Soberfest 2005 in Jamestown, ND

In my day, I have attracted some real dogs. The glasses helped with that. Sobriety helped a whole lot more. My name is Hollis Dodge. I am an alcoholic.

I am an alcoholic. And I gather it's very important that some people know my sobriety date. It is the 1st November of 1977. I called my wife this morning and she was saying, are you having a good time? I said, I'm having a wonderful time.

These are vibrant, exciting, good looking, Scandinavian, fast talking people. You must listen quickly because it's clear that you have a lot to say. I also found that in my hotel room this weekend, I have cable. Now we took the cable away from our house for a while, but I have, caught up on 4 episodes, 4 unseen episodes of Spongebob this morning. So I'm even more deeply grateful for Last year I spoke in Pennsylvania, and there was a fellow who said that, he sought in AA's literature a phrase or a sentence or an idea from our literature that would become his mantra for the year.

And I thought, man, that is something I've been waiting to hear for a long time. And the one that I chose for 2,005 was this, and it's from the 4th edition story, a late start. Every time I ran into trouble, I ultimately found that I was resisting change. That's my mantra for 2,005, and I make it a part of my quiet time every morning is 2 words that I picked up and it's called, for me at least, it's embrace ambiguity. That means to be ready to change at any time because our lives are predicated on the ability to change.

I believe that alcoholism for me was, in some ways, a desire for me to keep the world in a way that would fit me and that I could fit the world. And if I could get all the seams laid in the right way, that I would be a happy person. But the world never treated me that way. The world insisted upon changing often regularly and never to my liking. And I attribute to some extent the degree to which I experienced alcoholism to that inability to change that rigidity of character, which in my case was a defect.

One thing that changed that for me was Alcoholics Anonymous when I got here. And so what I want to share with you today is experience, strength, and hope. Now one of the things that is super important to me is to recognize that, that I am a steward of time, that the lord of my understanding has given me just so much, and I'm not getting any younger. So I need to use the time I have to the best of my advantage. When I first came into Alcoholics Anonymous, my sponsor was a priest and a very wise and good hearted man, But he told a story to me early in my sobriety, perhaps within weeks, that I've remembered since.

And it's been part of the whole fabric of the way I've looked at alcoholism. And Jim explained alcoholism as a young man who was enjoying his life, but wanted a change of scenery. And so he walked to the river's edge and saw a canoe that was resting quietly on the shore. And he got into the canoe and he pushed off from the from the shore a little bit, and everything changed. He was looking back on scenes in which he had been apart, And he saw them differently because he was surrounded by the warmth and the uncertainty and the slight movement in the current that had changed his life once he pushed off in that canoe.

The current picked him up a bit and he moved downriver very, very gently. And for him, the journey was a pleasure and a joy because he saw things through different eyes. He saw things as he had never seen them before. And as he moved downstream, the current picked up, and it was exciting and fun and exhilarating. In fact, occasionally, he'd get caught in a small eddy, and he'd turn around and the experience was euphoric for him, and he enjoyed it.

And the current kept on and on quicker and quicker and a dip and a twist and a turn and a bump. These things these things were just no consequence at all because the adventure was so great. But then was he got into faster and faster water yet, He began to hold onto the gunnels and hold on more and more tightly, and yet the experience was still so exhilarating and fun that it didn't bother him now that he was no longer in control. And when he looked into the canoe, he realized there was no paddle, no rudder, no way for him to control the course of events. And the water got faster and more turgid, and it was bumpier and rougher and more dangerous.

And finally, at the very distance, he could hear the roar of the falls. Someone on shore saw that man's plight and knew that in that man's ignorance that he was without a tool to save himself. So he ran along the shore, skipped along the rocks, and at the very last moment that he could, threw the man the one tool that would save him and say the falls are around the next bend, safety lies in that direction, work for all your work. And the man plunged in with the desperation of the imminently dying and with superhuman strength and all of the fear, but the tools at his disposal, he slowed his downstream course and began ever so slowly and arduously to move upstream again, back through the turgid water, back through the eddies, back into calm water again. The man from that point on would always be condemned to stay in that river.

And as long as he used those tools, the current would be quiet again and he could once again enjoy the scenery. He could enjoy his life again. He would have a new outlook and a new attitude. Because as long as he kept the paddle in the water and used the tools at his disposal, he could enjoy life as he had never known it before, and explore things in the safety of an enlightened consciousness. And he would never ever go back to the time of naivete and the excitement of those early days of drinking.

Is that familiar to you? It certainly is to me. And I'm grateful for that very first sponsor and all of those sponsors since who have been such an important part of my life. I want to tell you today my experience, which is out of the big book it says tell exactly what happened to you. I want to share the strength of this program, and I do so by stressing the spiritual nature freely, and then to talk about hope, which is outlining a program of action.

Now I'm going to offer from the big book a caveat, which is really an apology, And telling you that, and this is from the big book, page 29, it says, I hope that no one will consider this self revealing account in bad taste. But will by my disclosure be persuaded to say, yes, I must have this thing, and will join me on that broad highway shoulder to shoulder to trudge the road of happy destiny. That's from page 164. A further caveat, anything that bears repeating in my talk today does not reflect my wisdom, but the inherent wisdom that is contained in our 12 steps and 12 traditions, the book Alcoholics Anonymous, and all the rest of the literature with which I hope that you will be inspired to become more, attentive. I just think that, independent thinkers and alcoholics anonymous are in grave danger.

You can usually smell people who are following their own ideas. Let me share with you what my experience says. In the big book, it says this. Henry Ford once made the wise remark to the effect that experience is the thing of supreme value in life. The alcoholic's past thus becomes the principal asset and frequently almost the only one.

That was sure true in in my experience that by the time I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, my experience was about my only asset, and I came to Alcoholics Anonymous to save my asset. I like SpongeBob, but I'm almost more than SpongeBob. I love Harry Potter. I've read the things four times through, and I'm waiting for the next movie. And I'm waiting for volume 7, and then I must put an end to my love affair with Harry Potter except to read all 7 of them 7 or 8 more times.

One of the things that Dumbledore, who was the wise man, the great Gandalf the Grey of the Harry Potter series, he said that, that it is our choices, not our intellect, that measure our character. Now I was an intelligent guy. Guy. I am educated well beyond my ability to earn a living at it. But I made some choices which were abysmally bad.

So it goes to show you that you'd have a lot of education and a lot of knowledge and still not amount to a damn thing, and I certainly proved that. My choices were defective and so was my character. And someone earlier said, you know, that when that we thought we would return to a level of character that we had before we drank, but I drank began drinking early enough so that my character was malformed from a very early age. And although I did some things which were okay as far as they went, they were based on a foundation of sand. I built some good structure on a foundation of sand, and Alcoholics Anonymous has allowed me to go back and to rebuild that foundation.

One thing I'll say about alcoholism in my case is that it is genetic. Now we had a tough time, or I had a tough time, trying to figure out where the genetic link would have been. My father was killed when I was 16. As it turns out, his youngest sister, my aunt, told me in a conversation that we had a few years ago that my father's drinking was a source of great concern to the family. And I never realized that my father was an abusive drinker, perhaps an alcoholic, and and, sort of a candidate for our program, but he died young enough so that he didn't get here.

But there were things about his behavior as I looked back on them that showed an abusive pattern of drinking. Now for those of us who have been raised in a house where there was a lot of drinking, we become accustomed to it. We're just raised to it. So we don't see that this is different than anybody else's drinking. And for most of us, our drinking is something that we drift into and that we kind of it just happens.

If someone said to you when you began drinking, you will one day drink yourself into Alcoholics Anonymous, there isn't one person in this room who at that moment would have said, well, that's okay. We would have said, you're nuts. You know, my drinking is no different than anybody else in our family. Well, that may be the problem. However, I'm not blaming anyone for my drinking.

I'm the one who did every drop of it. Now we did have a grandfather, grandfather Benjamin Biggs, who ran off and left my family just as the stock market crashed and left my grandmother, my mother, and my uncle without parental without his, income. And he got blamed for everything else that was wrong in the family for a couple of generations, So maybe he too was an alcoholic, and and so I got it on both sides of the family then. But I'm the one who's an alcoholic. It is I have I feel that it is a physical ailment.

I also feel, though, that in my experience, the way that it first manifested itself was in the spiritual realm. I'm not just talking at the foot of the cross spirituality. I'm speaking about the ethos of a human being, the whole atmosphere and aura of what it is to be us. That was the way in which alcohol first affected me, and it changed me in subtle, rather gaseous ways that that moved straight through my entire drinking career. I also believe very much that I have a spiritual nature.

I am an ordained minister, though I don't over overdo that. I have a civilian job, and I do a little bit of Sunday preaching. And from the very early time in my life, I believe very much in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But without even realizing what was happening, that when my drinking began to pick up, which was when I was in high school and then when I was in college and then when I was in seminary, that I slowly and surely moved the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob over for the God of Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Johnny Walker. I came from a religious background that did not mind moderate drinking.

Well, I was a moderate drinker, at least by the standards of the people I drank with. We'll get into that a little bit later on. I also see that alcohol affected me mentally. I always looked down, never up. Okay.

This this is where the metal piece of this thing, the puzzle, got to me. In my drinking, as it got worse, I invariably found people who drank worse than I did. Therefore, by comparison with them, I was not as serious a drinker. It did not occur to me to look back into my past to see where I had been 6 months or even a year before. It was always the ability to look down lower than me, and at the end of my career there weren't too many people who were much lower than I was.

Now I did not do everything a lot of times, but I think I've done just about everything at least once. And the only reason that I didn't do it more often is because I just didn't have the Alcoholics Alcoholics Anonymous 28 years ago, I was one of the youngest people in the city of Richmond in the fellowship, and I was 30 at that time. And these fellows would say to me, you cannot possibly be as bad as some of us. You probably haven't why I drank more in, before noon than you drank all day. I spilled more in a day than you drank.

And I remember how angry I became at that, and I remember in desperation saying to the one of them, how much do I need to suffer to qualify for your approbation in this fellowship? I'm not leaving because maybe I'm a wuss, but I have hit the bottom for me. And they figured, well, he's not going away, so we might as well put up with him. And my sponsor says, oh, he had no doubt. He had no doubt.

We were raised the same. We were trained the same, and he saw, he said, you're a lucky man that you got here when you did. And I'll talk about that a little bit more too. I know that in my experience as a as an undergraduate, I I joined a fraternity when I before I went into seminary. I haven't any idea what the name of that fraternity was.

Tappakegade occurs to me. While pledging for the fraternity, I set myself on fire at the big bonfire. They had to throw me in the river to douse me. I drank as often as I could and as much as I could, and it I thought that that was social drinking. And for these guys, it was social drinking.

If you're gonna have a drink, then so shall I. And it worked just fine. The year after that, I decided to enter seminary. As I say, I was a spiritual person. My father having been killed when I was 16, I turned to the church, and the church provided me with a sense of spiritual groundedness, which is it always has in some form or another.

I don't think that I was as well a grounded a churchman, but I believe that the spiritual principles were valid even if I was playing a light and loose with them. I got myself ordained to the ministry, and I was sent to to a very nice church. And by the time I was ordained, I was a full blown alcoholic. I was a 5th day drunk. I might add that I ran into a few other things along the way, which I only speak of parenthetically because I stopped using them, because at the time I was using them, it was a felony to even be in possession of that stuff.

And, you know, it's one thing to find a min a drunken minister. I mean, they're kinda they're easy to find. There's plenty of them around. But to find a guy who's in who was arrested in possession who was also a man of the cloth, now that would make some fairly decent news. And, frankly, that's a career ender.

I went to sent to this very nice church in the west end of the city of Richmond, Virginia, and the people who were there were just great. They loved me. I loved them. And I immediately gravitated to the hard drinkers in this crowd. And there was one family in particular who loved to have me come over because they drank the way I drank, at least during that time.

At the end, they said, we can't keep up with you anymore. So I broadened my friendship to include others and give others an opportunity to watch me throw up in their house. As one particular couple though, I went to their home one evening. It was just before Christmas. And they had, I don't know what we ate.

It didn't matter. They did have a blender that we nearly burned up making some god awful concoction. And by 10 or 11 o'clock at night, I am numb from the jawbone down, and it's time to return to the church. Well, as I left their front door, I looked over and they had this creche scene, this nativity scene on the front porch with the spotlights on, all these little animals. And somehow, they had added this plastic Rhode Island red chicken to the scene.

And I I like chickens very much, so I stole it. Put it on the seat next to me, drove all the way back to the church with the thing on the front seat, talked to it all the way back. Now Cliff was talking about, you know, blackouts. Well, I I didn't have any really exciting blackouts. I met a guy one time who woke up in Denver with, a plane ticket from you know, he had been to England in the last 10 days.

And and he lived in Philadelphia, and he woke up in Denver. Now that's an exciting blackout. Mine was really kind of a wussy blackout, but it's the only one I can come up with right now that I can remember. The next morning, I had the early service at church. So I went into the church and the ladies artillery I mean, auxiliary had decorated the Christmas trees in the sanctuary.

And, oh, they were gorgeous. And I went through the entire communion service, and I'm sitting back after the service is finished and everyone's in meditated prayer at the time looking at the beautiful trees. And I'm looking at this one over on this side. I look at this one, and I get up to the top. And sitting at the very tip top of this tree is that rodan and red chicken.

I had no idea how it got there, but I knew that I knew the chicken. So clear the house, get rid of the chicken, find whatever had been in this place in this instance of an angel of some sort, and think to myself, now how did that happen? I must have let myself in the church after midnight, climbed up on the communion rail, taken off whatever was there, put the chicken up, and then wandered off to bed. Another time, I'm, I've been at another family's home helping them open up their swimming pool in the spring, and they thought that they'd do the rapid it would make a yard party out of it. So they invited all the drunks that we drank with.

They came over, and and they they took we took the lid off the thing, rolled it all up, and hung it over the back fence. And then it was time to get the water purified and do all the pH testing. They had to add some of this and some of this, so we just poured it in the pool. Then we all jumped in and kicked it around, you know, and surprising that anybody's gonads didn't shrivel right up to nothing with this. It was a cold pool, so I'm sure that, you know, if it had been that way, none of us would have known the difference.

So we all got drunk and sober about 3 times that afternoon. You know, we'd drink and drink and drink drink and dive into that freezing cold pool and come around. After I'd done this for a while, I stopped over at another friend's house, and we had 2 or 3 Tom Collins over there. Because now this is what I did. I would divide my social life so that nobody saw all of my drinking at once.

So I I went to another person's house and drank several Tom Collins with them and ended up to the church to realize that I was on for the Saturday evening service. And so I wandered into the back and climbed into my vestments and got both arms and my head stuck at the left sleeve of this thing and nearly fell out the window. They put me at the end of the of the procession and sent me forward, and it's a good thing I was at the back because the rest of them seemed to know where they were going, got up to the front, delivered a marvelous sermon. I thought it was pretty good. I learned something about my sermons in that church when I was telling this story several years later that I ran into a woman who had been a parishioner of mine, and she came up afterward.

And she said, you know, I was in the at the latter stages of my alcoholism while you were assigned to that church, and I I now I understand why your sermons always made so much sense to me. At any rate, it was time for the communion service, and they brought out this this plate and this cup, and I am then to celebrate the Lord's supper. And that's a very spiritual thing. And the things that I'm saying now, please, they don't disparage religion. They disparage the practitioner of religion in this instance.

So I'm not being sacrilegious when I say this. I was just a public disgrace. That's, that's different. It's time for me to enter do the institution narratives with the bread, and you hold it up, and you have a cup and you hold it up, and you're supposed to genuflect, which is like a curtsy behind this altar. It's a solid marble altar, gorgeous thing.

And I knew better than to genuflect to get down behind that altar because if I once got down behind there, it would probably be a while before I got back up again. So I decided on the bow from the waist, and I went over in a flourishing bow and hit the top of my scalp on the edge of that marble altar and split my scalp wide open. Blood is running down into my face. I got the holy linens. I'm patting my head to the holy linens.

You know, there's I'm sure there were several people in the old Padre Pio. You know, they're just it was it was a great and holy moment and everybody in that church is probably thinking, what is wrong with that man? I wasn't married at the time, so, you know, so I didn't have a wife who would say, what an idiot you are? But I had about 400 people that evening who were saying, what is wrong with this guy? Another time, I I did a lot of work with the deaf, with the hearing impaired, and I I signed, I know sign language, and I would offer divine worship for individuals who are deaf in various sort of a mission stations throughout Virginia.

And this one evening, I was at this church and at this small chapel, and at that time, I wore contact lenses. I had no idea. They killed my eyes from the minute I put them in, My eyes always itch. And I'm signing the service, and I hit my eye and knock one of those contact lenses off the center of my eye. And my eye just explodes into a roadmap of blood vessels and snot is coming out of this nostril.

And I'm standing in front of a group group of people and I'm trying to figure out how do I get this contact back in. Well, over on the side was preparing for the communion service was was a very shiny plate on which they had put the communion bread. So I just sort of scooped it up and got it and put the contact lens back in my eye and put everything back down and went on with the service. And I'm thinking those people say, well, that's not in the book of liturgy. I mean, what is this guy up to?

Is he nuts? As a matter of fact. So I I found that these things were happening to me just that really had me questioning my mental well-being. Then the physical part finally got to me. I began to experience something called decreased tolerance.

You know, for many years, I was able to drink, it seemed, with impunity. At least I had an increased tolerance that I could drink a lot more than other people and I could still operate. I would I was the one that would drive my friends home, carry them over my shoulder in their house, throw them on the sofa, take their shoes off, throw the Afghan over, then let myself out. In the last couple of years of drinking, I wasn't sure what was going to happen, whether it was going to be the first drink or 15th that did it. And somewhere in that line, though, I could appear to be the most sober man in the room, and then all of a sudden, I would come down drunk.

And I was also a projectile vomiter. And there, I have episodes vaguely remembered, but others were willing to tell me about them, where we'd be walking down the street and I would heave, and I would just simply, whoop. And it would I never got any on me but I God help anybody who was within range. We were in a hotel in New York City one weekend having a wonderful time, and I decided the time And so I made it to the window threw the window up there out the window and also went my upper plate out the window. So so I went downstairs and found it.

I'll tell you what right now. I put it in my pocket until I could get some place with a little bit of brasso in order to clean it up. These things, you know, this is not cool. I'm an educated man scion of the church. You're not heaving your teeth out a 15 story window.

I went on a convention to Omaha one time and I decided Coors was not popular in this in the East Coast yet. You had to cross the, I guess, the Missouri in order to get any of it. And I was in Omaha, Nebraska, so I went across to Kansas and got all I could hold and carried it across the line and ice down the bathtub for guests who might come in. And I drank the whole damn thing myself, all of it. Then I'm you know, and I I used it down in the tub, and and so I'm showering ankle deep in ice water.

And and I was supposed to be making a presentation that afternoon. I managed to get both contacts in the same eye, and so I'm like, this is. I knew my drinking was getting a little out of hand. So and I knew a priest who had gone to Alcoholics Anonymous, and we were kinda celebrating a marriage or a a a funeral that one day. And so I'm riding with all the same, depends on your point of view.

Driving to the funeral and I said to him, John, when did you realize you had a problem with drinking? He said, well, he said he was from Germany. He said, well, he said, I was trying to control my drinking, and, I thought I would keep my mind occupied and not drink. So I bought a travel trailer, and I I was going to go see the country. And I parked the parked the trailer in the KOA, and I bought a case of booze and never left the trailer all week.

The next week, I bought my first travel trailer because I was sick and tired of waking up in places that I didn't know where I was. So I thought if I took my trailer, I could go to sleep in the trailer, but did not that did not solve the problem sometimes of where the trailer was. And I would have people knock on the door, and I would come to and say, come in. And a perfect or a good friend who lived in a distant part of the state would come in and say, hi. And I'd say, what are you doing here?

He said, that's the question I was about to ask you. I had driven to this man's church parking lot. I had a key to the place, and there was plenty of guest rooms. I let myself in, unplugged the secretary's typewriter, strung my electric cord through her typewriter and out the window and across the parking lot to my trailer, sat in the trailer and finished the job that I had started earlier that day. And I had no idea why I'd even gone to that end of the state.

No idea. And so I was beginning to worry about things. I was waking up in places I wasn't even tired, and I was not always alone. And that wasn't cool either. I must admit though that I learned a good deal about human sexuality in those episodes.

I've heard of I've heard of heterosexuals. Those are people who like their own sex or their, the other sex. There are homosexuals. Trisexual. If it was sexual, I was likely to try it.

I had one rule, I had one rule, You had to fit the bed. So drinking was for me quite a worldwide event. Well, I I don't know. You know, some people got a closet so big there's a chandelier in it. So I think I had a drinking problem.

I certainly had problems while I was drinking. And for me, that was one of the definitions of being an alcoholic was that I didn't get into trouble every time I drank. But by God, every time I got into trouble, I'd been drinking. And I was no longer in control of that. I wasn't sure what was going to happen and people began to ask me to leave the home quickly.

Let me talk to you about what happened. This is where the strength comes in. We stood at the turning point, it says says in the big book, and I stood at the turning point on Halloween night of 1977. I had been down in Norfolk, Virginia interpreting in court for a deaf woman who had been involved in an auto accident, and I had taken one of my drinking pals along, and we drank all the way back up to Richmond. My travel trailer was now parked in their backyard because I was really not welcome in the parsonage or any place where I had been welcomed before.

So I just sort of hung out at their place, and I had strung that electric cord into their workshop. And I was pretty much hanging out in that trailer. And I stayed with them that evening, and I climbed into bed, and I woke up the next morning, and I shaved at the at the kitchen sink in that trailer. I drove to my office, and I said to myself as I'd said so often before, Dodge, you are alcoholic. Don't drink today.

And every day for the previous 2 years that I had said that, long about noon, that feeling would come right about here, and it would begin to scratch from the inside, want either to get out or to get something in. And the minute I poured booze on it, it went away, and the world was okay for me again. But that particular Monday morning or that particular I think it was a Thursday morning, 1st November, 1977, I woke up and I asked myself that same question, what are you going to do about your drinking? God, please help me. And as I went to my office that day, there were 2 pieces of mail on my desk, one of them a religious news note that's had written across the top of it, alcoholism.

And I opened it up and it talked about a clergyman or a a housewife who could not stop drinking beer. And I put it down because I'm not a housewife. The next one was a drying out joint for the clergy, and this one really rang home. And I still have those two pieces of literature at my house. Those were for me when the light of my confusion just got clear enough so that I could see the truth and the truth saw me.

And I knew that I needed to do something right then. And you have had that very same experience if you were enjoying sobriety today. You too stood at that turning point, and you gave it up with complete abandon though you didn't know it at the time, neither did I. I went around the corner to talk to this German priest who had bought the travel trailer. He worked for the drug and alcohol services in our community.

He was not there. I picked up the little twelve steps in 12 traditions I am responsible, fold your own wallet stuffer. And I went back to my office and read that thing through. Then I made another telephone call to a priest I knew who ran a drying out joint in that town, and he must have thought that I was doing some research on something because he made an appointment for the next week. The third person I called was a man with whom I had lived when I was in the seminary, and he knew I had a drinking problem.

And he invited me around, and I said to him, Bob, it is alcoholism. I'm alcoholic. And he then made a phone call to Jim, my very first sponsor in AA. From the day that I made that decision to this, I have not had a drink. I am what they call a first nighter.

That is no thanks to me. I am what they call a first nighter. That is no thanks to me. I just did all of my relapsing before I walked through the doors of AA. When I got to AA, I was done because I knew something about AA, and I knew the people who came here were pretty serious about this not drinking business.

And I knew that I couldn't fool the drunks with any shilly shallying about sip and see methods of getting sober. So I had to have my mind pretty well cleared up, and at this point, the truth had come home to live with me. Well, my first sponsor was Jim, and he taught me about the power of we, not the power of me. He said we go to meetings in Alcoholics Anonymous, and he took me to my first one. And I picked up all that literature and among them was that questionnaire, is AA for you?

There are several questions there and I answered about half of them yes. I took that test last year, and I answered yes to all but one of them. And I thought, well, have I passed or have I failed? And I read the instructions, and if you answered yes to more than 2 or 3, you probably were alcoholic. And I said, well, I'm sick of this.

So I'll act like these people act, and I'll do what these people do, and maybe I'll get what these people seem to have. Jim also put me into the big book. He said, this is a basic text of our organization. He said, you have read texts all your life. This is the one, I think, that will make the big difference to you, and it has.

He also showed me the steps, and I under to the extent to which I was able to take them then, I did take them. And he also said this is a spiritual program. Don't back away from the spiritual angle. And I I know for in my experience of of the of the whole business of spirituality and Alcoholics Anonymous, some people say, oh, we mustn't talk about God. We mustn't talk about God.

Well, I'm sorry. I do. I'm very much a believer that this higher power saved me. This is what, on page 263, Earl Treat when he was with Doctor. Bob in Akron.

He's doctor Bob says this to him. Doctor Bob led me through all these steps, and at the moral inventory, he brought up several of my bad personality traits or character defects such as selfishness, conceit, jealousy, carelessness, intolerance, ill temper, sarcasm, resentments. We went over these at great length, and finally, he asked me if I wanted these defects of character removed. And I when I said yes, we both knelt at his desk and prayed, each of us asking to have these defects taken away. I don't know how we can get, very far from the spiritual part of this program when the book is filled with stuff like this.

I think we have somehow or another to find that higher power and how that higher power is going to work in our individual lives. I that spiritual angle to me has meant the world, and I never back away from it with people that I work with. I'm not asking that they join any church. I I in fact, I think probably most of them aren't ready to go to any church because there's two reasons why. The Church would never understand some of the stories we have to tell them.

The second thing is is that we invariably compare our our insides to other people's outsides. And when we go to church and we see people all dressed up acting in a special kind of a liturgical way, if you will, we always come out on the short end of that stick. And we think those people are better than I am. I can never live up to that, and that creates some despair. Or we think we can get spirituality on the cheap, and if we go to church 1 hour on Sunday, then we can raise hell the rest of the week, and we'll be just fine.

But it doesn't work that way. That's why Alcoholics Anonymous concentrates on churches, yes, but their basements. That's what we concentrate on. Someone once said that alcoholism is a disease of religious people that is treated in church basements, and I believe that there's a lot to be said for that. One of the things that I think is so important about the strength that I have received from Alcoholics Anonymous was given to me by my second sponsor, a guy named Dick Toney, who said that you must have a quiet time.

I had been theologically trained. I had known all about public prayer. But frankly, in the rush to be a drinking man, I had sort of put private spirituality away, but I left the public spirituality. And old Dick Toney, who was a shoe salesman, is the one who returned the sense of a private personal spirituality back into my life. He spoke a lot about the morning quiet time, which is an Oxford group principle.

It was given to us by people that were that were in the first generation of members of Alcoholics Anonymous was a sense of spirituality, something about that sense of being on the feeling the inner light, if you will, rather than responding to the external heat. And that's one of the things that I believe will work to help us to move along the way. We've had a morning quiet time in my home. I have for ever since I've been in Alcoholics Anonymous, and those moments I think are probably the best that I spend in any day. I want to talk to you a bit about the hope.

You know, I recovered absolutely in reverse of the way I got the illness. First, it manifested itself spiritually, then mentally, then physically. And it worked, and I got undrunk exactly backward from the way I got drunk. First of all, I got sober physically. If you do not drink, you will not get drunk.

Duh. It never occurred to me. If I don't take the first drink, then I'm not gonna take the 10th or 15th drink. If I don't take the first drink, I'm not going to get drunk from alcohol. I had withdrawal symptoms, though.

I didn't have DTs or the shakes or the hallucinations or seeing the bugs running up and down the walls, but I felt a sense of internal flutters that existed with me for the longest time. I was also, I loved beer for two reasons. One, it was more socially acceptable in some circles. 2, it didn't work on me quite as quickly as whiskey. And 3, it was cheap.

So I drank a lot of beer, and part of my withdrawal was that I was constantly thirsty for about 6 months after I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I I also remember the first day that I felt good, and it was 6 months into the my into my experience with sobriety. World looked good, and I knew I was gonna be alright. That was the first day that I had felt good and in years, and the reason that it was so important to me because it was the first day. So if you're in those first sort of struggling period of alcoholics, anonymous life, hang in there.

Don't leave just 10 minutes before the miracle occurs. I also experienced a sense of spiritual renewal or mental renewal when I began to wake up and accept responsibility for my actions, and working the steps was a big help in that. And then there was the spiritual renewal. Now we hit many crossroads in our spiritual lives. We stand at the turning point several times.

5 years out, I'd made a retreat. And during that retreat, I asked our heavenly father to please renew me inside, to make me into a new human being, a better human being. And I've very soon after that, I worked the steps again with the sponsor and I experienced a new zeal for Alcoholics Anonymous and being a part of it. I also realized that my life needed to change and I knew that at that point, if I didn't change, that I might return to drinking because the man who does not change is likely to remain the man he always was. That was my observation and experience.

And the people I saw who were getting on with AA were people who were willing to change and even look forward to it. At that point, I left the church in which I was then an, a member and a minister. I took a job in a treatment center with, and I must have heard, 5 105th steps in the next several years. It was quite an experience for me because I had left something that was very secure and predictable. And I moved into an area where I needed some more clinical education, so I went back to school and got that clinical education.