The Summerfest 1999 in Eugene, OR

I brought my napkin in case I cry. First of all, I just wanna thank you guys for having me here. I've had a wonderful time this weekend. My name is Hollis Dodge, and I am an alcoholic. I love Alcoholics Anonymous, and I love an opportunity like this.

I want to thank you guys for just a beautifully constructed weekend. This has just been slick as oysters on a doorknob the whole weekend. I want to thank you particularly for 2 groups of people that I've seen here and have had a wonderful time with, and that's a noisy bunch and a silent bunch. And they're all over on this side. There's a bunch of babies over here.

I don't often get a chance to be at a conference where people feel so comfortable bringing their little ones. If those kids start screaming, you just let them scream. It's just light music to me. And then the hearing impaired. There's a group of folks over here who've been here all weekend, and this conference has made a commitment to the hearing impaired.

And I tell you what, it's a beautiful thing to see. I work with deaf people, and a lot of them need what we have, but we can't get it to them. And they're afraid of us because we're hearing people who use big words. And when you provide this experience, strength, and hope in the language of science, as you have done this weekend, you opened the door to a group of people, and it is truly passing it on. And I thank you.

God, I offer myself to thee to build with me and to do with me as thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do thy will. Take away my difficulties of victory over them. May I bear witness to those I would help with thy power, thy love, and thy way of life. May I do well thy will always.

That's the reason I'm here. This is 12 step work for me. This is carrying the message. This is doing something with you and receiving from you and trying on some small way to pass it on. I got sober on the 1st day of November of 1977.

I'm a first nighter. I came to AA after I had done all the drinking I could stand, and I haven't left AA nor found it necessary to take a drink or anything else since I walked through the doors of this fellowship. I don't take the credit for that. I know a lot about AA, and I knew the people who came to AA were serious about not drinking. And I guess I did all my slipping before I came to you, and I did plenty.

I don't know whether I'm the only alcoholic in my family or not. You know? There's some folks who say that alcoholism is a family disease and that it's passed on. I don't know. My dad died when he was younger than I am today, and drinking at times is a problem for him.

My mother very seldom drank. I have a sister who gets sick every time she drinks, so she doesn't she doesn't drink. And then I have a brother who drinks like a civilian, and then there was me. Now I guess it has to start someplace. So it may be me that brought alcoholism into our family.

I may be the guy that turned our teen pool into a swamp where booze is concerned, but I drank enough of it for all of my family members. And I hope that in sharing my story with you, that you'll come to understand several things about me. 1, that I am sober because of you. 2, that I am grateful. 3, that Alcoholics Anonymous is a way of life that touches every facet of my existence.

And 4, I've had a hell of a lot of fun being an AA member. Sometimes it isn't fun. It seems like we go through periods where it's mighty dry running, and it's very difficult. But as we look back over the years, the months, and we see that we're still staying sober one day at a time, then this thing is working. Now I I'd say that, one of the things that I experienced very early in coming to AA was that things had to change and that I needed to go to a lot of meetings.

And I experienced the fact that being an AA member, at age 30 at that time, I was the youngest AA member in my town, which was Richmond, Virginia at that time when I came in. And the fellow said, you can't be an alcoholic. You couldn't have drank enough. You couldn't have drank like the rest of us. And my I remember clearly saying that for god's sakes, don't send me out to suffer more.

Can I just kinda ride in on your shirt tails? And it was 3 months before I heard my story in Alcoholics Anonymous, told by the, a female, a principal of an Episcopal Girls School from the eastern part of Virginia, and she described my drinking to a tee. And I felt so comfortable and so grateful to her that I went up to her after the meeting. And I said, you know, although you said nearly that we were seldom really, really drunk, I was never really, really sober. There was a time in my life where I didn't have booze out of my system in a given time.

But I was in a profession, and it was necessary for me to function, and I needed to work in order to drink. So I was a maintenance daily drinker. My problem was is that I was maintaining at the level of a 5th a day, and I found that my product wasn't quite as good at the end of the day as it was at the beginning. So I was a 9 to nooner at work and then not worth a damn thereafter. And in my profession at that time, it was very difficult for me to subsist on a 5th day and not be a little bit, obvious.

I've been, active AA member goer ever since I came into the program. I've always maintained a steady, number of meetings a week. In fact, I write them down so that I'll be sure I got to enough. And I keep paper and pencil always at meetings so that I can write down these great one liners that I hear from people, Ideas that I wanna think about, things that I disagree with, things that I want to appropriate for for my own use and and pretend that I'm the one who thought of them. And friends of mine have said, who are not alcoholics, themselves or not members of AA, they say, well, jeez.

You have to go to all those meetings. You know? You're you're a pretty well educated fellow, and I think that a few of those meetings would do you. I wonder if you're not wasting a lot of time going to those meetings and hanging around all those degenerates. And maybe you ought to just kinda get over it and get on with life.

And I wonder what would have happened to you if you, you know, hadn't become an alcoholic. Maybe you wouldn't have to go to all those damn meetings. And I I I'm reminded of a story that illustrates very clearly the idea of what I might have become. In Winchester, Virginia, which is at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley in which I live in Virginia, apples is the number one cash crop. And back during the depression of this country, back in the thirties, when no one had any work and everything ground to a halt, a poor old fellow from the mountains thereabouts came into the city of Winchester looking for work.

When he got into town, someone said, well, there's a joint around the corner that's looking for some help. Go on around there. So the man went and knocked on the door and was ushered into the parter of Winchester, Virginia's most prestigious cat house. And when the lady at the place said, what can I do for you? He said, I'm looking for work.

And she says, well, we're looking for an accountant. Can you be an accountant? And he said, well, ma'am, I left school in the 1st grade. My daddy needed me to farm. I can either read nor write, but I can cipher some.

So So let me see if I can take the job. She said, no. I won't do. He said, ma'am, I'm so damn hungry. My stomach thinks my throat's been slit.

Do you have something for a poor man to eat? And she said, yep. There's a bunch of apples in the kitchen. Go on out and get a few and let yourself out the back door. So this old mountain boy goes into the kitchen and figured, well, what the hell?

Took all the apples out, picked the 12 best ones, put them in a paper bag, polished them up on his coat, left, and was walking down one of the main streets of Winchester eating an apple when a man came up and said, god almighty. That's a beautiful apple. Do you have another one? I'll give you a nickel. Well, it just happened to have another one.

So he sold it for a nickel, and he ate another apple, and he sold another apple. And by the day's end, he had a full belly and some silver change rattling in his pocket, and an idea was born. The next morning, with the money he had collected the day before, it goes down to this the produce market. And it first opened up, and he spent that money only on the very best that he could find. Put it in the same bag, sold it all.

Sold another bag that day. Soon he graduated to a little box that he tied around his neck with a rope, and he put a little hand lettered sign saying, I take the time to get the very best. Not too long after that, he graduated to a little push cart. And 25 years later, the man was wealthy beyond his wildest imagining with truck lines running up and down the valley of Virginia and all over the East Coast. And his logo was, I take the time to get the very best.

And one day his lawyer came into him and says, mister, you're being eaten up by the IRS. We've got to funnel some of this money into some sort of a charity, and I would like to tell you that I've done the research and I have set up a foundation for you. I'd like you to read through these documents and sign them and and tell me what to you know, just let's get this on the way. The guy said, well, man, I'm just a poor old mountain boy. I only got through the first grade in school.

I had to help my daddy farm. I can either read and write. I I can't do this. And this lawyer was dumbfounded. He said, my god.

You're sitting there in that beautiful suit behind that beautiful desk. What the hell would you have become if you could have read and written? He said, I'd have been a bookkeeper in a whorehouse. So So for you and me, being members of Alcoholics Anonymous may be as good as it'll ever ever get in our lives, and I'm living, breathing proof of that fact. I'll tell you, I've been in AA over 21 years and I've counted it up on in my heart and my soul, and I don't have one thing today that I had when I was drinking.

I either got fired from it, quit it. It left me, left town, rusted, wrecked, got stolen, burned up, or I misplaced it. Not a damn thing that I have from the day that I got into any any but I do have the very first big book somebody gave me when I walked through the door and asked for 3.50 for it. And I've collected a whole new life. I wanna tell you a little bit about that because this is this is what we're all about.

We're sharing experience, strength, and hope. I was born to a fine family. My mom and dad loved me, and all 3 of us kids just loved us. I don't think we were poor by any means. We weren't rich by any means either.

My mother and father were cared about us children and loved us very much. As I say in my father's drinking created some problems and he was killed when I was 16. And I remember that I consoled myself with booze at his funeral, and it took the pain away of losing the man that I loved and admired. But I was drunk at his funeral. The night before he was buried, I crawled up the steps to my bedroom past the rest of my grieving family, laughing hysterically about the wonderful things that had happened to me during my drunken 16 year old experience in the next town over.

It was not appropriate. My drinking started out inappropriately, but it cut the pain. I did not like the man who was living inside of my skin, and it was me. And I discovered then that booze would anesthetize me against me. I didn't have to live with me anymore.

I'd found the answer. From the time that I found Boos, I ceased maturing as a human being and commenced manuring as a human being. I'm educated far beyond my intelligence. I've got a good college and university background, but I I developed that while I was drinking. And I am here to tell you that college is an excellent place to develop your drinking and get a PhD in it.

I joined a fraternity. I haven't thought the best idea what the hell a name that fraternity was. Tap a peg a day, it appears. But, I was in that college for 1 year, and I had deep spiritual convictions because when my father was killed, I turned to the church, and I decided that I wanted to go to the seminary. I did not realize at that time that already alcohol was a very important factor in my life, but I went to a Roman Catholic cemetery seminary.

Doctor Freud, what are you? And, I went to a Catholic seminary and all the rest of the guys drank drank too, or at least the ones I hung around with, and we had a wonderful time. For Roman Catholics, there may be a few in the room. I've heard alcoholism described as a Roman Catholic illness that's treated in Protestant church basements. And lo and behold, while I was developing my alcoholism, I also developed a degree in philosophy and a post graduate degree in theology, and some poor damn fool bishop ordained me to the priesthood in 1974.

And when I quit the priesthood, it was one of the happiest days of that man's life, I might add. But a few things began to happen to me. By this time, I had the illness. I it just hadn't started costing me too much yet. I this is a physical ailment and when I drink alcohol, I break out.

It might be Baltimore, it might be Philadelphia, it might be New York City because I have been drunk in all those towns. I'd like to go to Portland someday. I'd love to see that town sober. I hear it's very attractive. I've been drunk in a lot of places.

I've awakened in places that I wasn't even tired with people I didn't even know. Sometimes I discovered when we peeked under the covers how well acquainted we'd become in the evening, but it would never got the point of exchanging names, just body fluids. I'm awful, god, darn glad I got sober when I did or they'd abidied me with something progressive and fatal as just a result of my friendly nature. They ordained me to the priesthood and sent me to a very nice church in Richmond, Virginia, and here's where the the spiritual part of the element got me. You know, you hear it called physical, mental, and spiritual.

I had it physically, mentally, and spiritually, but it showed up the other way backwards. It showed up first in my life spiritually, then mentally, and finally physically. The spiritual part. I had convictions galore when I went in. I can't imagine anybody going into the ministry except what they want to serve.

And I did want to serve, and I wanted to do good things. I understood a little better about that after I'd gotten sober as to why I wanted to do good things. I think it had something to do with because of how bad I felt about myself. And I also chose a profession where I didn't need to get so close to people on an intimate basis. I didn't have passing acquaintances, but I wouldn't have to engage somebody where they really get to know me and get to know my soul.

So I chose a good field where I could do good and keep you at arm's length, and that was the priesthood. But, spiritually, I had begun to die when the alcohol began to pick up. As my tolerance for alcohol increased, my values began to decrease. I found all the cynics in the seminary, including the professors. I broke every rule there was of decency and humanity and morality and Christianity while I was in the seminary, and they still ordained me.

They sent me to a very nice church. There were wonderful people in that church. And a few episodes happened there in the spiritual park that showed how kind of depraved I had become. I had a great belief in the sacraments of the church. Loved them very much.

For me, celebrating the mass, was a very mystical experience and prayer was a wonderful experience for me. But I remember being drunk, so drunk at times at mass, that I could I just barely got off the altar before somebody had to take me away. One instance I recall in particular, I was, helping a friend open a swimming pool. We got drunk and sober 3 times that afternoon. You You know, you'd get about half in the back and dive in that cold water and climb back out and drink some more and fall in the cold water and climb back out and slither in the cold water.

And then I got to the church to discover that I was the priest for the 6 PM mass that Saturday night. The other guys were gone over the hill, and I was as drunk as an owl. They stuck me in the vestments and I managed to get through a sermon. Oh, I gave beautiful sermons. Doctor Gates said beautiful sermons.

I was given this lead one time and one of my ex parishioners came up to me and says, now now that we're both in Alcoholics Anonymous, I understand why the word you delivered from the pulpit had such deep meaning for me. I don't know what the hell she was on, but I know what I was on. This one particular evening, though, after I'd helped my friends open the pool and they finished the sermon, they brought the Eucharist or the bread and the wine to the altar for me, and I consecrated it, and I was absolutely plowed. And I knew that after I raised the host that I was supposed to genuflect, which is a very neat kind of a curtsy behind the altar. And then when I raised the cup, I was supposed to curtsy again.

And I knew better than to try to curtsy because if I ever got down behind that altar, I was not coming back up for a while. So instead, in all of my fine pontifical vestments, I bowed from the waist, hit my head on the front of the marble altar, split my scalp wide open. Blood is running into my eyes. I'm taking the purificator and wiping my bleeding forehead with it. Got on with the mask somehow.

I had a group of people, maybe as many as there are in this room this morning, and they all probably looked at me. What the hell is he up to? That post Vatican crap again? He's a damn nut, but he's ordained so let's cover for him. Another time, I'm saying mass down in Norfolk, Virginia.

I was in a hospital chapel. I was a chaplain to the hearing impaired, to the deaf. I know sign language. I was saying the Catholic mass in sign language. I was wearing contact lenses.

Somehow, I hit myself in the face and knocked one of those contact lenses off the center of my eye. I don't know if there's ever anybody here has ever worn a hard contact lens. This is like somebody just put a hot ember in the middle of your eyeball and this eye bursts into flame and the snot is running out of this nostril. And I'm trying to wave around if they're making sense, about 3 sheets to the wind. And it occurs to me that on the pattern, under the blessed body of our Lord and savior, is a very shiny plate.

So I swept the Eucharist off the plate, got it up here, and put to the and put all the communion bread back on and on with the service we go. You know, deaf people are going, you know, what the hell is he up to? But nobody jumped my bones about it. They just figured, you know, he's leaving town soon, I think, if he can find his way to the city limits. I was visiting friends at Christmas time, having one of those wonderful free Christmas dinners at, late one Saturday night after I had said the mass, somewhat sanely.

And I got absolutely bombed at their house. These were drinking buddies and I was numb from the jaw south. I and on my way staggering to the car, I saw their creche, their little Jesus scene on the front porch of the lights and the angels and straw, and there was this red chicken, a big plastic rod iron red chicken, and I thought, why the hell? So I stole him. I took him with me, put him in the front seat and talked to him all the way back up to church.

Went in and promptly passed out. Next morning, I had a 7 AM mass, and I come into church. And I'd say the whole mass, you know, a beautiful altar and a beautiful sanctuary. The The ladies artillery of the church had decorated the tree, all these little angels and stuff. And I'm sitting down after the communion and all these people are looking up very, very piously at the tree.

And I decided, well, I'll look piously at the tree. And I look up in the top and there's that damn red chicken sitting up on the top of that They might have been saying, what the hell is wrong with that tree? The chicken a sign of chastity or something? So I got the got the people out of church and got rid of the chicken and found the Virgin Mary's statue and stuck them. These things were happening more and more often.

I mean, this would be confusing to explain if I remembered what the hell had happened. But some of this stuff, I wasn't able to remember. I thought I was, you know, spiritually. Well, there are other things that happened to me too that were the mental part, you know. And the mental part sometimes is where all of our body and what we think are nowhere near connected and that's just sort of a working definition of alcoholic insanity.

And I had all these values and stuff but my behavior didn't go along with it. And, I'd taken some vows, you know, that I would try to uphold certain things, and I broke every single one of them. I mean, I've, misappropriated funds. I've, been caught in, some very compromising positions. And, I remember one time going on a convention, and it was a convention out in, Kansas City, Missouri.

And I was in this hotel and I got a private room just in case, I decided to do a little canoodling on the first class while I was there for the week. I didn't do any canoodling. Hell, I just iced down my bathtub, filled it full of Coors beer, and, drank my way through it and then showered ankle deep in ice and went out to do some real drinking. And after I've been doing that 2 or 3 days, I couldn't have raised an umbrella. So I left Kansas City and.

Virtue was intact through no fault of mine. That's your damn career. All those people just mattering hell at me. I was serving on 2 or 3 boards in that convention, never made a one of those meetings and stumbled back home. I mean, just crap like that was going on all the time and the physical stuff started to happen to me too and that was the blackouts.

And then I don't know about some of you folks, but dying seemed to be very attractive to me, you know. And I I tried a number of different ways, very subtle ways, like driving drunk. And I used to say that I drove a car better drunk than most people drove sober. And I was on the road. I had a job that took me 50,000 miles a year on the road and I'd drive and I black out while I was on these trips and I'd come to some very exotic places.

Sometimes in Virginia, sometimes not. I remember once waking up down in Nags Head, North Carolina. That's 400 miles from where I lived. I had the foggiest notion while I was while I was there and I didn't have any place to stay. So I slept in the back of, the pickup truck that I was driving and I decided this is just no way, you know, just waking up in strange places not knowing where you are.

So I bought a travel trailer so that I could hang it on the back of whatever the hell I was driving, and I could wake up and eat. The problem with that was I wasn't always sure where the trailer was. I I tried to stop drinking a few times. It just, well, didn't work worth a damn. I'd say, you know, you're having a problem with your drinking, so don't drink before noon.

But I it with me, it was if I started at noon, I drank as much as if I'd started at 8. In fact, I had a good friend of mine who also worked with hearing impaired people. He was the Episcopal Vicar for the deaf. And when David moved to town, I looked him up and and, we'd teamed up and decided that we kinda combine our ministries. I'd realized later on that he was one of us too, and we figured that the odds were a little better that one of us would be sober so that we could handle the service for both of us.

But I'm in it now. We used to have an altar. Now, of course, now that I'm out of the ministry, I don't mind telling these stories, but I would hope like hell that the deaf people would never tell either bishop what we're up to. He would have one end of the altar and I'd have the other. And he would be he didn't know how to sign very well, so he'd copy my signs and he would do everything that I did in the Episcopal service at the same time I was doing it at the end other end of the altar for the Catholics.

So the episcopals were over here and the Catholics were over here and David and I are up here not realizing both of us about shot in the ass and, trying to get through the service. And we tried to figure it out theologically one time. I said, you know, these services are so confusing and I have a feeling that our Lord doesn't even know how he got here. So he suggested that we tap the communion bread and if it said, Joll or No, it was mine and if it said, Hello, it was his. I didn't realize that David was a problem drinker and we used to have our staff meetings during lunch at a very nice restaurant in town, one that served very good drinks, by the way.

So, I got there at one time and I had a couple of drinks and David had a couple of drinks. Well, we're to meet there the next week and I got there 15 minutes early so I could have a drink. But you know, David showed up before the time and he had a drink. So I had 2, he had 1, then we had some, then we then we both went out to finish off the day. Finally, I got started getting there around 10:30 when they were still getting the chairs down, and David and I decided, screw this.

Why don't we just show up here at noon, drink all we want openly with one another, and just get on with life? Because my tolerance and my need to sustain a buzz was with me all the time. I happen to know that David has, I think, 19 years of sobriety now. He he said to me one day, my wife has a terrible drinking problem. It's me.

So the physical part got to me too. I had worked around drunks for a lot of years. I'd sent great many people to Alcoholics Anonymous. When I was in seminary, I took courses on alcohol studies. Have you know?

Then I overtrained. I was living in the city of Richmond, Virginia at that time, and I stood at the turning point just like all of us have. Every single one of us stood at the turning point, and we asked his protection and care was completely abandoned. Mine happened to me on the first day of November 1977. I've been in Norfolk the day before interpreting for a deaf member of my congregation, and I had driven back to Richmond and had gotten pretty well shot in the butt that night and showed up at my office and opened my mail.

And there was a little newsletter in there that said alcoholism and I opened that up and I said, and put it down. I opened up another one and it said priests and alcoholism And I thought, well, the jig is up, so I read them both. And I made a decision at that point that booze and I had to part. You know, I'd had that thought many times in my drinking career. You're drinking too much.

You're not controlling the amount you're drinking. You're drinking alone. You're drinking at times when it is the worst time to drink. You don't remember that you said you were not going to drink this morning, but you drank anyway. Why the hell did you drink so much?

Those questions have been coming to me for a long time, but I think the god of my understanding allowed me to be in the same room with that intention that day. I believe that happened to you. We are given many opportunities, but the one that matters is the one we grabbed a hold of. And from that day to this, I've not found it necessary to take a drink. I went to I called a priest that was in the program.

He was running a drying out joint at one of the local hospitals, and he must have thought I was writing a paper or something because he made an appointment for the next week. I called another priest that I had known, the guy who gave me the idea of buying the travel trailer so at least I know where the hell I was, and he was on vacation. And the 3rd guy I was called was in fella named Bob who was a nonalcoholic with whom I had lived and he knew how much booze had meant to me and he's been worried about me for a long time, and he put me in touch with my first sponsor. I say that word very, very carefully because I would not be caught sober without a sponsor, somebody to help me. And Jim was the most fantastic human being I ever met.

I made an appointment and went up to talk to Jim and he sat me down and he listened to me and he told me a little of his story and we went to the meeting that night and I picked up all the literature and I I said I think I have a problem with drinking and they said said, you're welcome here at the school's meeting till you figure it out for yourself. And, it was Thursday night and I read that stuff and it just made great sense to me. So the next Monday, Jim was chairing a meeting downtown and I went to that speaker's meeting. And I remember what that guy said. I don't know if you all pass chips and medallions around here, but in my part of the country, in the East Coast, they give them for a variety of colors and for lengths of sobriety.

A white chip was the beginner's chip. And he told this group, he said, oh god. Well, if I could give you a 1 year's medallion worth of experience when I hand you this white chip, I would. But, friend, you gotta get it a day at a time. Is there anybody who wants a white chip?

And I wanted a white chip but I was too proud to get up and go get a white chip. After the meeting, I stole my white chip. And Jim was sitting right across the table and I said, Jim, I'm in. Will you sponsor me? And he came around, he took me in his arms.

That's what sponsors do. He took me in his arms, and he got me so close to him I couldn't get away, and that's what sponsors do. And he laid it out there for me. He said, don't drink. Go to meetings.

More will be revealed. And I didn't drink and I went to meetings and Jim was a fireball. I had just been elected to the priest council of my diocese. I don't know why they did that. Maybe they thought they needed a guy to run the bar or something.

But Jim was on the council, and together, we set up a health panel for drunk priests. And we kicked the door down on 18 of them in my 1st year of sobriety. And I did 12 step work that would stand a hair up on anybody because there are very few people that are harder to crock than a priest. And I I tell you, the clergy just know too damn much, and they are too good to be involved with the likes of us. But we got them anyway.

We would get I remember one guy, the bishop got a letter from the beloved adoring parishioner who says father Joe is a wonderful priest. This is a classmate of mine from seminary. She said, but at the picnic on the 4th July, he got drunk, and we had to carry him to bed. And the next morning, our little boy got up and he came downstairs in tears. And he said the tooth fairy had forgotten him, and we didn't know he'd lost a tooth.

And we found out later that he'd shown father Joe where he'd lost a tooth. And father Joe said, how much do you get for the tooth? And he said, a bunk. And father Joe gave him his upper plate and said put this under your pillow, you'll wake up in the morning a rich man. So the beloved parishioners got Joe's teeth out of hock and carried him up to the church and we followed 2 days later and Joe got sober.

And this happened to me a lot. I was all over the state with that guy. I got right into 12 step work before I'd even taken the 3rd step. Jim was a beloved and patient man with me, but he told me that we'd go to the meetings and we don't drink and we read the big book and more will be revealed. So I read the big book.

I was already not drinking and going to meetings And soon after he said, We don't drink, we go to meetings, we read the big book and we work the steps. And I began to work the steps. And then I finished my 5th step which was a doozy and I was ashamed but Jim put his arms around me and said, buddy, we're in this thing shoulder to shoulder. That's what sponsors do. And soon after that, Jim left town.

And I stayed sober on not drinking, going to meetings, having read the big book once, having worked the steps sort of up to 5, and I stayed sober for 5 and a half years on that. After being sober three and a half, the bishop decided that the dust had settled a bit and named me as a pastor of a small church up in the Shenandoah Valley. And I loved those people, and they loved me. Just absolute love affair at the beginning. I will I have to tell you that I had not changed any of my lifestyle in any other area than drinking, and I paid a hell of a price for that later.

I was in that small parish loving those people and being loved by them and being important, and I stopped going to meetings as regularly. And I darn near got drunk over it. Turns out God takes care of us and we haven't the brains to take care of ourselves. I had to go on retreat that year, and I remember being in church this Saturday afternoon to open it up for the services before and the words of an old hymn came to me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

Melt me. Mold me. Fill me. Use me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

I didn't realize that I stood at another turning point. I went on my retreat and I took this book with me and I took the 12 and 12 and I said to the retreat master, I'd like to rework the steps. And he said, it's your daughter. Go do it. It was a non directed silent retreat.

When I got in that room, I realized I had only worked first the first half of the first five steps. I admitted that I was powerless over alcohol, but I had not admitted that my life was unmanageable. I was still just as undisciplined and as screwed up and as paranoid as I had been from drinking. And with my behavior, I had reason to be. You know, as this priest in a small town, you just you're you're pretty visible.

And there were things that I was up to that I'm not very proud of. The second step, I came to believe that there was a power greater than myself, but I didn't realize that I was insane. I just thought that once I quit drinking, the wonderful guy that Hal and Aggie had raised had just come bobbing to the surface like a cork. I didn't realize that I needed a change of attitude and ideas, that some of my thinking was pretty screwy. I made a decision in step 3, but I never turned my life and my will over.

I'd made an inventory but it wasn't searching and fearless. I had told God and myself everything but I had withheld some of the worst stuff from the human being. And it was during that retreat that I tried to set that straight. And that that poor non alcoholic, Monsignor, got the whole load. He said something to me right then.

He said, Dodge, if you think that Alcoholics Anonymous and those 12 steps were put on this earth so that you could just not drink, then you are a fool. And it still hurts to say that word in that context because he was right. I realized that I also had not worked any of the subsequent 7 steps in this program. No wonder I was a basket case and at that point I got serious about AA. It was a painful time for me, but it saved my life.

From that point on, folks, I took off on AA like somebody stuck a rocket up my ass. I did the hard footwork. I made the amends. I made the list. I wrote them all down.

I put them in my wallet. I carried them. I did my daily meditation. I took my inventory every day to see whether I was right or wrong. I did the things that the book said for Christ's sakes.

And I opened the book up and I began to read this thing as as part of my morning quiet time. And this is a recommendation that I have for any of you. If you got a big book, I suggest you get one that doesn't have the same underline in it, not a mark in the book you're reading for your morning 5 times because you're gonna get distracted by what a genius you were to have underlined that. So get a book that you've never written a thing in and get a bookmark and start out right at the very first, the very, very first thing, the preface. Start right out with that and read a little bit in your morning.

Put the bookmark in and you'll be surprised how quickly you could chase that bookmark front to back in that book. I read the big book, and I'm not bragging when I say this, but I read it about 3 or 4 times a year as a result of doing it in my morning quiet time. I've gotten to the point now I have a little variety of game I play with myself. I read the multilith edition, then I read the first edition, then I read second edition, then I read the 3rd edition. And as a result, it's not real easy to lose me in this book.

And and I discovered that this is the basic text. The next thing that happened with me was I knew that I had to change some things and I didn't know how And I have always had a sponsor, but I really began to use one at this time. And I discovered then that I needed to give it away too, so I got involved in AA work. I had a small home group at that well, a pretty large home group at that time. And I have done everything in that group since stand at the door and shake people's hands to wash the coffee cups and the ashtrays to sweep the floor, then they let me order all the goods from toilet paper to coffee, then they put me in charge of being the secretary, and then they put me in charge of getting the speakers for this meeting.

And I graduated from that to getting all the speakers and being the speaker chairman for the state convention in Virginia 1 year, and I'd I had such a good time with that that, I finally founded my own home group. I founded a new group and I did all that stuff with the new group. And along in the early part of the nineties, I got started getting invited to go talk places. And my attitude was this, I I would never say no to AA if I could possibly say yes. So I've been in a lot of places talking to a lot of people.

And what it's done for me is it's broadened the AA horizons for me. I it all goes back to the Tuesday night study group, though, in Spannan, Virginia where it took us 5 years to get through the big book the first time. And we're in now we're 7 years old, and we're only to page 58 the second time through. Someone says, Jesus Christ, you guys take that. Why it takes so long?