the transitive urge to save
almost this whole order of nuns is staffed by nuns who’d been saved from Toronto’s mean, dead-end streets by other older tougher saved nuns.
Context
Himself's splatter-film accidentally dramatizes the Program's engine: an order sustained entirely by the saved going on to save, each rescued addict driven by a "transitive spiritual urge" to pull up the next one and so discharge the debt of her own rescue. It is the sponsor-chain and carry-the-message doctrine rendered as pulp — recovery as a thing that survives only by being passed hand to hand down a line of the formerly wrecked, the debt payable only forward.