I love this gospel.  There are certain things that strike each of us  
in different ways.  I love this one.  “I want to see!”  “What do you  
want me to do for you?”  “....I want to see.”

My first class as a high school teacher was the last period of the  
day – 40 senior boys and the class was religion.  Now, I was lucky,.  
All my life I didn’t have a discipline problem.  But, boy that first  
year with .... His name was Bill.  He wasn’t a brat, but boy the  
first half was apologetics (how to defend your faith), and the second  
half was marriage, and did he have his hand up for 10 excruciating  
months! Question after question, he would harpoon me! .... He wasn’t  
a brat.  Of all of those kids, he’s the one I still hear from.  I  
still hear from him
.
Ten days ago he called and we chatted, “When’s your next talk?”  He  
doesn’t use the nomenclature of today – he doesn’t say “homily.”  I  
said, “I don’t know.”  “You don’t know?  What’s the gospel?” I said  
“Well, in a couple of weeks. let’s see.  It’s about a blind man.  I  
want to see.”  So Bill said, “Talk about addictions.”  I said, “Oh  
they don’t want to hear about addictions on a Sunday morning.  They  
want to breath, and be blissful, be peaceful.”  “Talk about  
addictions.  You want to be seen making things too comfortable?”  I  
said, “OK, OK, I get it, I get it.”

So we are going to talk today briefly about the 12 steps.  And any of  
you who is living with and suffering with someone with an addiction,  
you know you can go to open meetings, 12 steps, AA.  Let’s just think  
about AA.  You can go to open meetings, You don’t have to wear a mask  
and sneak in lest cousin Tilly see you.  Open meetings, Anyone can  
go.  Open meetings. ”... I want to see.”  If you’re living with  
somebody you love and you’re worried and you’re tense all the time,  
you know the cliché The Elephant in the Room?  It’s such a good  
metaphor, this awful heartbreaking, especially with the holidays  
coming – Elephant in the Room. Addiction: prescription pills, booze.

You know, a Jesuit named Father Dowling, a Catholic priest, helped to  
write the 12 steps. It’s true.  And everything in the 12 steps is an  
open meeting. Well that’s what Christ said, that’s what Jesus said.  
It’s the gospels capsulized.  You won’t feel lost in an open meeting  
– those with an addiction.  The meeting is call Al-Anon if you’ve got  
someone you care about, that you’re worried about.  Al-Anon. You are  
not alone.  “....I want to see.”

My spiritual director back in New York was a priest older than I, if  
you can imagine such a statistic.  And he went away one time, left  
the room to get coffee, and on the coffee table was this book, “The  
12 Steps.”  I recoiled as if it were a cobra.  I wonder if he means  
that for me?  And then I thought to myself, well alcoholism runs in  
my family, and then my buzzard flew in and said, “It doesn’t run in  
your family. It gallops!”  I thought, well maybe I’ll go to an open  
meeting of Al-Anon.  And then I thought, “Wait a minute, I gave up  
money, sex, and cigarettes and now is he indicating, my spiritual  
director, I should keep my eyes open for addiction?”

The founder of AA was Bill (another Bill).  He had what we call a  
religious experience.  Now some people would scoff, but not a  
believing Catholic. I don’t think you’d scoff.  He was in a room at  
night in bed and suddenly the room was filled with light.  This man  
was not given to poetry or melodrama.  He was filled with this  
powerful, personal, penetrating light of love.  He never drank  
again.  And he began to spread the word – God.  And don’t do it  
alone.  And “I want to see.”  You can’t get sober alone.  And those  
of you who live with people you are worried about, you can’t do it  
alone.

The first meeting I went to was an open meeting with my brother, back  
on the east coast.  I was there 10 minutes and I grabbed my brother  
with a convulsive grip, I said, “Everybody in this room is a  
believer.”  Now, I was in my 50s and it was the first time I was able  
to say that from my heart.  Not everybody who comes to Sunday mass is  
a believer. You know that.  Some are tormented by doubts, some are  
here because somebody they love drags them here, or out of habit.  
But at an AA meeting, even an open meeting, where you don’t have to  
be a drunk to be there, everyone is a believer in a personal,  
personal, loving presence.  Not all of them call it Jesus Christ as  
we do, but everyone was a believer, hanging on to something, not just  
taking it for granted.

Do you remember your own first drink?  I do.  I was thirty years old  
and I had just started to teach and I was at a big faculty lunch  
before school began.  And they were passing around champagne, and I  
didn’t like the smell of whiskey. It reminded me too much of home,  
growing up with an alcoholic.  But champagne…and sitting next to me  
was this incredibly glamorous, gorgeous, beautiful, female physics  
teacher, not a nun.  And I’ve always been intimidated by gorgeous  
people of either sex, so I thought “Well, it’s just champagne” and I  
tossed it in a single, greedy gulp.  Oh… and the leg under the table  
that I always rotate stopped rotating.  Oh, so that’s what it’s  
about.  “”Would you like a second?”  “Uh-huh.”  And even then I was  
balding and scrawny, but I turned to this gorgeous physics teacher,  
“Hi.”  I was Paul Newman or Robert Redford.

The name of the group to whom you can go and it doesn’t cost a thing  
is Al-Anon, if you are worried about somebody who is drinking too  
much or on too many prescription drugs. “I want to see,” says the  
blind man.  And my former student on the east coast, Bill, said,  
“Talk about addictions.”  A lot of people want to see, maybe hear it  
again.

My own father was a hopeless alcoholic.  He died drunk.  And I  
remember the bars stayed open until 4 o’clock in the morning back on  
the east coast.  I was still in high school and he would keep at me  
for money.  I used to hide the money and the liquor and it was  
getting towards 4 o’clock in the morning.  “Mike, give me the  
money.”  I said “no!”  And then, like a good seminarian full of zeal,  
I grabbed the bottle of whiskey which I had hidden, ran to the  
kitchen, opened the bottle and drained the whole bottle of whiskey  
down the kitchen sink.  And my father entered the kitchen and said,  
“Oh Mike.”  He was a very gentle, kind man. “Oh Mike, all that  
precious nectar going down the drain.”  And he managed to get money  
out of me and by 10 minutes to 4, he was out to the bar.

In those days there was no Al-Anon. You did it alone.  And there was  
a place called Bellevue in New York City, a big hospital.  And I used  
to go there many times and wait for my father.  It was a drying out  
place.  And I was standing there, dressed as a seminarian in a black  
suit, white shirt, black tie.  You look like a kind of priest-lite.  
And there was a lady standing there on the weekend, all by herself.  
I remember she had a big pocket book.  And by the third weekend, we  
were standing on a sunny, Sunday morning, waiting for the inebriates  
to come out of rehab.  By the third Sunday that we were standing  
together she said, “Are you a father?” in her New York accent.  I  
said, “No, I know I look like one.”  We started to talk and she said,  
“The kids are married and gone.  What’s he gonna do?” meaning her  
husband.  “So I wait, I take him home, and I wait for the next  
time.”  I think of her a lot.  She had to do it alone.  You don’t  
have to anymore.  Al-Anon.  All the cumulative wisdom of people who  
would never say “Pour the liquor down the drain.”  You can’t change  
another person – you can change yourself, how you cope.  Not alone  
with the elephant anymore.

The gospel says today the man who was blind persists, keeps yelling.  
And that crowd “Oh shut up” and then the crowd says, “OK.”  He kept  
yelling, “I want to see!”
I got a prop.  The 12 Steps – you can get it for about 10 bucks.  I  
find you get all kinds of things through the Internet.  You can get  
this through the Internet.  Every page of the 12 steps, I’m not  
kidding, it’s like you’re reading the gospels, but in very simple  
Anglo-Saxon prose.  And rent a movie, The Days of Wine and Roses, in  
black and white, a masterpiece.  It’s not for kids.  It’s serious.  
Great move.  “...I want to see.”  The Days of Wine and Roses, first-
rate movie. And now we’re up to card six.

When people start to recover – some of you know that – when people  
start to recover, stay sober, stay clean, they have the best sense of  
humor, they do.  They’ve been to hell and back.  And their laughter  
comes from here (gesturing to the gut) not that kind of tight,  
constricted laughter that you undergo at Thanksgiving with relatives  
you can’t stand.  Laughter down here.  They are the best listeners  
because they have been to hell and back.  They really listen.  Don’t  
lose your own hope.  And they are the best prayers.  They pray the  
best.  So, don’t despair.  “...I want to see.”

We’re going to have a minute of blessed silence, when I’m going to  
shut up.  Would you pray for anybody you know who wants to see, who  
doesn’t have to do it alone anymore, like the man of the gospel.  
Keep persisting.  Blessed silence, you and I now, for a moment.