Why the Steps Separate the Men from the Boys – David B.

Mes amis, my good friends, je suis un alcoolique. I am an alcoholic. My name is Dave. I'm Not really very anonymous, because I think probably 99% of you out there know what my name is anyway, but I will preserve the tradition. I'm not too accustomed to speaking at this kind of a meeting where I don't tell my story where things are different and I have to make notes for myself so perhaps is that better? perhaps I won't sound just as I always do. You know, many's the time in the worst of my drinking days and I think I said that last year when things were very bad and didn't seem as if they could be worse though I said to myself I was an agnostic I used to come and sit in the back of the church here where it was peaceful where it is where it's quiet and where strangely enough it reminded me of the Anglican Cathedral in Quebec where I went when I was a small boy. No, there is something inside us, a spiritual thing, I think. God, I suppose you would call us, who draws us back to the things of our youth. Father Bill said we had to, or he thought we had to have a force, a something stronger than a group itself. We should be perfect even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. Or not that we should be, that we shall try to be. And it seems to me that that is what all of our twelve steps work towards, the twelve steps if we will conscientiously and honestly and earnestly and to the best of our ability through them, when we come to the last step, it says having had a spiritual awakening or having had the spiritual experience. And I don't know exactly what a spiritual experience is, other than what one might call a conversion, a turning to God. And I think actually the way it should be that to each and every one of us in AA, God is the Father. at least that's the way I try to look at it you know sometimes when I stand here and I look out in this very very beautiful old church I'm very conscious of the wonder of the miracle of this whole thing that has been my life in your life, and the AA way of life. And I look back to a little group. Twenty-seven years ago or more it is now. That's a long time. And we were meeting in our shabby little living room out in Cote-des-Neiges which in those days was the outskirts of the city it's very hard for me to visualize or to understand that this, all of this has taken place from those seeds that were sown way back and I look today sometimes to the tremendous tremendous rewards that have come to me and come to every single one of us in AA if the only reward we have is that we're not drinking today it's a tremendous reward and I looked back sometimes to a little drunken number one police station that's over on used to be on Gosford Street in those days. And I believe in miracles. And sometimes I say to myself, what wonders hath God wrought? And that's why my favorite prayer really is a very simple thing. God give me a grateful heart. But we're not here really to talk about me. We're here to express our gratitude to the pioneers, let's say, and the builders of AA in our community and beyond, and those who have left us for better things. perhaps someday we'll meet them all again I suppose it's not irreverent to say I sometimes say it and I think the good Lord will forgive me someday perhaps we'll have a great big open meeting in the great beyond where we're all there we'll be able to we'll build for the principal speaker and Dr. Bob to back him up And I don't mean that irreverently. I think there's something else that we should never forget. I think that we should remember the wives in AA. Sometimes you know, I think it is the wives who suffered oh not only the wives, the fathers the mothers, the sisters, the brothers, the children. They suffered perhaps more than we did because they couldn't understand and we couldn't understand either that they didn't know. They could only feel. They couldn't experience It's a tremendous compulsion, the things that made us, drove us, drove us on and on, and they drive us to insanity and death, and they truly do. And I believe, I really believe that alcoholism is a disease. I really belief it's a three-part disease. I think it's a disease of the body. It's a disease of mind, and it's also a disease of the soul or the spirit if you like to call it that. Before I start I'd like to pay tribute to some few people who weren't alcoholics, but who influenced me tremendously in these three phases long before I ever came to Alcoholics Anonymous. There's Fred Wilkinson. He's a bishop now. Fred used to be up at St. James the Apostle Church. He was the minister. It was canon in those days. And that man tried so hard to help me, and how I repaid him. I repayed him by falling asleep on his lawn with all his neighbors walking by the next morning by upsetting all the things in his church. But he had the patience of Job, and sometimes I meet him now. He's a man that told me a tremendous thing. You know, I've learned a lot. I don't—everything we know. I think the things that we learn from these people influenced our lives too, not only AA. Things that happened to us before AA. Man is the product of all his experiences, Emerson said, and I think he experiences are paths crossing of all kind of people makes every one a little bit of somebody of all the other people that he ever saw before when I was interdicted over at the courthouse there as a common drunkard and a vagabond who came there with me Brad Wilkinson came to be my support and be my comfort a tremendous man and he was a man that told me once when I first came back into AA or a few years after I came back I told him the problems and troubles I was having with going back to church and he said whatever it is you have Dave it's so much better than anything you ever had before you better hang out of it and I like that and then there's Travis Dancy a doctor he's in the church here today I drove down with him actually he was a young doctor staff doctor I suppose you'd call it down at Verdun the Verdun Protestant Hospital when I was there and how I well, I don't know that I really hated him I resented him I resanted anybody and anything that was trying to get taken me away from doing the things I felt I should be able to do but yet in my own heart of hearts I knew I couldn't do but he was a man that one day he's a very good friend of mine now so I can say these things. He was the man that one day came in, my sister had sent up the big book and I resented very much that they had to see the things that I was going to get in this hospital. And he threw it on the bed and said, I don't think this can do you any harm. And I said to myself, it'll be a long day before I ever read that book that I'm an alcoholic. And after a little while, when I thought nobody was looking and I was all by myself and late at night in the room, I read the book. I didn't remember it again. Some few years after that, again over in that bullpen on Gosford Street. I think of Dr. Porches, dear old man that he was. I always liked him, I suppose, because I never had too much to do with him, except I used to talk to him on occasion. But he was the man who again by one or a few simple sentences perhaps plunged me so far down into the depths of hopelessness that I came to the point a little later on where I was willing to do anything anything to get sober he was a man who said to my wife Dave is an alcoholic of a type that we've with whom we've had very little success there's nothing more we can do for him you'll probably have to have custodial care for the rest of his life that was like the voice of doom but we're talking about the grateful heart and the miracle of aa when travis dancey came back from the war what do you think i was sober by the grace of God I've been sober ever since that is what I mean when I say there were non-alcoholics and many non-alkoholics in my life my wife, my sister my father so many people even a stepmother that I disliked so violently There was one instant when she understood. She said, oh, coming right near the end, she said, you just can't help it, Dave, can you? You just can'st help it. And there was another one. Some of you may know her. her name was Miss Calder she was up in what was then the Western Hospital on the fourth floor and she was the night superintendent of nurses and I used to think she was a very good nurse she was one of the most miserable thing in all the world do you know after I got to know her she was one of the kindest people and she helped I don't know how many drunks after we got AA started we took into that that clinic or outdoor place whatever you call it up near that old western to get shots of this and shots of that and their stomachs pumped out and every other kind of thing but do you know why I particularly remember Miss Calder because it was to Miss Calger that I took not knowing I took the first step they brought me into the Western Hospital as they had done so many times before and I was lying in the bed and she came in and she said oh Mr. Bancroft why do you do this look at your little wife look at your son and here you are I've never forgotten to this day what I said because it was the first step I said I don't know Miss Calder I really just don't know and so that's what I mean about the non-alcoholics the non alcoholics who helped me so much prior to my coming into AA and perhaps molded my life and perhaps without them I never would have come into AA. They were the ones who really, when you stop to think of it taught me some of the steps and I'm a great believer in you take 12 steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 down to 12 there aren't anything in there that's not supposed to be or you don't guess at anything or nothing's written in between the lines they're twelve steps and they're extremely hard to do but they are possible and I think all of these people taught me to admit that I was an alcoholic to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself to admit to God and another human being the nature of my wrongs, and to be entirely ready to have those wrongs removed, and to humbly ask him to remove those shortcomings. Now we're coming to as close to the anniversary and the memory of Bill. It was in thinking of Bill that made me think of those particular steps, because when I was taking those steps, it was Bill who told me. Those are the steps, Dave, that separate the men from the boys in AA. And we should think a minute, perhaps, of Bill and the tremendous, tremendous contribution he's made to every one of our lives. And the things he's done—you know, when I came, I'm a great believer in doing things like the book says. I'm a great book man, fundamentalist they used to call me. When I came to make my moral inventory and admit it to another person, I went down there because I didn't know anybody else to go to. And I talked to Bill. I don't know how many, and I wish they had that book A Comes of Age translated into French. I don' t believe you have it in French as yet, but I do so wish they would, but it's a big-sized book. And in that book, Bill wrote of me as a marathon 12th stepper. I can remember that book just like that. Up in Quebec, things had started to perk. Dave was up there, a marathon 12-stepper. I loved that, of course, you know. And I never forgot it. You know, I was thinking today when I was looking over all of this, you good people were kind enough to have that torch up beside my picture in the office It was the Greeks in the marathon who ran from marathon to somewhere hundreds of miles with that torch, which now I've passed on to all you good people. So maybe there's something more. Sometimes strange things happen in AA. maybe there was something to the marathon 12th stepper but God bless Bill and his wife Lois none of us probably would be here at all and then there's Dr. Bob we have to remember Bob was a deeply spiritual person he was a man who would if he could have had no organization whatsoever and of course he wouldn't have worked that way but he was a perfect complement to Bill because Bill was the other way, Bill would have had everything organized and so between the two of them it worked well Dr. Bob was a very humble man Dr. Bob's great phrase and he said it often was keep it simple and I think too we should keep it simple and then I don't know how many of you remember the third man who came to AA he's been up here he came up and spoke years and years and years ago when we were having our banquet up in and all we have the Saturday night meeting is old Bill Dotson. Unfortunately, we found that many of the French-speaking people and some of the English couldn't understand him because he came from Arkansas, and he had an accent that was unbelievable. Tremendous man, though. He helped me. And there was Bill who told me once, get honest with yourself as never before. Dr. Bob, who said, keep it simple. It's not easy to be honest with yourself. You can think you're honest with yourself, but it's not too easy to be completely and really and truly honest. At least I find it so. And I have to try to search within my most secret heart, I read somewhere, for the God of my own understanding. And I'll be everlastingly grateful to those people. I suppose it sounds perhaps too dramatic, but I owe those people my life, my life and the happy kind of life that I have now. and then there was another one there was Bobby Bobby Berger she wouldn't mind Bobby was the girl who handed me the torch Bobby who in her letter to me said oh this I've been in touch with her for a long time nearly six months Bobby said we believe that you're the man that's going to get AA started in Montreal you know if you ever got anything ready to send a guy out on the drunk all you have to do is write him a letter and say we believe that you are the man that's gonna go out and do something I told you I'm a big book man I remembered in my favorite chapter something that it said it said we know what you're thinking we know what you're saying to yourself but I'm alone and I'm afraid and I could never do that and then it goes on to say but you forget you forget you just now tapped a source of power so much greater than yourself and we do all forget that and I forget it and we forget it occasionally there is a tremendous source of power that's available to us anytime we want good father was speaking to forgiveness i was thinking of a little phrase i'm full little phrases i never can remember where they come from it said man stoops to forgiveness god lays it at your feet And I wish we could do that, too. So now I think probably I better talk about some of our own AAs, some of those who influenced the way we should grow from infancy to youth and to maturity and to AA as we know it today. And I'll start with Clarence. Clarence had a little office over here. You ought to have seen it. Clarenced helped more people in that office than you can possibly imagine. Clarece would always be saying, If you got fifty cents today, if you get fifty cents I want to go and get an oyster stew or something. All the time he had ten dollars in his pocket probably. clients who worked so hard and did so much, wrote the bylaws, arranged for the money for her Kimberley Club. That was the first club, and I like to think think sometimes it was the most successful club we ever had. But of course when you look back things always look so much better. They don't always look well when you go back to see them. I'm sure for Ken and Davidson didn't always, he was so kind. I found my father went to school in that used to be the old lower canada college the church of can't think of the name but i can remember john the evangelist i can remember they were saints those poor fathers and priests of that place because you know AA wasn't too different than it is now and there were drunks and rubbies and all kinds of people coming in and leaving old bottles in the pews and sleeping overnight in the pew and doing every other kind of thing in the church Clarence and I together mostly Clarence because he was a great man for games of chance which I was no good at organized our Saturday night meeting which is still going still strong he's really started to keep his brother Eddie sober because he never could stay sober on Saturday night Clarency I think you know AA at one time French speaking peoples couldn't come or wouldn't come to AA except the very lowest bottom kind of flunks because AA was a neutral society and as such People weren't supposed to come. But eventually so many people came, people who had gone so far down the ladder that they didn't have too much to do with church. And a great number of them came. And they got sober. And it was the people in this church—and I can remember it so well, because we took our coats and hats off in that room downstairs and left them there—where we had the first meeting in a French-speaking Catholic Church anywhere. And they were very happy to have us here. Perhaps it wouldn't have gone over so well today, because we didn't have any French members or any French speakers, so Clarence and I both had to speak in English. it was from that little seed that all of the groups and all of the group meetings in all the various churches all over this province started and of course now nobody could help us more than the Catholic Church and then I'd like to speak perhaps of another man. Gordy, 12th Step Gordie. We could never forget him. He did more 12th step work, I think, than anybody that ever came in before or since. You know, we had a lawyer member, Jim, Jimmy the Dip. And Jimmy went off on a slip. Oh, many, many many years ago and then he stayed sober after and he used to go down to the Regent Tavern and Hicksey would be up in the club and Jim would be down in the Regent Cavern and some fella would appear up in the club and say hey there was a fella down at the Regent Tavern told me to come up here and I can get sober it's a real deal and it worked very well he had a buck a month club you know like all clubs they have difficulty financing it Gordy organized the buck a month club he used to always be a great one day at a time man by the yard it's hard by the inch it's a sink he was a man who had a great many of those scenes and then there was Bob Bob was the first French member who came and stayed for any length of time for Bob he didn't stay till the end but he stayed for a long, long time and I'd like to just clear it and if I ever do get that book written, you'll know who started the first French group. It was Bob who started the first France group. Bob, Cecile, and another girl who's still alive. She's one of the oldest, oldest French-speaking members. They started it in Preston Hall after they had left the forum. I think that must have been in 1945 or 46, and that was the first French-speaking group of Alcoholics Anonymous in the world. And then there was Stan. Stan the man. Stan was a born leader. He had to be mean for a big upstanding man, and I must tell you, you did what Stan said or else. he would point to somebody perhaps in the bed suffering the pangs of alcohol, and he would say, get out of that bed. But very often you would find that same Stan handing over a few bucks to this man to get his dinner. Stan was one of our delegates. Stan worked in the intergroup. Stan worked in the general service of the day of that North End English group Stan was let's say the North End English group everybody there went to Stan with their troubles and Stan helped them he was a tremendous speaker and a tremendous 12th step worker a tremendous man in the services of AA, and he was a great AA. And then there was Paul, Paul M. I'm sure you know him. Paul was a French-speaking taxi driver. I remember once saying Paul was one of the ones who probably because of people like Paul that they allowed us in these churches Paul had gone down about as low as any man could go, I think I remember saying to another French member once well Paul can't speak English very well I wish I could speak to him he learned to speak English later now this person said don't worry he can't talk he can speak French either all he knows is swear words but that man was a tremendous tremendous force in Alcoholics Anonymous I have a picture of him with his little prefect I guess it was car, tiny little thing he drove all over this province up into the Lake St. John area up past Val D'Or up into gold mining area down into eastern townships He drove everywhere carrying the message, up into the gas bay, carrying the Message of Alcoholics Anonymous. He was one of the earliest, if not the earliest—and I think he probably was the earliest workers in the French-speaking prison groups out at St. Vincent de Paul. and he helped to organize the VA club I sometimes think of Paul Paul and I were great friends you know despite the way he used to talk to me sometime I used to see Paul quite regularly when he was in the hospital coming near the end and I often thought of a little poem again one of these things I don't know where they come from. They were speaking of love. He said, unlearned he knew no schoolman's art, no language but the language of the heart. And then there was Pierre, a very gentlemanly person in the exact opposite of Paul. Paul was his sponsor. Strangely enough, very gentlemanly, very quiet, and very nice, and a great friend of mine. Pierre again was one of our delegates, and Pierre spent most of his AA life in the service of AA. He was in general service. Before that, he was in intergroup. He helped to found the general service which we have today, which had all broken down and all into pieces. He was a tremendous man. He was one of those servants that we speak of in AA, and I'm not going to be much longer, but I would like to mention that of the people in Quebec, and not many people will remember these people because Quebec started a while after. There was a man named Rennie, Renni A. We used to go to meetings in Rennies' house in the beginning. Travel, we traveled a great deal more than we do now. I guess I was younger and able to travel. Perhaps that was something to do with it. You know, I had been brought up in Quebec, and I had known Rennie for years and years and years, and nobody was more surprised than me. And I'll see him in there. There's a man named Boise. Boise McKay. He was in love with my sister once, years ago. And there was Edna. Edna was pretty controversial or whether they like it or whether they don't and sometimes I have to be a little controversial too Edna got that thing going she got that intergroup going and Sherbrooke there was a man named Harry and a guy named Morris But all I can say now is they and many, many others carried the torch. And something that's in the funeral service, and I think it's in your funeral service too, they followed the course. They kept the faith. And I pray that someday they'll be able to say that about me. He followed the path. He followed his course. And he kept the fate. And I can only say that A.A. in the old days, for all of us, it was a great adventure. It was new and it was untried, none of us knew what to do, only what people told us. You know, when I was younger and considerably more dramatic than I am now, I used to call it the hope of the hopeless and the help of the helpless. If you want to know, it really is. And I believe it's like original Christianity, and I'm convinced that we have the same help from on high as those original Christians. Perhaps it's all explained in the big book. The little paragraph which is one of my great favorites, and which seems to me to contain all of the necessary things to make AA work. He says, abandon yourself to God as you understand God. Admit your faults to him and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of the past. Give freely of what you find and follow us. And now I'm going to close with my favorite little a poem which I think is quite applicable. I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, give me a light that I may step safely into the unknown. And he replied, go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God and that shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way. So I went forth And finding the hand of God trod gladly into the night And he led me toward the hills And the breaking of the day in the lone east Thank you My friends, if you will, we are going to say together Our father in our language to each one of us Our father who art in heaven May your name be sanctified May your kingdom come May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.