[Excerpts from the sharing at the Sunday morning joint SA/S-Anon Panel on Spirituality, Portland, Oregon International Convention, July 10, 1994]

I’m Harvey, a sexaholic. You know, talking about spirituality as a separate topic here makes me think a great deal about how to talk about spirituality as a separate topic, because all weekend we’ve been talking about spirituality. I was told many years ago, there is no spiritual part of this program, it IS a spiritual program. So in thinking about talking about spirituality, I thought I would share with you some things that have happened recently that to me are the essence of spirituality.

I want to start with yesterday, when I heard Mike from Oregon talk about his son coming to his house, drunk and stoned, and yelling in the front yard, to come on out—that he wanted to beat him up, and how maybe a year before, Mike would have gone out and really got into it with him. This time, he went out and held him, and hugged him. And the young man has been sober ever since.

Spirituality is when I was in London last October, and I went to an SA meeting, and I was with a small group of SAs, and what did they do for their program but read from the SA Blue Book. And I saw the Blue Book, and I said to myself, I’m not going to tell these people that my story is in that book. That would be ego. So they’re reading it, and all of a sudden I start bawling. Not only were they reading the book, they were reading the story of someone I sponsor, and all of a sudden I shared with them, finally, “I want you to know that I’m experiencing the 11th Step.”

Why did I have to be so low-life, and do that low-life living I had to do? Why did I have to do every one of those low-down things? Because God’s will for me is that four or five thousand miles away, someone might have their life saved by reading something that happened to me. And that was, for me, spirituality.

Spirituality is when I go every Wednesday night to be with my mother, who stabbed me when I was a child. It’s when I listen to her and care about her. Some months ago, it was our Sabbath, and I went from services to her house and she said “What are you doing here?” And I said, “I just came to hold you, Mom. I get the feeling you don’t get held very often.” And she just froze up and I held her, and she doesn’t hold me or hug me or kiss me or tell me she loves me, but I held her and I said “Bye, Mom.” And the next week when I saw her, she cried when she saw me, to let me know that she couldn’t believe that I did that.

Spirituality is when I think my wife is wrong in something she says, and I can keep my mouth shut. Now I don’t always do well in that… [laughter].

And spirituality is what I saw yesterday when we gave a standing ovation to Iris and Roy. It’s something that I experience, not something I know. And in putting all this together I felt that I wanted to read to you all from Bill’s story. He said, “…simple but not easy. A price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness. I must turn in all things to the Father of light who presides over us all.”

The destruction of self-centeredness. To me that’s at the core of my spirituality. But how does one do that? Bill’s story tells us, three paragraphs before. He just says it. He says within the day he was at the hospital, he did his Steps. He took care of his character defects by acknowledging them, and then he asked for them to be removed, and then he made his amends. It’s that process that permits me to have my spiritual awakening.

And what are those spiritual awakenings? For me, it is to see God when Roy was hugging Iris, and to see God when Mike was telling us about holding his son. And it was to love my mother unconditionally, because today she’s a paralyzed woman, 82 years old, she’s not that woman who did what she did when I was 15. And if she were, I’m not that boy! I can see that.

How do I learn these things? Not by studying. It doesn’t work that way. I once said to my sponsor who had 29 years of recovery, “Gee, Cherry, when you first went to AA, there were only three meetings a week, and now there are 14 meetings. Will I have what you have in a quicker period of time?” And he just laughed. His answer was “Nope!” [Laughter]

I won’t even have it after 29 years, but he said, “No, it just takes time.” And what does the time include? It includes letting God talk through you, to me. I have to hear me, through you. I had to be taught, in Rochester, many years ago, about loving my mother unconditionally, from an S-Anon woman who spoke about how she had been incested for years by her brother. Her mother knew about it, and she had to separate from them both because it was even going on in adult life.

One day she learned her mother was dying of cancer, and she went to her mother’s bed in the hospital, and she held her mother and was able to tell her all the things she had always hoped her mother would tell her. Do you know how many times I’ve told that story at SA and AA? It’s part of me today. It’s inseparable, that story, just like other things you’ve taught me. There are people in this room who I’ve learned so much from.

So I’m gonna keep coming back. I’m going to keep traveling. Thank you, and thank you for giving me my life. I will never be sufficiently grateful that God chose Roy to do this thing, as a vessel. I understand the vessel stuff, but man, am I appreciative. I could never verbalize it until someone came up to me and said to me how glad he was I was alive. Who would have thought my life would ever be that way! So thank you for letting me be so happy that I’m alive, and to be part of this wonderful fellowship. Thank you.