Carrying the Message

For years, I went periodically to AA meetings as a professional guest--and also to please my bishop, to influence local government officials, to follow the advice of doctors, psychiatrists, and magistrates, and to attempt reconciliation with the wife I still love. None of these impersonal attempts succeeded, even though I eloquently rendered lip service to the AA program, about which I understood less than the newest member just coming off a bender. I went from a cathedral pulpit as an Anglican priest to being a janitor in a plywood mill, then further down to skid row.