"If I were President, this is what I'd do," we say. Of course, it's nonsense. We don't really want to be President -- we'd hate it. No freedom, incessant "problems" to which there are no solutions .... No, most of us are happy to keep at a distance from the good and the great.

Actually, as we practice the last three Steps, we come to see that for most of our lives we've stayed away from the good and the great as much as we possibly can. Oh, we admire them, we may even venerate them; but we don't want to be them. Particularly, we don't want to be good. In fact, we insist it's impossible. And keeping a nice big space between ourselves and good people enables us to perpetuate the myth that it's impossible.

Take an example that's almost a cliche today -- Mother Teresa of Calcutta. This woman is disturbing to us in several ways. She worked with the dying. She worked with the indigent dying. There seemed no "point" to what she was doing -- why didn't she work with the hungry, who could be fed? So we dealt with her in two ways. Either we regarded her as a crank, someone whose work was futile or meaningless; or (and this happened a great deal towards the end) we placed her on a pedestal, as someone quite beyond us, in a different class of human being, possessing a nobility to which we could never aspire.

The possibility we don't want to contemplate is that Mother Teresa did what she did, not primarily because she was drawn to the dying, but because she had -- by some practice similar to Steps 10, 11 and 12 -- got to know and understand Mother Teresa. And the reason that possibility is so terrifying to us is that, if that is really what drove Mother Teresa, then it makes her all too ordinary -- it makes her like us. And if we are like her, to what level of personal commitment and sacrifice may our practice of the last three Steps drive us?