No Man Is an Island

BEFORE coming to AA I thought being spiritual was pretty old-fashioned. Joan of Arc was spiritual; Florence Nightingale was spiritual. I was not like these ladies, nor did I want to be. Their male counterpart was, to my mind, a half-naked hermit with ragged hair wasting away in some desert cave while contemplating visions of God--not a very likely candidate for a modern husband. And God, naturally, could not exist, in spite of his teaching that not a sparrow would fall, if he allowed such monstrous crimes against man as the black scenes at Buchenwald, Dachau, Hiroshima.