May 7

May 7 – AM

Page xxix, The Doctor’s Opinion

Men have cried out to me in sincere and despairing appeal:  “Doctor, I cannot go on like this!  I have everything to live for!  I must stop, but I cannot!  You must help me!”
Faced with this problem, if a doctor is honest with himself, he must sometimes feel his own inadequacy.  Although he gives all that is in him, it often is not enough.  One feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change. Though the aggregate of recoveries resulting from psychiatric effort is considerable, we physicians must admit we have made little impression upon the problem as a whole.  Many types do not respond to the ordinary psychological approach.

May 7 – PM

Page 53, We Agnostics, Chapter 4

When we became alcoholics, crushed by self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing.  God either is, or He isn’t.  What was our choice to be?