eat rocks to prove willingness
He sometimes, the founder, in the House’s early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks—as in like rocks from the ground—to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of sobriety.
Context
Willingness dramatized to the point of parody: newcomers made to try to eat rocks, a going-to-any-lengths test so literal the state had to order it stopped. It reads as cruelty or lunacy, and the scene half-defends it — the pedagogy is that only total, humiliating willingness cracks the disease, and the founder simply staged that willingness in stone.