miles every night and stays with my mother between 10 and 2 o'clock in the morning while I get a bit of sleep. And then that night she came into the church. We were singing and I asked everyone to be seated because I wanted to introduce her to the community. And I said, I would like to introduce to you the lady that many of you have not seen. She lives next door to the parsonage. Her name is such and such. This is a high moment of her life, you see, because this is the first time she's been back in this church since her father was his pastor and built it. And then we think that we really and truly are concerned. And we really and truly care. This is just one story. I wonder how many of them could be written about our communities where we are, because we have done the same thing and we've been more interested in pointing our finger than we have in finding a way for human life. The second thing I would say to you is that unless you give some attention to these who are in trouble with alcohol and these who have the disease of alcoholism, who's going to be about this business of helping? And it's a strange thing about alcohol. any other disease that a person might have, we immediately recognize that we must give them care, we must gives them attention. But someone who has alcoholism or has a narcotic problem, we immediately think that if we ignore them or if we push them out, we've solved the problem. I wonder if we've ever helped anyone or won anyone by ignoring them and therefore one of the things it seems to me that we need to do tonight is to recognize the fact that you've never helped anyone by ignoring him and I put this illustration in my book when I said you didn't fall in love with your wife or your husband by ignoring her you fell in love with them by giving them attention you never kept a person in your office as a doctor by ignoring them as a patient but you kept them and you helped them by giving them attention you never helped a person in your life in the church as a minister by ignoring an individual and take Thank you. Thank you.