Lessons
You know that the self-made man is truly shallow — Stephen Stills, Church (Part of Someone)
He told the story about an Irish priest, who happened to be an alcoholic. He routinely led Mass while “in his cups”, until one morning, in the middle of a Mass, he just collapsed. They had to drag him off the altar, call in the monsignor to finish the Mass, the priest was publicly humiliated, and then grounded from having any interactions with the public. He was basically restricted to the rectory.
Slowly, people began to come and ask to talk with him — just a few at first, but after a little while, he had many people who came, asking for him. He didn’t understand why this was happening. One day, he asked the monsignor, “Why are these people coming to talk with me?” The monsignor said, “It’s because you’ve been broken, and you’ve become approachable. You used to put people off, you were very rigid and authoritarian. Now you are able to just be there for them.”
He told another story, about a railroad crossing bar that didn’t go back up after the train came and went. Cars approached the intersection on either side of it, growing more and more impatient and upset about the malfunctioning crossing bar. Someone started honking at it. It didn’t go up. Someone else got out and banged on the roof of their car. It remained down. A policeman came and said, “We’ll have to notify the experts to fix this — there’s nothing we can do.”
As more people were growing more and more upset, a 12 year-old kid in a baseball uniform, got out of his parents’ car, walked over to the railroad crossing arm, put his shoulder under it, and started lifting it. Suddenly, others jumped out to help him. They got the arm up on the one side, and folks on the other side did the same.
Everyone was able to get through the intersection and on their way to their destinations. The kid wasn’t educated enough to know he couldn’t simply lift the arm up.
The stories were told to illustrate a couple of ideas. The second one was simplicity. Learning not to be too smart to see the simple answers that are right in front of us. I couldn’t help but think of Peter Sellers’ final movie, “Being There”, where Chance the Gardner, a very simple man, winds up becoming “Chauncey Gardner”, a close personal advisor to the President of the U.S., without knowing anything about politics or the state of affairs of the nation. He simply says the things he’s learned about gardening, and everyone assumes he’s saying these things as analogies, and that he has great and valuable insights into how to conduct the affairs of the nation. Simplicity.
The first lesson was, we can be most effective working with others in the areas that we have been broken in. There, we are more approachable, more humble, more willing to empathize with others who might be broken in the same areas. We’re vulnerable enough to be open to their suffering. We can help facilitate their healing.
Good lessons. The retreat leader has a subtlety in approach. He tells stories, and leads you to a lesson without beating you over the head with it. What makes this more remarkable is that he is from Philadelphia. If you know Philadelphia, you know what I mean.
In the later morning session, the topic was Thanks-giving and gratitude. He talked about a book Susan Cheever wrote about Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA. He was born on Thanksgiving Day, but his mother would always remind him of how giving birth to him almost killed her. What a thing to be reminded of all your life!
He said that our birth stories are something that can be very teachable. He also mentioned that a source for gratitude can be that we were born when we were born, in a time when alcoholics had something like AA, a way to recover from this malady.
I’ve often talked about my birth story, but it’s one that I never tire of telling, just as my dear old Dad never tired of telling it to me. It was certainly a source for knowing I was loved, he’d always tell it so lovingly, even (especially) in those years in which he and I did not get along at all. At least once a year, I would know that he did love me, as he always told the story, at some point, on or near my birthday. I was born the day after the first Veterans Day, the year that Armistice Day became Veterans Day, 1954. I won’t go into the whole story, but it involved his favorite aunt coming over to help out, so Mom finally had time to go have me, and how he and his aunt celebrated my birth in the wee hours of the morning on November 12th. A lovely story it was.
As far as being grateful for when I was born, when AA was around, that’s a whole other story that I also never tire of telling and which gives me a huge lift of gratitude. It begins on the day my parents married, nearly ten years before I was born, in January, 1945, ten years after the first AA meeting between Bill W. and Dr. Bob. Uncle Jerry Liebler, a brother of my Mom’s mother, came down to Pittsburgh for the wedding, from Butler, Pa. His siblings hadn’t seen him in awhile, but took one look at him, and said, “You’re not going anywhere looking like that”, instead checking him into a local hospital to dry out.
Back in those days, drunks were usually taken to the Psych Ward of a hospital. While he was there, a couple of AA members came to see him, and he walked out of that hospital a sober man. Uncle Jerry proceeded to help AA grow and thrive in Butler, Pa, where he lived and stayed sober the rest of his life.
There was one guy there who Uncle Jerry worked with, who could never manage to get and stay sober. Long after most of the other AA’s would have given up on the man, Jerry was always there, ready to help him, to take him through the steps, whatever was needed. At one point, the fellow tried what they call in AA a “geographic cure”. He moved the family to California, where he hoped to start a new life. He did well for awhile, got a business going out there, prospered, then fell back into drinking, and eventually had to sell the business, lost his family, and was left with a decent amount of money and a station wagon, which he loaded up and planned to drive back across the country to Butler, to regroup.
After the first day of driving, he stopped at a motel, and while he was having dinner, decided a little wine would go well with whatever he was eating. He didn’t remember anything after that until he woke up out of a blackout in Kent, Ohio, a week later, where he’d sold his car and was, once again, broke and hopeless.
Being a good, resilient alcoholic, he managed to get a decent job in sales, and was maintaining a life of sorts in Kent, still drinking, doing his best to manage his affairs. He got to be friends with a young guy in his regular haunt, and on a barstool he told this young guy about the program of AA. He told him it never worked for him, but it might be a good thing for the young guy to check out. He even took the guy over to Akron, and showed him the Detox facility in a hospital there, and told him all about the program.
“It didn’t work for me, but if you’ve ever had enough of this life, you might want to give this thing a try.” That young man reached a point where he had pulled his car over to the side of the Cuyahoga Bridge, and was contemplating jumping off and ending it all. He remembered what the older guy had told him, and instead went home, called his wife, and told her he needed a ride to a hospital in Akron. There, he got sober, and never drank again. That man was the nephew of Uncle Jerry, my Mom’s little brother, Pat Egan.
Pat was Mom’s favorite sibiling. Whenever he came to visit their parents on the other side of Pittsburgh, Mom would go over, and Pat would always ply her with drinks, and never proselytized to her about the program. But, he suspected she could use it. One time, he invited their parents to a Founder’s Day celebration in Akron, where Bill Wilson would speak, and many alcoholics from all over would come in to celebrate the miracle of AA. He thought his father could use AA. He was a “dry drunk”, no longer drinking because doctors said it would kill him, but as miserable as a man could be. Mom decided to tag along. Their father didn’t get it — “it made no sense to me, all those drunks, but not one of them drinking!” They’d all been given a tour of the detox facility, and learned about what had saved Pat, AA.
A week later, Mom called Pat and asked what she needed to do to get into that detox facility. He told her to get on a bus to Akron, and he’d take care of everything. Mom got sober, and had only one relapse, four years later, then spent 27 years of her life running the Ala-Call Hotline for the state of New Jersey, where she was able to help thousands of alcoholics find recovery. Both my brother Ken and I realized we had drinking problems right as we got out of our respective hitches in the armed services, Ken in the Air Force and me in the Navy. He found AA, while it took me a few years to find N.A., since I also had a problem with drugs that took a little longer to give up. Eventually, another brother and a sister got sober. Four out of seven of us are in recovery. We’re pretty sure the other three don’t share the alcoholic gene. All of us owe a special debt of gratitude to Great Uncle Jerry, Uncle Pat, our Mom, and that drunk who never made it in AA, but who pointed Jerry towards AA.
So, yes — I am grateful I got sober when I did.
I probably know about half of the 80 or so guys that are here, and more probably know who I am than I know who they are, since I spoke here last year, one of the Saturday night speakers. They like to pick someone who is new on their journey, someone with a couple years, someone with ten or fifteen years, and someone with long-term sobriety, for the four speakers, each going 20 minutes or so. Since a couple of the guys went much shorter than 20 minutes, I went a lot longer, until someone poked their head in from upstairs to let the room know the ice cream was beginning to melt. The do an ice-cream social after the speaker meeting. I wrapped my tale up so we could go get ice cream
I love these retreats. Each one is different, and unique unto itself. This one is no exception to that. I’m really glad I’m here.
