About A Course in Miracles

This is the text of a letter that I sent to a new AA/writer friend of mine, gÃNgst€® Bo¥s¢oUt.








Hey, G! I hope you don't mind addressing you as "G," but I don't have the typeset to spell out your full tribes.net moniker. Actually, that's a lie. I am just lazy.

I swore after just writing you that I was going straight to bed. Naturally, when I declare I am going to sleep, I tell myself first that I can graze the web for another 5 minutes ... and here I am.

I saw your reference to "A Course in Miracles." My [AA] sponsor Rick Saslaw knew Marianne Williamson; they knew each other very well. Rick used to take me to hear MW speak. She spoke twice a week in LA during the 80s and early 90s. I was just 18 months into sobriety and quite raw. Rick took me to Alanon meetings and ACIM talks given by MW. A lot of my ideas about my HP came to me through Rick, through MW and ACIM.

MW was quite a delightful, conscious lady human being with a wise heart and a nose for bullshit. Nothing got past her.

Rick had AIDS. He had given so much to AA and to lots of charities throughout LA, but he almost always balked at getting or asking for help. MW helped to run an organization called Project Angel Food, which prepares and delivers meals to people with HIV/AIDS. Rick was running out of money and he would never eat at home.

Rick was brilliant and defiant: the worst combination in an alcoholic. I was pretty much Rick's primary caretaker; but he wouldn't ask Project Angel Food for help, and he wouldn't let me ask. Finally, I called Marianne. I didn't think she would remember me, but all I had to say to her was Rick's name, and that he was jeopardizing his life by not eating. We knew about AIDS wasting syndrome. Marianne called Rick right then. She prodded him until he was willing to accept Project Angel Food's help. THAT was a deep dish course in miracles. The next day, the deliveries began and Rick began to eat again.


I called Marianne again about a year later. Her book, "Return to Love" had become a bestseller, and she was in the middle of her second book tour. I let her know that Rick had died.

A half-year or so before, I caught MW at a break during one of her lectures. I introduced myself again. I asked her if she would officiate at Rick's memorial service when he died. She agreed on the spot. I don't think I told Rick. I must have. It's just that he and I could barely talk about his death.

It was shortly after the day that I last saw Rick; I placed a large sunflower from my garden on the back of his burly naked body: lying in the dark in his tiny bathroom. I didn't really get to see him. His body blocked the bathroom door from opening except for just a little bit.

Then the Neptune Society came, picked him up, cremated him, and later poured his ashes into the sea. The Neptunes don't let people ride on their boats to come to say goodbye. [I hope that it was dignified.]

Marianne paused her RTL tour and officiated at Rick's memorial at this postage stamp of a park tucked below Sunset Strip. All of Rick's eccentric friends and AAs -- crowded onto this petit lawn. Of course, we were in West Hollywood. A hundred or so feet above us, in the zenith of a sterling day, was the Sunset Strip, all its vampires vouchsafed until the night; three of four blocks below, down the hill, was Boy's Town and the bars.

It got hot. I was wearing this blue wool business suit, and holding on to Rick's huge stuffed monkey doll. The monkey made me itch more than the suit. At the podium, I made the most nonsensical remarks about Rick and his stuffed monkey. Marianne salvaged the hour's empty disposition, basically giving us an ACIM lecture, a discourse on Rick Saslaw. It was the most fitting tribute Rick could ever have had.

Rick's been gone 14 years now. I haven't seen MW since.


I have Rick's copy of RTL. I have read and reread the book dozens of times. My sponsee Matt will attest to all of the sentences covered with neon shades of highlighting pens, underlined by my ecstatic shaky hand, and my furious emphatic notes that cram the margins and whatever blank space I could find in the front and back. Lovingly illustrated with light bulbs, lightning bolts, happy faces, flowers and hearts, it's a hippie's journal. But it's my book, and I don't care if it does look kind of gay.


Matt has taken to reading RTL. With most of many sponsees, this strategy of mine hasn't worked.

I am always going on to Matt and my other sponsees about the necessity of cultivating positive spiritual energy in sobriety. RTL is the perfect spiritual energy textbook for this. And it's getting through to him.

At first, I lent Matt Rick's copy/my copy of RTL. Then, I bought him a mint first-edition hardback copy of RTL on Amazon. This outcome relieves me and makes me very happy. His ex-girlfriend loves RTL, too. Actually, I couldn't open the book for several years after Rick had gone, but I treasured it until I could read it.

Of course, RTL is something that I will always read. That and the Big Book and my book on the Prajnaparamita Sutra. I always have one or more of those books on me at all times. They are my talismans.

I have had four sponsors, one of which still works with me now, and they are all sacred to me. Each one of my sponsors has made me into the sober and spiritual mensch that I am today. [I will say I'm a mensch; they were for me, and now I am in their place.] With great giddiness and reverence, I talk on and on about my sponsors to my sponsees. I'm not sure if they are suffering this fool gladly, but I can't help myself.

Rest in peace, my wise and beautiful sponsor and best friend.
(And thanks for being there, Marianne.)