From the Ordained Ministry to Alcohol Rebab
All in Three Days
During the last several Sundays of my ten years as the pastor of a midsized protestant congregation in the Northeast, I craved more alcohol before conducting our 11:00 am service.
I remember well my last Sunday. As I had for the last couple of months, I began drinking at 7:30 am, an hour before our first service, taking two hefty swigs from a fresh pint of vodka I had purchased the day before.
At the end of the service, I traipsed the 200 yards back to my family’s church-owned house (called a parsonage in Lutheran argot) to teach the confirmation class of eight 7th and 8th graders.
On the way to the basement classroom I stopped by my office for two more generous swigs. Descending the stairs I felt good — buzzed and cheerful, but in control. This was how I liked it. I hated getting drunk. How can you enjoy drinking if you get drunk?
At the end of confirmation class, I had 30 minutes to get back to the church and prepare for our second service at 11:00. Before walking back, I took another hefty hit from my pint bottle, which was now three-quarters drained. At 10:50, I joined the choir in the narthex at the back of the church to prepare for the kick-off of the service.
At 10:57 I needed more booze. My bottle was back at the house. So, I slipped into the tiny hexagonal room where the altar guild keeps its supplies, on the pretext of adjusting my vestments. The flimsy door separating this room from the narthex bustling with waiting choir members had no lock.
So, I braced my right foot against the door jamb as I reached across to the altar guild cabinet, seized and uncapped the communion wine, and took two huge gulps.
Putting the revolting Menshevik concord grape wine back more or less where it belonged, I threw two mints and one slice of fruity gum into my mouth. All these maneuvers took speed and dexterity. Chewing vigorously, I slipped back into the narthex, banging into a choir member.
Within seconds the organ began to play the prelude and I led the choir down the left aisle to begin the service.
During the following week I tended to routine ministerial duties, but drinking so much that I didn’t begin that Sunday’s sermon until Saturday evening.
But sitting in front of my typewriter, I could not think of anything to preach about. About 9pm I drove to the liquor store, returning to my desk with a pint of vodka. Ninety minutes later the bottle was nearly empty, and so was the page in my typewriter.
Suddenly, without any thought, I picked up the phone and called my Bishop, telling him about my predicament. He told me that he would arrange for another minister to lead the next day’s services and that on Tuesday I should admit myself to the Fair Oaks alcohol rehabilitation unit at Summit Hospital in Summit, New Jersey.
Three days later I walked into a room that looked like a small warehouse, with cracked linoleum floors, dim but harsh ceiling lights, a broken wall clock guarded by steel mesh, and abandoned spider webs.
I took a seat in a ring of chairs occupied by about 25 alcoholics, and was instructed to introduce myself. My heart was thumping and my throat parched. I wanted to vomit out my embarrassment and anxiety but managed to give a brief account of who I was and how I ended up here.
When I mentioned that I was a minister, eyes flickered with interest. I made sure to mention my two graduate degrees in theology. I hoped to convey that I was not any ordinary alcoholic, but a highly educated one. I concluded by saying that I was married with two young children.
Not only a minister, not only educated, but a good family man to boot.
My self-introduction was followed by a staff presentation on the “cycle of addiction.” The circle then broke up, and everybody went their own way. The counselor told me to report to the nursing station.
But I was first approached by two men. One asked what it was like being a minister who was an alcoholic. Before I could say anything, he disclosed that he was a churchgoer and now felt better about himself, knowing that even ministers could have an addiction problem. His subtext was, “At least I am not as bad as you.”
The other person remarked that my educational and career background must give me a leg up on all the “spiritual stuff” in the program of recovery.
I didn’t know what this meant, though later I realized how wrong he was.
Over the next 35 days I made no contributions to the group’s collective spiritual wisdom. I knew a lot about God, at least the Christian one, but I did not have a relationship with him. My head was full of empty doctrines and concepts. But I did not yet realize that these were only intellectual constructs, and in my eagerness to be different from run-of-the-mill alcoholics, I tried to look wise and mysteriously spiritual.
My spiritual condition did not start looking up even after I was discharged from rehab and began attending AA meetings. In fact, I rarely thought about God for many years. What I did think about, from my first meetings onward, was how distinct I was from most alcoholics.
In fact, I continued to question if I was in the right place. Most alcoholics seemed to have drunk more than I did. I was shocked when I heard people refer to drinking a liter of vodka in one day. I rarely exceeded a pint.
I did not drink to get drunk, much less to pass out. I didn’t make an ass of myself in public, crash my car into other vehicles, or initiate fist fights at social gatherings. I vomited only once due to drinking, and this was in college because I mixed wine with bourbon. I stayed away from hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, mostly because I didn’t know how to find them.
So maybe I was a mild alcoholic. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous divides boozers into four groups. The first comprises mild alcoholics who may have a way to go before they hit bottom. In the fourth category are the kind that spend half of their lives passed out. I placed myself in group one, which seemed like a good reason to declassify myself as a genuine, died-in-the-wool drunk.
After all, I really was a religious man, at least if I gave myself credit for thinking about concepts about God. If I put some elbow grease into it, I should be able to leverage this knowledge into a cure, or at least find my way back to moderate drinking.
When I alerted an old AA acquaintance to my plan, he looked at me thoughtfully. “Forget the drinking,” he said. “Do you spend a lot of time thinking about drinking?”
He had me. Before going to rehab, I thought all the time about drinking. Not just about drinking itself but about where I was going to get the alcohol and how much I would consume that day. How I would drink it so I didn’t get caught. Where, geographically speaking — my office, the church, my car — I would drink it. How I would I get rid of the empties. How I would make the colored lines (blue and green) on the pint bottle so I didn’t exceed my “quota.” Whether I wanted to pick up a couple nips (airplane bottles) for an emergency. How I could disguise from others that I had been drinking, which is part of the excitement and curse of the private drinker.
No matter how much or how little I drank, I had been obsessed with every aspect of it. I spent more time thinking about drinking than I did actually drinking. Obsession, like drinking, is a progressive malady. I decided to stay in AA.
I have stayed for quite a few years and today am not far from being an “old timer,” though I don’t like the sound of this. I never went back to the church as either a minister or parishioner. But partly through AA I have found a useful and meaningful way to live.
