Bill Moyers was introduced by his son, William Cope Moyers. What follows are excerpts from Moyers' speech:

One of my favorite cartoons of all time is the one in The New Yorker where the newly crowned king calls his advisers together and announces, "All I want during my reign is wisdom, humility, and media exposure." If this were a sane world--instead of a media world, where wisdom and humility are a distinct handicap--Judith, my wife, would be giving this speech. It was she who participated so vigorously and effectively with Bill and Peggy Hassett's team to bring Hazelden New York into existence. She made the difference in the focus and impact of our PBS series on addiction and recovery. And it was Judith whose faith grounded our family during our own long struggle with addiction close to home. Not once did she waver. Her belief in rebirth and renewal never wavered. She never lost hope.

And that of course is what Hazelden is all about. At the end of a century that has been filled with hatred and horror, death and destruction, the Hazelden community represents the triumph of hope. In an era of megamergers of power and wealth in a global economy where vast sums of money and billions of bytes of information move as swiftly as the speed of light around a planet of six billion people, Hazelden represents the most intimate and individual of miracles--the transformation of one human life.

So I can't imagine being anywhere else than being here tonight.

However, if I'd had my way, this event would have been scheduled on Dec. 31--as our New Year's millennium party. Could there have been any better way to celebrate the passing of the old and the beginning of the new than in the company of so many kindred spirits, all of whom believe in fresh starts? . . .

On New Year's Eve I would have read a poem instead of making a speech. I would have read the poem Maya Angelou wrote for the inauguration of President Clinton in 1993. It's about the inner freedom of the spirit. Human beings created only a little lower than the angels crouch "too long in the bruising darkness," Angelou wrote. Too many of us, she said, awake to a new day "on a nightmare and a dream for something better." And then she says, "the horizon leans forward, offering . . . space to place new steps of change."

New steps of change: that pretty well sums up the Hazelden story.

Every life that might not have been here is a miracle. Every life rescued from despair, every life made whole, is a miracle. Hazelden wasn't here 50 years ago. Hazelden is a miracle. . . .

Think of all the miracle workers in the Hazelden story--people who tapped deep spiritual roots to bring forth something that didn't exist before, and to keep it growing. You'll find some of the names in the record books: The Founding Fathers--Ripley, Lilly, Carroll, McGarvey, O'Shaughnessy, Kerwin, and Heckman, among others; crucial figures like the Butlers, Anderson, Swift, and Hill; and formidable names like Cain, Harkness, Williams, Elliott, and now Jerry Spicer. And others too numerous to mention: all those counselors and nurses and administrators, those researchers, financial case managers, accountants, chaplains, maintenance crews, cooks, and housekeepers who kept the place going. And of course the men and women who came here desperate for help, who came in fear and left with hope, sharing what courage they had with each other, telling over cup after cup of black coffee stories of arduous struggle and painful loss, of humiliation and resolution, stories that make the heart bleed and stories that make the heart leap, unvarnished stories of follies and fantasies, families and faith. Stories work miracles in speaker and listener alike. "Change but the name and the talk is told of you," wrote Horace in his famous book Satires; through these stories people learned they weren't alone after all on the road to recovery, others were coming back, too, small step by small step, one day at a time. These innumerable, common but extraordinary stories become The One Great Story that is Hazelden, this community of unquenchable hope.

How this miracle happened is fascinating as history. When it happened is telling, too. I'd like to take you back there for a brief review of the news.

I was 15 in 1949, just about to begin my first job as a cub reporter on our hometown newspaper. My ears were perking up to the world, and if it wasn't an auspicious time for miracles, it was a feast for journalists. There was plenty to titillate us.

Nineteen forty-nine was the year Miss America denounced falsies as being dishonest. The Illinois state legislature passed a bill requiring cats to be leashed; Governor Adlai Stevenson vetoed it.

In Virginia, the town of Mole Hill officially changed its name to Mountain. (I'm not making this up.)

After a two-year investigation, the United States Air Force officially declared that UFOs don't exist. . . . (and Moyers went on to recite a long and remarkable list of telling events from 1949, before concluding with the following)

The clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was moved up from eight minutes to three minutes to midnight. Schools taught children how to scramble under their desks in a nuclear attack. The Age of Anxiety entered full sway in 1949.

But here in Minnesota something else was happening of an altogether different character. It didn't make news at the time. This is the front page of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune on January 10, 1949. The top story told of icy ripples from a cold wave that brought sub-zero weather to the Twin Cities. (The more things change . . .) There was a small item about a man who was hospitalized after his wife sunk her teeth into his ear during an argument. But mostly the news in these parts was more of the same: the President's new budget, Governor Youngdahl's inaugural address, British warships on alert after Israel shot down five Royal Air Force planes, and plans by the nation's biggest phonographic record makers to produce different-sized discs for use in different record players.

The incorporation of the Hazelden Foundation didn't make news that day. But miracles are rarely noticed when they first arrive, and this one was no exception. Who would have suspected that under the threat of a mushroom cloud, in a raucous nation four years from the end of one war and only a year away from the beginning of another one, a miracle was occurring in a rambling one-and-a-half story structure with white-shingled sides and a red roof, on land shared with Hereford cattle, on a remote lakeshore in Minnesota?

I was thinking about that very question the other day as I was looking at pictures of the old Power Farm. I suddenly remembered an inscription Judith and I had come upon many years ago on the ruins of a church in England. This is what it said:

In the year 1653, when all things in the kingdom were
Either profaned or demolished,
This church was built by Sir Richard Shirley,
Whose singular praise it was
To do the best of things in the worst of times.

It happened here in 1949. A seed sprouted, and grew.

The miracle and the moment: But what about the message? If after 50 years we could distill Hazelden's essence and bottle it, what would we be offering? I have an opinion on this. It started forming when Judith and I were here 10 years ago at the Family Center. I saw people arrive in shambles--wobbly and blank like shell-shocked troops coming back from the front (I was pretty wobbly myself, to be honest)--and I saw them leave a week later on their own two feet, composed, making their way again as healing human beings. . . .

Hazelden's unique contribution has been to figure out how to respond to that cry (for help), bringing to bear in treatment the best insights of AA combined with the findings of modern research into science, psychology, and human behavior.

The full force of this came home to me when I was reading Damian McElrath's second volume of Hazelden's history. (Chapter six is a splendid summary of the phenomenon of the Divided Self and is based in part on Minnesotan Craig Nakken's own work.) He quotes an old poem that goes like this:

Within my earthly temple there's a crowd,

There's one of us that's humble, one that's proud,

There's one that's brokenhearted for his sins,

There's one that unrepentant sits and grins,

There's one that loves his neighbor as himself,

And one that cares for naught but fame and self;

From much corroding care I should be free,

If I could once determine which is me.

. . . Its been Hazelden's great achievement to help us see that treatment is about reconciling our divided selves and our separation from one another. And it has been Hazelden's message that the road to recovery--recovery of health, sobriety, dignity, worth, and humanity--begins with a spiritual awakening . . . a dying and rising, as McElrath puts it, encounters with mortality, the power and practice of discernment, the redemptive healing journey. For 50 years, through trial and error, with the cooperation and collaboration of its large extended family, Hazelden has been mapping that journey. That work has added greatly to our understanding of addiction and recovery.

"It is our hope," wrote Robert McGarvey 50 years ago, after Hazelden's incorporators put down $50,000 to buy the Power Farm, "to enlarge on the whole facility . . . so that the institution, or home, will eventually turn out hundreds of thousands of cured, or at least arrested, alcoholic diseased patients. It looks like this is a dream that is finally going to come true. . . ."

One of those "hundreds of thousands" is someone I know well and love deeply. He's the other person from our family who could be making this speech tonight, for much of what I know about this I have learned from him. Like Hazelden, he wasn't around 50 years ago. But he's around now because of Hazelden. I don't know how better to express the miracle, moment and message of Hazelden's story than to share with you a letter he wrote us after he had left Fellowship Club. His struggle wasn't over and there were still miles to go, but he had found the road home, to wholeness. Here is what he wrote:

"Several things made a difference to my recovery: faith in a higher power, a compassionate God, the Twelve Step program, and Hazelden. The whole experience was one of the reality of treatment versus the reality of facing the world as a sober person. A canyon divides those realities, and Fellowship was the bridge across it. I walked across that bridge from the protected cloister of primary care into the scary world where there is no room for drugs and alcohol. It was in Fellowship that I saw I could make it; I had to see it before I could do it, and I saw it there, and knew that I could make it. I had to rebuild my destroyed life, and I couldn't have done it without the strength of numbers, the company I kept, the fellowship I experienced.

"There is no cure for addiction. But there is treatment. I learned at Hazelden that it is possible to arrest the disease and lead a productive life. I lived every day for four months without drugs and alcohol, something I hadn't done in 15 years. I might be dead without that experience; I know for sure I wouldn't be on my feet, confident, working again, married, and soon to be a father. I learned there that a sober life is not easy but it is possible. And rewarding. With this disease we are always running from reality. Hazelden gave me the chance to take a deep breath, stop running from reality and embrace it. To learn anything at that state of my life was a miracle; to learn to live again was the greatest of all miracles."

That is wisdom won the hard way, from falling through a hole in the earth, a crack in the soul, and climbing back. But the reward of wisdom hard won is beyond measure--that life returned from death, that person made whole.

Miracle of miracles.

Close to home.

Published in The Voice, Winter 2000