Brother Alexis - AA Speakers - Serenity, Acceptance, and Change in Alcoholism Recovery - THE M2 THE ROCK SHOW - Michael Molthan

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Lovely ladies, handsome gentlemen, good morning. You know, when you
address a group at this time of the day, and
most especially, it seems to me on Saturday, the audience
looks like a posse. But here we have nothing but
smiling faces, for which I am extremely grateful, my brothers

(00:33):
and sisters, by the grace of God and his gift
to me the Blessed Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, I am
this morning a very grateful recovering alcoholic. My name is Alexis. Hi. Everybody.
There's a story told about the fella who came out

(00:55):
of the grave on Judgment Day. Gabriel's fund at his horn,
and he came forth, and as he did, he glanced around,
and he read the stone, and on the stone it
said loving son, faithful husband, devoted father. Hell. He said,
I've been laying in the wrong hole. That is a

(01:28):
little bit like the way I feel. After listening to Dusty,
I hardly recognized myself. I think all of us are
nervous when we speak. Someone once said, it's just God
trying to shake the truth out of you. But I

(01:50):
think that we all are a little nervous. But if
there is any place where nervousness is not called for,
has no place at all, or Alan Honor Ala team.
It's in our fellowship. The most affirming people on the
face of God's earth are the people in our fellowship.
When was the last time you went to a meeting

(02:12):
and the leader said I got two lousy speakers for you,
or even said I got one lousy speaker and one
good speaker. Everybody in the fellowship is a great speaker.

(02:37):
Reminds me of the guy who cruised the cemetery and
he read all the epitaphs. Then he asked his friend.
He said, where the hell are they buried the sinners?
So I guess to a certain degree, you wonder where
they bury the bum Aa speaker. It is a great

(03:04):
privilege for me to come here this morning. I have
a priest friend that I live with, except I left
home early enough this morning that he wasn't up and around.
But every time he sees me go out with my collard,
he says the same thing. Oh my god, he says,
you're going out into the whole world. You're a drunk again.

(03:33):
I think it's important to set a pattern so you
know where I am coming from. I'm not going to
boast about my drinking. Sometimes you go to an AA meeting,
it is kind of can you top this? You know?
The first speaker says he drank a fifth. The other
guy says he drank two FIFTHSI so that is not

(03:53):
in a boastful way that I am sharing with you.
The reason I am here today is for myself, primarily
to keep me sober. That's why I go to meetings.
I've long long ago come to the conclusion that other
people simply do not understand why I continue to go

(04:14):
to meetings. You don't drink anymore. Some of them forgot
that I drank at all. Others never saw me drink,
and for them it's a mystery. Why do you keep
going to these meetings. I share with you why I
am here this morning, and why I continue to go
to these meetings. I think that's important for us. The

(04:35):
highest faculties that God has given to us is our
intellect and our free will, and I think that wherever possible,
we should use those. It's not sufficient, in my judgment,
simply to say if you don't go to meetings you
get drunk. Then someone says why, and you say, I
don't know. That's just the way it is. There is

(04:57):
a reason, and there is a reason, as I say, why,
I come here to share with you my experience, my
strength and my hope. You know, even the most joyous
events in our lives, weddings, first communions, bar mitzvah, whatever
it might be, we try to preserve that joy. We

(05:21):
use photographs, match books, you know, Mary and Jack on it,
swizzle sticks. We do everything we can to preserve that
great moment of happiness, whatever it might have been. But
you and I know that with the passage of time,
even the happiest memories, the ones we are struggling to preserve,

(05:45):
slip away from us. Pinney, we don't remember who was
at the wedding reception, and it wasn't because we were drinking.
We just don't remember. Time. Time takes its toll. Gladis
Knight and the Pips had a hit records years ago,
called the Way We Were, and they said, it's the

(06:06):
laughter we'll remember whenever we remember the way we were.
Things too painful to remember, we simply chose to forget.
Then they asked themselves, has time rewritten every line? You know,
God has built into each one of us a forgetter?
And that's a marvelous thing. That is a gift. It's

(06:29):
a gift. If you or I could recall on a
moment's notice the tragedies in our lives, we would be
overwhelmed by them. We have all experienced physical pain, yet
with all the effort that we make, we can't recall that.
We know that it was unpleasant, it was not good,
but we can't recall the pain. That's God's goodness. That's

(06:51):
a healing, the death of a husband or a wife,
a child, a parent. When we're going through this, we say,
I will never get over this. Life is at an
end for me now. But we know with the passage
of time the healing takes place. And as I say,
this is a marvelous gift for everybody except those of

(07:13):
us who are alkis the minute we forget the reality
of our drinking, then we are in very very serious trouble,
very serious trouble. And so I keep coming to the meetings,
and I keep speaking, and I keep sharing in a
conscious effort to keep alive the reality of my drinking.

(07:34):
She left to my own devices. My drinking could be
a Manhattan on Christmas Eve, nothing bad happened, So a
warm glow, if you will with my confreres, that is
not the reality of my drinking. My drinking is coming

(07:55):
up New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, three o'clock in
the morning on all four and I've already lost the automobile.
A taxi driver makes a U turn and he picks
me up. He takes me home. I always liked to

(08:16):
add he was a little surprised at where I lived.
But that is the reality of my drinking, and that
is what I have to keep alive. And so this
morning I want to share with you my experience, my strength,
and my hope. I want to tell you a little
bit about what I was like, what happened, what I'm

(08:40):
like now, that's what I'm supposed to do. And in
doing that, as I say, I help myself. If there's
anybody out there who is new, particularly AA, for God's sake,
don't compare yourself. Don't compare yourself. The only thing that
all of us in AA have in common is trouble.

(09:03):
We all drank differently, different amounts, different kinds of booze,
and for different lengths of time. I am what a
priest friend of mine calls a late bloomer and an
early fader, forty years old, seventeen years in religion before

(09:26):
I picked up that drink, and my career like a
star across the heavens. Seven years it lasted, and I
was as totally and as completely wiped out as if
i'd been drinking for forty seven years. So you don't
want to compare yourself. That's not important. That's not important. Identify.

(09:48):
Identify maybe with some of the things that I will
share with you. The other thing, which I believe is
a great waste of time, a great waste of time,
is trying to figure out why I drank. As my
sponsor said to me one time, and I presented this
to him, I was hoping he would tell me it
was somebody else's fault. I don't know, he said. When

(10:12):
you find a man on the back of a Bengal tiger,
he's holding on for dear life, but he's losing his
grip and he knows that when he falls off, he's
gonna get eaten by that tiger. Said, you don't ask
him how did you get there? You do what you

(10:35):
can to help him. You do what you can, he said,
Supposing I tell you you drank because your mother wore
army shoes in the kitchen. Now you know why you drank.
Do you think you can drink safely? Now let me
tell you, he said, you can't. I'm reminded of a

(10:57):
priest little parish in Virginia. He had a fellow in
his parish who had a problem, a drinking problem. The
wife had come to see father many times, and father
got ahold of this guy, Mike Is by name, and
talked to Mike. They never made any inroads at all. Never.

(11:18):
Mike was always very repentant as we alties know how
to be, and he was gonna do. He never did
any different, never did any different. Party used to get
very annoyed with him. One day he's walking down the
street and who's coming at him but Mike, you know,
weaving from side to side. And he straightens up and
he says to him, father, I want to ask you something.

(11:39):
He said, What is it? He said, what causes shingles?
And the priest thought, I'll get him now, I'll scare
the hell out of him. He said, shingles. I'll tell
you what causes shingles, drinking, sexual excess, raisin as sloop rang.

(12:00):
I'm doing. That's what causes shingles. Why do you ask,
he said, Well, he said, I just read in the
paper where the bishop's got a bad case of shingles.

(12:26):
He said, I't waste your time trying to find out
why you drank. Again, for the sake of those who
can identify, let me share with you on my backgrounds.
First of all, I think I was born with glasses,
you know, as a kid, I remember my mother putting

(12:46):
me out the door and give me a pat on
the tush and say, don't break your glasses. You know,
don't break your glasses. I always felt outside, always felt
outside of things to begin with. I hated sport, hated sports,
and I found it very difficult to fit in with
the kids on the box. I was always a shy person,

(13:07):
always had feelings of inadequacy, always felt that everybody else
had it together. Hell, I was forty seven when I
came to the program, and I thought everybody had it
all together except me. And then my job was not
to let you find out I don't have it all together.
But as I say in my youth, that was the
way I was. I was extremely shy. God as I

(13:29):
understand him, God as he was presented to me by
my parents and by my church, and God as I
found him, was always a very personal, very loving God.
I have always had a real, a genuine relationship with God.
Now sometimes it's been pretty lousy, but it's been a
real relationship, a real relationship. And so in my youth

(13:53):
I felt a need or a desire to come closer
to God. And being a Catholic, the obvious route was
priesthood or religious life, something of that nature, and that's
what I thought I was going to do. World War
II came along and that idea went to the back
of my head, and instead I went into the Service.

(14:14):
I spent almost six years, five years, nine months and
ten days, remember it well, in the service. Loved every
minute of it. Booze was not a problem, it was
not part of my life, was no problem whatsoever. I
was in the Navy, as I say, over five years
when I again felt this call from God to come closer,

(14:38):
and so I left the Navy and I entered my
religious community. That was in February of nineteen fifty. It's
important that I stressed to you that in the next
seventeen years I developed an intimate, personal, deep, loving relationship

(15:00):
with God. It was the natural consequence of the life
that I was living. You know, in those days we
prayed together seven times a day publicly in addition to
our private prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, all of these things
that contributed to my becoming a good and a decent man. Now,

(15:25):
that is not pride. Humility does not consist in denying
what we are, but rather in attributing to God, the
source of all good, that which is good in us.
For those of you who are sober alcoholics today, to
deny that sobriety would be nonsense. To take credit for
it would be greater nonsense, but to deny it would

(15:47):
be nonsense. And so we cannot say that in humility
we deny the truth. Humility is truth. And I say
to you that I became a good and a decent
man consecrated to God. You love your husband, you love
your wife or your children. My relationship with God was

(16:08):
not unlike that. As I stand here before you, I
share that with you. God was very real to me.
And it's important that you understand that because I want
to show you where alcoholism brought me in the end.
But that was the relationship, you know, at that time
in the Catholic Church, religious life was very, very structured.

(16:31):
You know, we all get up at the same time.
We like, you know, cookies pressed out of with the
cookie press. We're all the same. We dressed the same,
we talked the same, we looked the same, we prayed
the same, everything the same. Someone was always at the
top making all the decisions. You know, we will get
up at six o'clock tomorrow. I mean, we used to
get up at five point thirty. And when the Precious

(16:52):
always he's always complaining about him. He said, hell, he said,
the sinners aren't going to get up until ten. What
the hell are we going to do for four and
a half hours. All of these things were decided for us.
You know, looking back on it now, I see that

(17:14):
my mother and father took care of me until I
was about eighteen, and the Navy took care real I
was about twenty three, and then my religious community took
care of me til I was about forty, always making
decisions for me. Well after Vatican Two, that all ended.
Everyone was kind of on their own. I got a
resentment against fat little Pope John figure. He's the one

(17:36):
who screwed up my whole life. Say, you gotta blame somebody, right,
I didn't have a wife at hand, and so the
structure was taken out of religious life. One of the
things that happened was juridical I could now hold office

(17:58):
in my religious community. Before because of juridical legislation wasn't possible,
But now I could. They offered me the job. Whant
I tell you what the job was, you'll I'll ask
you a question about where did he get the money
to drink? See? They made me treasure of general of
the whole order. Now I became a good and a

(18:25):
decent man, but I didn't become perfect. And while I
had misgivings apprehensions about this taking on this job, I
thought I can handle it. I can handle it, and
so I said, yes, I accept. You know, the minute
I accepted, fears that I had not experienced since I

(18:45):
was a child, fears, the fear of making a mistake,
just descended on me. I was powerless, I was paralyzed.
I couldn't do anything. I couldn't make any decisions, couldn't
do anything. In the beginning. I like to think of
it in terms of the early months of my administration.

(19:07):
I would say such things as let us reflect upon this.
To act in haste is to repent in leisure, and
everyone nodded, you know, a guru. That's what I was,
a guru. So well, after about six months, those cats

(19:29):
wanted a little action. You know, I just was totally
incapable of doing anything, just paroid. I was afraid to
make a mistake. See one night, I'm trying to condense
this whole thing, But one night I went out to
dinner with some business associates. I remember in that crowd
was a lawyer and a real estate man, some others.

(19:52):
I don't remember what it was. Now. I don't want
you to think that I was perfectly naive that I
didn't know anything about booze. Obviously I knew about it.
I didn't drink, primarily because I just didn't think that
it was in keeping with my lifestyle. But that night,
the waitress came and she said to the guy sitting
next to me, would you have something? And he said

(20:13):
he would have a Manhattan And then she asked me,
what would you have? And I wanted to be just
as you know, sophisticated, I said, I think I'll have
the same. She blew my mind. When she said straight
up around the rocks, I said, I'll have it the
way he's having it there. I want you to know

(20:34):
that my life has not been the same since. Were
it not for that Manhattan, I wouldn't be here with
you today. I took that drink and it went down,
and I felt warm, and I felt comfortable, and I
knew the whole world loves me, and I love the

(20:57):
whole world, and everything is going to be our right.
And that night I made some decisions that up to
that point I was incapable of doing. I made some
decisions and I thought to himself, oh my gosh, we'd
have been heightened this stuff. This is marvelous. This is
the answer to all my prayers. This is the solution

(21:19):
to all my problems. It was in a very short
time to become my greatest problems. The Big Book of
Alcoholics Anonymous tells us that booze is cunning, and it's
baffling and as powerful. It didn't kick me in the
teeth the first time, No, the first ten times. All
this time I think that I'm using it. I'm using it,
But it did. It gave me a certain freedom, not

(21:41):
the kind of freedom that I have gotten from the
program of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it gave me a certain
amount of freedom. I made decisions and I did things.
The progression of the disease of alcoholism is totally imperceptible
to the sufferer. He doesn't see it at all. But
as your fingernails are grown and the hair on your

(22:03):
head is growing, the progression is there and you look
at it and you don't see it. Same as I
look at my fingernails today and look at him again,
the marre, they're looking in a different But it began
to get more and more cunning. I was drinking mostly
in the evenings. Now I found out I still have

(22:24):
to go to meetings at you know, nine o'clock in
the morning. And at those meetings, at those council meetings,
my palms are perspiring and there is a quiver in
my voice. And I know that they hear that, they
can detect that, and they're saying, he's not certain, he's
not sure of himself. And so I thought, how about
a little bourbon and a little ginger ale and a
little listerine, you know, and who's going to be the wisest.

(22:47):
And I did it, and it worked, and it was beautiful.
When I would leave those meetings, they knew what had
been laid on them by an expert. That relationship with God,
it began to deteriorate. Now certainly not because I was drinking.

(23:07):
I just am busy now about a lot of things.
I just don't have time to pray, and I just
don't have time for spiritual readingcy I am now a
big executive, a big drinking executive. Say well, of course
I didn't see that, and so that relationship began to
deteriorate because I say, it too was imperceptible to me.

(23:32):
To me, you know, I lived at that time with
maybe forty men who, for the love of God, loved me,
and I loved them for the same reason. They would
never knowingly or deliberately cause me any pain or anxiety
or anything that they will do. Were marvelous men, and
I love them. When one day one of them said

(23:52):
to me, don't you think you drink too much? Instant hate.
I made a list, a mental list, really two lists,
those in front of whom I would continue to drink
and those in front of whom I would not drink.

(24:13):
I'll be damned if I can't had a drink in
my own house in comfort. Then I just won't drink
in front of you. Pretty soon only had one list.
Everybody was on my case. Sky. I remember one time
a guy said to me, what do you got in
that glass? I said, bourbon and ginger ale. Always said,

(24:34):
can't be much ginger ale. That's brown support a green
glass up. At this point, I was experiencing the routine
problems of the problem drinking, you know, sick in the

(24:55):
morning and hung over, and gagging when you try to
brush your teeth. But these, the these were nothing compared
to what I was about to experience. See, because I
took that attitude, got an attitude about people talking to
me about my drinking, and so I said. Whether I
said it specifically, I don't know, but this was the

(25:15):
attitude of tooth. I won't drink in front of you.
The hell with you. I'll go out and so us one.
The area between the University of Maryland and Tagg's Restaurant
in Laurel became my area of operation. And downtown at
ninth and about f for g Streets. Somebody's looking for me.

(25:40):
That was another area of my operation. I didn't I
knew I wasn't going to meet anybody there who knew me,
and so I would drink there. Let me tell you,
I shouldn't have had any difficulty whatsoever with the second step. Huh,
but the sanity part of it. But I did. The
thing began to happen to me. I began to lose automobiles.

(26:02):
You know, ye dented automobiles. She wentn't allowed to own
her automobiles. Forty guys in the house, six automobiles. You
gotta sign out for it. I would sign the book,
take the automobile. Then someone would say, there's a big
dent in the green car. I go tear the page
out of the book. And then some would say, somebody

(26:35):
parked a blue car on the lawn. Go tear the
page of the book. I remember one morning the boss
woke me up. He said, are you okay? I said yeah, fine.
He said, well the police call. They found the car. Oh,
I said, thank god, I didn't even know it's gone yet.

(27:01):
Many times I reported them stolen. I wasn't stolen. I
just didn't know why I put it. But you can't
admit that, you know, you can't say I don't know
where I left it, or you can't say I left
it in front of the TikTok on the East West highways.
So I was always going down claiming the car. And

(27:24):
you know, we get crazy, do a didn't a lie?
I remember one time the policeman said to me, it's
a hell of a day. He said, when they go
right to the rectory and take the car. And I thought,
I didn't say it, You said it. All I said
was sure is. And he wrote that down and I

(27:48):
didn't have any problem swearing through the accuracy of that statement.
You know, that's what he said. Insane things, insane things.
On one occasion at the holiday inn on US one,
I smoked marijuana. Dear god, I haven't finished about a fifth.

(28:09):
I thought I had a stroke. I sat in this
big chair in the lobby for about three hours. My
mind is racing what am I gonna say when they
get here? They're when they get here, you know. Finally
some feeling came into my toes and into my ankles.

(28:30):
I managed to drag myself out into the car, made
it home doing about five miles an hour. You know,
the personality change that we hear about. I am a
little guy, but I'm a smart little guy. I don't
fight with big guys except when I'm drinking fifth and

(28:59):
many years now, but I still haven't been able to
figure out whether I got bigger or they got smaller
when I drank. But in any event, I got into fights,
fights on every parking lot, on us one, all over
the place. You know, got a broken arm in the
last year of my drink it You ever explained a
broken arm when you go back home. What had actually
happened was a guy hit me with a six pack

(29:22):
and broke my arm. We got into an argument. Aren't
these things absolutely insane? Another occasion, I was telling him
a guy in the bar and he was going to
show me where there was another bar that was still
open after hours. He had a gun crazy Saturday night special.
He left it in the glob compartment car. I told him,

(29:43):
he's making me nervous. Put that, and he did in
the glob compartment. I get home about four o'clock in
the morning, and I remember the gun. Now, wasn't more
am I gonna do with this gun? I got a
little bit of conscience left. I didn't want to just
throw it out at some kid will pick it up
and blow himself away. So I'm sitting up on him.
Should ever again early in the morning, cleaning my fingerprints

(30:03):
off it very having decided, I am going to put
it in the mailbox. The mail man will find it.
Hell it. I went to the mailbox and I thought, oh,
wait a minute. When I dropped this in the mailbox,
it might go off and blow me away. So I

(30:27):
went to the phone and I called the police. I
remember he said to me, I don't suppose you want
to give me your name. I said, indeed, I don't,
but you'll find it under the mailbox. It's such and
such a place going insane, absolutely insane things happening to me.

(30:49):
Now you must say to yourself, not yet anyhow. I
had a friend of mine, what was near Georgia Avenue.
I forget And when they calls to tell me that
Ed had, you know, dropped out. He was dead before
he hit the floor. I said, where was he? In

(31:09):
the story? And he told me in journal of that
party he he didn't have much longer to go. He
coulda been finished up. I shadn't want that to happen
to me. It's a year at this uh particular moment.
Now you must to ask yourself, you know, didn't you
try to uh do something about this uh alcoholism? Of
course I did. For any practicing alcoholic, just stop drinking

(31:34):
is not a viable option. You don't think about that,
seeing the first thing you think about any alchemy. Who's
worth his salt says, I gonna get into this control drinking,
So I gotta control this thing. That's what I did,
just gonna drink. Probably, I don't know why I said,
but Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays or Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays,
or you know, but g it never worked for me,

(31:55):
not even once I had. I poured myself a bourbon
and ginger ale and it got a little warm, so
I put some more icy. We put more ice in.
He had to put more bourbon and then a little
bit more ginger. Well, after a couple of hours, I
went to bed that my bomb out of my skull
two vincent that had happened on one drink. Control drinking

(32:15):
never never worked for me. I went to see the
the doctor. You know, I heard someone say to the
day the definition of alcoholism is when you drink more
than your doctor. If you don't eve drink as much,
you're not an alcoholic s. Well, I went to see
my doctor and I explained to him, nowhere near the truth.

(32:37):
Nothing that I am saying here this morning is meant
to be critical or of uh medical doctors or psychiatry.
I don't. The big book tells us we can't do that,
and I don't do that. But it may sometimes appear
that way. There's an alkay telling that to You're right,

(32:59):
I did, but I didn't. So I began to tell
him about my drinking, see, and I never even got
near the truth. But he looked up and he said, well,
I will prescribe some anibuse for you. He told me
what the anebuse would do, and so on and so forth,
and so that was okay with me. Well, the primary
symptom of the disease of alcoholism is denial coupled with

(33:22):
most dishonesty. The only way that you can stay in
denial is to become the most dishonest person in the
face of God's earth. That you lie to others, as
my sponsor said to me, didn't touch it. That you
lie to others, he said, is understandable. Hand around a
uh A glass there said, you might have to stay

(33:49):
Say no, i't such a vis was understandable. Who wants
to get preached that every time you put your hand
around a glass people ask you for drinking. You say, no,
I'm not drinking. They catch you with you say the
first one today, that it was even for a weeks.

(34:10):
Stay funny, I should see you to day. Last time
I saw you, I was having to drink first one
since then too, But he said, the greatest infidelity of
all is that we lie to ourselves. The first thing
that I convinced myself off after about three days on
anibuse was this, anteribuse has given me indigestion. HM, just
keep me awake at night. So I'm gonna stop it.

(34:30):
Because I stopped it, and then I got drunk, and
then I got frightened all over again, and I started
taking the interbuse again, and then I drank on the interbuse.
I share with you since getting solid, but I've had
a heart attack. The pain of the heart attack and
the pains of the interbuse. Take the heart attack any day.
It was over in a couple of minutes, but the

(34:52):
interbuse for about the first hour, I thought, oh my god,
I'm gonna die. Second hour, I thought Oh my God,
I'm not gonna die. I would have had to feel
better just to die, tell you the truth. So the
interviews didn't work for me. Now I am a child

(35:13):
of God. God should heal me through the church. I
have taken more pledges than bare and his aspirin. Never
kept any of them. See, never kept any of them.
The only thing I got out of them was another
layer of guilt. The insanity with us alcoholics is that
we do the same thing expect different results, like walking

(35:36):
up on the roof and stepping up and saying, this
time I'm gonna go up, says Plage. You had to pledge.
I went to see a psychiatrist. To me, that was
the the the pits. I mean, at the end, you
can't go little nuts, will you go see again? As
I said, I'm not knocking psychiatry. Anyone who knows anything

(35:59):
about the history of our all synonymous knows we wouldn't
be where we are today without knowledgeable psychiatrists. You've been
to two AA and me. You know more about alcolism
than that crown did. I said, I picked a real boob,
So you you know, people say that when we come
to the Fellowship of AA One of the things that

(36:19):
impressed them the most was the word we. Well, that
didn't impress me a bit, cause when I went to
see this shrinking, that's what he said to me. He said,
we are about to start on a new way of life.
And I thought, well, now that's great. I'm not gonna
have to do it wrong. But he said, you are
a little nervous, and so I'm gonna give you something

(36:41):
to calm you down, see, and then we're going to
talk about this thing. Well, he gave me something, and
in about twenty minutes that new way of life arrived.
I thought, I can live with this. This isn't too bad.

(37:05):
I felt so good about that. On the way home,
I had a couple of drinks. My blackouts before, my
blackouts before had been for hours. Now they were for
days with the pills and the booze, you know, two
three days out of my life. So psychiatry it didn't
work for me. The great dilemma, certainly in the last

(37:31):
year of my drinking, was why has God done this
to me? I golfed myself to God at twenty three
years of age, gave him everything, and now he abandons me.
That seems I'm you know, maybe illogical to you now,
but it didn't seem illogical to me at the time.
Why has God done this to me? You know? What
I was to find out. I know with absolute certainty

(37:53):
that God wills my sobriety the highest faculties that God
has given me, as I said to you, intellect and
free will. The first thing that was out the window,
I drink it intellect and free will. So I knew
that God willed my sobriety, but he was really ticked
at me. What I was to find out was that
God did indeed will my sobriety, but only only through

(38:15):
the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. Only through the Fellowship of
Alcoholics Anonymous, there was an all saying that God gives
the very best gifts to those who leave the choice
to him. If God had healed me in any of
these ways, I would probably still have those deeper underlying
problems that the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous talks about.

(38:39):
But as it is, God gave me a gift, so
great a gift that today, as God is my judge,
I stand here before you and I tell you that
I am not only glad and grateful to God that
I'm recovering alcoholics. I'm glad and grateful to God that
I'm an alcoholic for the change that it has brought
in my life to having tried psychiatry and so forth.

(39:05):
And at a time when loneliness and bitterness, hopelessness and
helplessness just permeated my whole life, I attempted suicide. In AA,
we hear that attempts at suicide or a cry for help.
I don't dispute that. For many there was not the
case with me. God be damned. God can go to hell,

(39:29):
or God will understand. I don't know. I just wanted out.
I could not take it anymore. So I know him,
and I deliberately tried it. I came to and in
uh Holy Cross Hospital, liing up a storm. You know,
you don't admit to something uh like that. That is
what alcoholism did to me. That is what alcoholism did

(39:50):
to me. That relationship that I had that God was gone.
Those of you who have been married to depresing alcoholism,
you know the joy in the marriage, uh, the joy,
the ecstasy of that marriage day and then to see
it all go down the tubes. That's what it was
for God. In myself That's what it was. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. God,

(40:14):
as I understand him, might have addressed me as he
did the hypocrites of his day two thousand years ago
when he said whited sepulchers outside painted white, and inside
filled with the bones of dead men. That's the way
that I felt. That's what I felt. You know, I

(40:35):
left holy Cross Hospital. I knew I would never drink again. Consumotomist.
It is finished, never again, never again. Four days later,
I'm back in the bag. This is a threefold disease, mental,
spiritual and physical. Holy Cross Hospital took care of the physical,

(40:56):
did nothing about the spiritual for the mental, and I
was doing to drink again. That was in February. My
drinking was to go on until that that November when
I fought off Montgomery County and Prince George County emergency
squads on Georgia Avenue when they try to haul me
off to the hospital again and a blackout, doesn't know
any of us, don't know any of us. It was

(41:17):
at that time when I asked for help, not that
I believed that anyone was gonna be able to help
me with my drinking, but I just had to show.
I'm I've tried everything. Now I've tried everything, so tried
everything called a priest friend of mine, father John, John
is my sponsor. Now he's the associate director of an
alcoholic treatment facility in Cleveland. In the face of this

(41:38):
great track record, the best I could say was John,
I think I might be having a problem with drinking.
And so he came out to see me and apparently
agreed I was having a problem, and so I went,
we don't give up easy realities. I was angry, angry, sentful.
The man who brought me out there was a classmate

(41:59):
of my father, Peter, and I thought, by damn, if
I'm gonna suffer, you are too. And so I embarrassed
him all the way from Baltimore per at p Airport
to Hopkin's Airport in in Cleveland, demanding drinks. Making a
just humiliated him. You know, But I think, if I'm
gonna have to suffer, you're gonna do it too. See
that's how angry and resentful I was. When I arrived

(42:22):
at that alcoholic treatment facility. I was so drunk they
didn't even bother to take the Bible's astistics. They put
me in bed one of the things they asked me
was how tall are you? I said six four. The
next day nurses kept sticking their head in the room,

(42:42):
looking around and walking out see find me. After a while,
the woman came to me and she said, are you
mister Norton? I said yeah. She said you're supposed to
be six foot four? Said why did I way? I
don't know. Yeah. He asked me what time it was.
I would ask you why. You know. That's how dishonest,
uh we become. It is here that I wanna tell

(43:10):
you about the tremendous debt that I owe to Alan
On to debt I'll never be able to pay. There
are other demensions to it, but time doesn't permit me
to go into all the details. But this is the
most important part. People from AA came and talked, and
I was angry and I was resentful. I remember saying
to father John, John, I'm in the wrong place. You're

(43:32):
talking about restoring me to sanity. I'm not insane all
or not. Wait a minute, he said, that is a
legal term, not a medical term. He said that was
a medical term. We would have you locked up now.
They had taken all my clothes away from me, they
gave you a pair of pajamas one size fits nobody.

(43:56):
They give you a robe with Rosary Hall written across
the back of it, which everybody knows is the tank.
See I own pair of cotton slippers. Where the hell
are you gonna go addressed like that? In November? I thought,
you know, John, always think I'm pretty still, But you
don't have to lock the door. And I'm not going

(44:17):
to go anywhere like this. No, no, he said. It
is not a medical he said, a medical term lock
you up. It's a legal term. He said. It means
a lack of good judgment. He said, once you go
back to your room and think about what you've been
doing for the past year, he said, it might suggest
a lack of good judgment. One for John at you

(44:38):
got two days. I came in and I said, John,
I wanna tell you something. I'm an alcoholic And he laughed.
He said, well, he said, I can teach a parrot
to say that, and he'll believe it more than you do. See.
Then I get angry all over again. I wasn't hearing anything.

(44:59):
The AA people can. Then a figure and then one
day a very lovely woman from Alanon came She was
not a re least bit judgmental. She didn't talk down
to us. She was married to one of us, not
a brother, an alochis, and as I understand that he

(45:23):
was no prize, but a lovely, lovely lady. Now what
she said have no effect upon you at all, say,
but it changed my whole life. She said, it is
a beautiful and a courageous thing that you are doing,
trying to stop drinking. And I thought, I'm a t khan,

(45:43):
I'm doing a con job. But I'm gonna listen. I'm
gonna listen. All of us in AA and I believe
all of you in alanon an aural teens that mean
matter have them touched by God to be able to
all the come the denial, to get enough honesty, to

(46:04):
be able to say even I think I got a problem.
You have to be touched by God. That is not
a natural thing for an alcoholic to do, or the
spouse of an alcoholic color alcoba do you wanna call it?
It is not the ordinary thing to do. It is
not an unnatural thing. It is a super natural thing.
It is God's grace, That's all. I never knew who

(46:28):
that woman was for about seven years, I guess until
I went back to Cleveland one time to speak and
mentioned this and she came to see me. She changed
my whole life. All of us our instruments in the
hands of God. God did not use for my recovery
an alcoholic God used a woman from alanon. She was
the instrument. She was the willing instrument. If she hadn't

(46:51):
been there come to talk to us, I don't know
where it'd be today. She was the willing instrument in
the hand of God to bring about uh my healing.
We areties. We don't accept this thing, you know, like
being hit by lightning. When I was leaving that institution
and Father John said to me elections, He said, you're
gonna be okay, I said, John, and I put the

(47:12):
fight of my life. He said, fight. Hell, the war's over.
You're lost. You surrender, He said, I give you three
things to do if you never want to come back
to this institution again. He said, don't take that first drink,
go to AA and pray, he said, and do it
in that order. And no substitutions, no church instead of AA,

(47:34):
none of that stuff. No substitutions like it says under
Denny's menu, you know, hamburger, peas and theresh potatoes, no
substitution please. I thought, well, okay, I'm gonna go to
AA once a week, very generous right in Virginia, because
I don't go in Maryland. I live in Maryland. Say no,

(48:00):
I'm not gonna tell you anything about myself. No, no, no.
I had some idea. It was like, people will go
to church, thinks some of the magic happens if could
just go to meetings. If you just go to meetings,
then you're gonna get a hemorrhoids from sitting on those
cold chairs. It is the steps out of the program.

(48:22):
But at the time that was my attitude. When I
got on the plane to come back, he had been
in the hospital for a while now, and I didn't
really feel the urge to drink or an't like that
at all. Another thing I share with you was in
the hospital that I was reconciled to God as I
understand him totally completely without reservation. Instantly God said, O,

(48:44):
our brother who was dead has come back to life.
Put a ring on his finger and a robe on him.
You know today, I know, I knew it then. I
just couldn't apply it to myself. One of the attributes
of God is if God is changeless, if God has
ever loved me, He's always loved me. God has loved
me anymore today is I stand here share with you
my experienced drength and hope not one bit more today
than he did when I laid in my room and

(49:04):
threw up all of myself drunk. Hmm. God has always
loved me, and so my reconciliation with God was instantaneous,
m no question about it. But John put me on
the plane and I was feeling pretty comfortable until his
real cute number came down with a push cart and
she said cocktails, and I got, Oh, my God, here

(49:27):
I go again, said, but I did what he said.
I didn't take that drink when I go off the plane, though,
I went to a meeting next door to where I live. Finally,
park typical Alchi went all the way to clean on
the fire. I should have gone next door. See And

(49:49):
since that day, my commitment to the Fellowship of Alcohost
Anonymous has has uh grown, has grown. It is the
most marvelous experience of my u uh whole life. I
am more committed to AA today than I have have
ever been. And as I say that that uh uh
commitment UH grows, that commitment grows. God has used this

(50:11):
UH fellowship to bring about my UH healing. I think
that in addition to our alcoholism, those of you are
alcoholics and those of you who are now an on,
you and I have something else in common, and that
is our inability really to adequately express what this blessed
fellowship means to us. For me, it is summed up

(50:31):
in the one hundred and thirteenth song. I will lift
up the suffering from their misery, and I will cause
them to walk in the company of princes, the princes
of this earth. That is what God has done for me.
He picked me up from my suffering and from my misery,
and he put me in the midst of the finest
people on the face of God's earth, that is the
people in in uh Aa and the people in Alimon,

(50:56):
and the people in our ty. Yeah, this was the
instrument that God UH chose UH to use to bring
about my UH healing. And it is because of this
that I'm able to say to you not only blad
and grateful of God, that I'm a recovering alcoholic Blad
and grateful to God that I'm an alcoholic. John told me,

(51:18):
he said, every night you must thank God for your sobriety,
and every night you must ask him to keep your
sober again the next day. And I started doing that
the minute I came back to Washington. May not committed
the program, but I don't think I was in the
program a week when I I expanded on that, and
I have since then prayed every night for everyone who

(51:41):
was in AA, for everyone who was an alan On,
for everyone who is in a alerteam. And so tonight,
when you uh speak to God as you understand him,
say a prayer for Alexis. Will you God, bless your
love you here

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Brother Alexis - AA Speakers - Serenity, Acceptance, and Change in Alcoholism Recovery

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