Family connections: Monsignor O'Brien's Daytop Village. (Of Several Minds).

I went for my first helicopter ride the other day. Naturally, I was apprehensive about buzzing around thousands of feet above the ground in a contraption that seemed more closely related to a lawn mower than to an aircraft. But the experience was more exhilarating than scary. For some reason, being able to take off, land, and hover like a bumblebee seemed less unnatural than being propelled through the sky in a jet. And as it happens, the purpose of my helicopter trip was equally exhilarating.

I don't recall saying more than a few words to a priest when I was growing up. My mother and father didn't know any priests personally. We never had a priest over to the house socially or in any official capacity. I was vaguely aware of the fact that my father's first cousin, William B. O'Brien, was a priest in New York. But I can only remember meeting O'Brien once or maybe twice as a child. He was a distant and formidable figure. A priest of the "old school," my father liked to say, which usually meant a tough guy who would brook little nonsense.

When I graduated from college and told my father I wanted "to write" (speaking of nonsense), he suggested I drop O'Brien a note. One of O'Brien's neighbors growing up in Tuckahoe, New York, had been Robert W. Creamer, an editor at Sports Illustrated and a highly regarded biographer of Babe Ruth. O'Brien did put me in touch with Creamer, who responded to my plaintive letter with a gruff and dismissive note. Evidently the "old school" operated in journalism as well.

That was thirty years ago, and just about my last contact with Monsignor O'Brien until he came swooping out of the sky in a helicopter like some fabled tycoon to pick me up from Westchester County Airport and whisk me off to Rhinebeck, New York. He wanted me to tag along with him on one of his regular visits to the residential treatment centers of Daytop Village, the drug rehabilitation program that he founded in 1963 and continues to run. In this instance, "old school" also means a priest who has waged a successful battle against one of the great modern scourges.

O'Brien, seventy-eight, was not flying the helicopter; he sat calmly next to the pilot, reading the New York Times (reading the letters to the editor about Peggy Steinfels's October 22 op-ed piece, as it happens). Also onboard was Eugene Porcaro, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and once an altar boy for O'Brien, and James Gilhooley, another archdiocesan priest as well as a much-published writer. We flew up the Hudson, past "Sing Sing" prison and West Point, and landed on a playing field at Daytop's facility for adolescent boys.

A stream of boys rushed out to greet O'Brien and escort us into one of the buildings where all the treatment center's young clients had assembled. O'Brien was greeted with thunderous applause, and I was beginning to feel like I was in a Bing Crosby movie. Standing before the group, O'Brien introduced each of his guests and then called on various boys to explain how they had come to Daytop and what the program, which entails extensive group therapy and a rigorously structured schedule, was intended to accomplish. He sprinkled his interrogations with wisecracks, and after each boy told his story, O'Brien hugged and thanked him.

We visited three other facilities that day; these were for adults, including one with many clients from overseas. Daytop is an international organization, with programs from China to Rome. O'Brien travels extensively, preaching the gospel that a therapeutic community, not prison, is the best way to treat drug addiction. Addiction, he believes, is a symptom of the failure of the modern family. "Drugs are an attempt at self-medication to block out the excruciating pain of family crisis," O'Brien has said. Daytop's treatment program tries to create a supportive emotional community in which people feel secure but at the same time are held strictly accountable for their behavior. Its success rate is high. More than 85 percent of those treated stay clean. Daytop has treated more than 100,000 addicts in its nearly forty years, and has close to 10,000 persons enrolled in its residential and ambulatory programs nationwide. It is widely regarded as one of the most successful programs of its kind.

"Cousin Bill" had not told me that he would call on me to speak, so I was a bit flummoxed to find myself addressing a group of recovering drug addicts. However, it is impossible not to be impressed with the sincerity and courage of Daytop's clients, and it was not hard to speak to them. Still, it was humbling. The older I get the more I have come to appreciate how difficult it is to change anything about one's habits or life. Battling addiction seems like an overwhelming challenge, and is often a life or death struggle. Yet Daytop has found a way to help people do the seemingly impossible.

At the end of each assembly, O'Brien led everyone in the recitation of the "Daytop Philosophy." "I am here because there is no refuge, / Finally, from myself," it begins. It concludes: "Here, together, I can at last appear / Clearly to myself, / Not as the giant of my dreams, / Nor the dwarf of my fears, / But as a person, part of the whole, / With my share in its purpose. / In this ground, I can take root and grow; / Not alone anymore, as in death, / But alive, to myself and to others."

It is a remarkable experience to stand in the midst of hundreds of people who, having confronted the worst in themselves and in many cases the worst this society has to offer, can profess such a faith. No wonder O'Brien likes to fly in a helicopter: he's used to defying gravity. You could call it "old school."