Latest / Sober Readings / Deep Down Within Us
Transcript
- Scott Hayes: Hello everyone, welcome to Silver Readings. My name is Scott. Today is Wednesday, June seventeenth. Let's begin today's episode with the Serenity Prayer. God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. From daily reflections, deep down within us. We found the great reality deep down within us. In the last analysis it is only there that he may be found. Search diligently within yourself. With this attitude you cannot fail. The consciousness of your belief is sure to come to you. And that is in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous page fifty five. It was out of the depths of loneliness, depression, and despair that I sought the help of AA. As I recovered and began to face the emptiness and ruin of my life, I began to open myself to the possibility of the healing that recovery offers through the AA program. By coming to meetings, staying sober, and taking the steps, I had the opportunity to listen with increasing attentiveness to the depths of my soul. Daily I waited. In hope and gratitude for that sure belief and steadfast love I had longed for in my life. In this process I met my God, as I understand him. From twenty four hours, june seventeen, AA thought for the day. We in AA have the privilege of living two lives in one lifetime. One life of drunkenness, failure, and defeat. Then, through AA, another life of sobriety, peace of mind, and usefulness. We who have recovered our sobriety are modern miracles, and we're living on borrowed time. Some of us might have been dead long ago, but we have been given another chance to live. Do I owe a debt of gratitude to AA that I can never repay as long as I live? The Meditation for the Day Thinking about God in love and worship drives away evil. It is the thought before which the hosts of evil flee. The thought of a power greater than yourself is the call for a lifeline to rescue you from temptation. The thought of God banishes loneliness and dispels gloom. It summons help to conquer your faults. Think of God as often as possible. Use the thought prayerfully and purposefully. It will carry your thoughts away from material things and toward the spiritual things that make life worthwhile. The prayer for the day. I pray that I may think of God often. I pray that I may rest in peace at the thought of his love and care. The daily meditation from touchstones. The loneliness each man feels is his hunger for life itself. It is the yearning that makes fulfillment possible. Ross Mooney. Many different journeys have been taken by the men who finally entered this program in search of hope. Most of us have known our own brand of desperation, but we have one thing in common the loneliness we felt. Some of us felt left out of our families and other groups. We were appalled by what was happening in our lives, alone with our secrets, as if no one truly knew us. Some of us even romanticized our loneliness as a form of heroism. As we gave up our controlling behaviors, false pride and Over competitiveness and striving for power, we made our weak spots and secrets more obvious. We became more accessible to friends. As we count the blessings of recovery, high on our list is that we are no longer lonely. In part, what kept me going and led me to this program was my hunger for life. I am grateful for the friends who truly know me now and still accept me. And for today's final reading, we're heading back to AA Comes of Age, Chapter Two. So chapter two is The Three Legacies of Alcoholics Anonymous. And this ⁓ speech that was given by Bill W is titled Recovery, the First Legacy. And when we last left off, Dr. Bob was talking with Bill W. And he was giving him some advice as to how he should talk to new drunks. So we'll pick it up from there. Now, talking with doctor Bob, I remembered all that doctor Silkworth had said. So I went very slowly on the fireworks of religious experience. I just talked away about my own case until he got a good identification with me, until he began to say, Yes, that's me, I'm like that. In turn, doctor Bob talked to me about himself as he had never talked before. He too was a Vermonter. His father had been a stern, full. but deeply respected judge in St. Johnsbury. Also, as in my case, Dr. Bob's drinking proclivities had shown up early. In fact, he had busted out of Dartmouth College for this reason. Somehow he had wormed his way through medical school and internship in Chicago. Despite his drinking, he had shown a talented flair for surgery. After his marriage to Anne, they had settled in Akron, where in due course young Bob was born, And a daughter, Sister Sue, was adopted. Dr. Bob at the time of our first meeting was fifty-five, some fifteen years older than I. He must have had an iron constitution. He said that all through the years his drinking had been practically continuous. When he got too jittery to operate or to see patients, he sedated himself heavily. When this recourse sometimes failed, he would steal away for a week or so. To a drying out place so that he could start the same cycle all over again. In those rare moments, when he got thoroughly sober, the insatiable craving for alcohol never let up. This was a physical phenomenon which bedeviled even his first years in AA, a time when only days and nights of carrying the message to other alcoholics could cause him to forget about it. Although this craving was hard to withstand, It doubtless created some part of the intense incentive and energy that went into forming Akron's group number one. Bob's spiritual release did not come easily. It was to be painfully slow. It always entailed the hardest kind of work and the sharpest vigilance, yet he seemed to have no serious neurotic difficulties. As he often put it, I just loved my grog. By the time I met him, this compelling love had almost done him in. His surgical skill was still recognized, but few colleagues or patients dared to trust him. He had lost his post on the staff of Akron's City Hospital and barely existed through a precarious and dwindling general practice. In debt up to his ears, he was only one jump ahead of the sheriff and his mortgage payments. Anne verged on a nervous crack up, and their two children, of course, were greatly upset. Such was the payoff of twenty-five years of alcoholism. Hope was a word they had come to avoid. In our first conversation, I bore down heavily on the medical hopelessness of Dr. Bob's case, freely using Dr. Silkworth's words describing the alcoholic's dilemma, the obsession plus allergy theme. Though Bob was a doctor, this was news to him, bad news. Always better versed in spiritual matters than I. He had paid little attention to that aspect of my story. Even though he could not make them work, he already knew what the spiritual answers were. What really did hit him hard was the medical business, the verdict of inevitable annihilation. And the fact that I was an alcoholic and knew what I was talking about from personal experience made the blow a shattering one. In Dr. Bob's story, as afterwards written for the AA book, And years later in his full length talk at Detroit, he made this point very clear. It was not any spiritual teaching of mine, rather it was those twin ogres of madness and death, the allergy plus the obsession that triggered him into a new life. It was doctor Silkworth's idea, confirmed by William James, that struck him at great depth. You see, our talk was a completely mutual thing. I had quit preaching. I knew that I needed this alcoholic as much as he needed me. This was it. And this mutual give and take is at the very heart of all of AA's 12-step work today. This was how to carry the message. The final missing link was located right there in my first talk with Dr. Bob. And I'll stop right there for today in that story. I'll pick it up again in another couple of days. I hope you guys are really enjoying this story. I know that I am. So with that, I'll end today's episode of Sober Readings. I really hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, do me a huge favor and hit that like button and share this episode. And if you'd like to be a guest reader on the show, I would love to have you. You can help me read stories, you can pick out a reading of your own, and we can read together and then discuss. So it's very simple. Send me an email at sober readings with Scott at gmail.com and let's talk about sobriety. If you'd like to drop a dollar in the virtual donation basket for today's readings, just go to soberreadings.com and click the donate button. So thank you so much for listening, everyone. Stay sober, keep reading, and I'll see you in the next episode. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other, and remember, just for today, don't drink, go to a meeting, and keep coming back. Have a great day. And as my friend Larry says, best day ever.