The Church and the Alcoholic

My qualifications for tackling this slippery subject are twofold – I am an alcoholic (though now dry for some years); and I am a Christian, a member of the Catholic Church. To write a book is not the same as to indulge in newspaper controversy. Thus I believe I am not breaking the tradition of anonymity of the organisation, Alcoholics Anonymous, to which by the mercy of God I owe the ability to remain sober, by publishing this commentary under my own name. That tradition applies specifically to the level of Press and radio, and was designed, I think, to protect dry alcoholics and the groups to which they belong from the effect of a certain native egocentricity. I believe I am not violating that necessary tradition.

Furthermore, I enjoy the freedom of a Catholic layman, and so can speculate about the medical and moral and even theological aspects of page 265 alcoholism without formal authority. It is my fallible voice, not the infallible voice of the Church, which you will be hearing in these tentative opinions.

It seems that the negative effects of the Fall of Man can be divided into two main categories – moral effects, that is, the proneness to sin which affects and has affected the whole of the human family with the sole exception of Our Lord and His Mother; and also the wide range of involuntary evil, including various forms of sickness or incapacity and death itself. In the case of alcoholism, a most obvious evil, it is my conviction, founded on experience and observation, that the evil is of the second kind, basically a matter of sickness rather than a matter of sin. I also think that many Christians have been and still are muddled about this.

Recently I read a long article by a Jesuit – I forget his name; a lousy memory is one of the legacies of active alcoholism which I have to accept and get along with – which chiefly concerned itself with the moral aspects of alcoholism. He postulated a theory of diminished responsibility – that an alcoholic would commonly, as the inroads of the disease diminished the power of his will, become progressively less culpable for his excesses; and hence what would be mortal sin in a non-alcoholic penitent would in him be venial sin. Undoubtedly the article was sympathetic and progressive; yet when I tried dutifully to apply his theory to my own experience and the experience of my fellow-alcoholics, I began to feel that he had missed the mark.

If a man with no more than average mountaineering ability had to climb the north face of the Matterhorn in frosty weather, each day, in order to get home from work without going into the pub and taking a drink, I would say it was pretty close to a moral certainty that that man would hoist a drink; not a mathematical certainty, I’d admit; but, as in matters of salvation, so in matters of everyday morality, the Church prefers to concern herself with moral certainties. If this is the case – namely, that an alcoholic, once the disease is well established, cannot of his own power avoid the process of the alcoholic habit – then the Christian community has made many serious mistakes in dealing with its alcoholics.

The mistakes would fall into several categories. One of the most obvious would be an attitude of unjustified censure. It is natural enough that some desperate wife, whose husband has just seized the last few shillings from her purse in order to go on his third binge for the month, will consider him to be a cruel, selfish man, devoured by intemperance, incapable of true love or penitence. Yet, if you ask such a woman what her husband is really like, you are likely to get an odd answer – ‘Jack’s really a good man; when he’s sober, he can be very kind; it’s just that . . .’.

The eye of intuitive love is, I think, never wholly mistaken. Generally the close friends and relatives of an alcoholic recognise that his intentions are at least as good as those of other people. What they are trying to describe (but generally fail to describe) is a compulsion, the irruption into consciousness of page 266 violent unconscious urges, in such a way that the will has not the power to resist them.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of neighbourly censure is that the alcoholic may convince himself that it is justified, and regard himself as a hardened sinner. The imagination of nearly all alcoholics is over-active. The priest on a mission who thunders out a hellfire sermon for the particular benefit of the drunk with the shakes at the back of the church may now fortunately have gone out of fashion; but he did a lot of harm in his time. The sermon might concern itself with intemperance; the drunk is not intemperate, he is alcoholic; but with typical alcoholic self-accusation he would be likely to take it to himself and sink into some further bog of spiritual misery.

I can remember coming off a long-drinking bout, and spending two full days in anguished prayer, under the impression that Satan was visibly breathing down my neck – the recollection is humorous now, but at the time it did not seem so. This hellfire meditation did me no good whatever; indeed, recovery only began when I acquired a total trust in the love of God. I would recommend that nobody who wishes to help him should even mention Hell to a drinking alcoholic. . . .

Sometimes neighbours will adopt an attitude of humorous resignation. By this, I imply the view that the alcoholic is a kind of moral idiot, unable to distinguish right from wrong. This attitude is neither just nor helpful. I remember, for example, waking up from a comatose state to find myself among the barrels in the yard at the back of a certain pub; and the publican was asking me to shift on, in a kindly enough way, but with a tone in his voice and a look in his eye which clearly indicated that he felt I was not quite human. It is no doubt a way of trying to be kind; but its effect on the chronically oversensitive alcoholic is invariably to drive him deeper into himself. I remember also encountering a lesser variant of this attitude in a very fine old priest to whom I had just confessed the tangled detail of a long drinking bout. ‘And did you enjoy yourself?’ he asked me in a friendly fashion.

He was trying to set me at my ease. But the incongruity between the violent mental and physical pains of that bout and his vision of it was so great that I had to force myself physically to remain in the confessional. I think he saw me as a wild lad who had gone on the spree for the hell of it – a figure taken from some of the less orderly associations of his youth in Ireland – and I was indeed grateful for his attempt to be kind to me. But no interpretation could have been further from my actual condition.

His view, however, may have contained an element of puzzled sympathy; and this attitude should not perhaps be counted as a mistake, since it implies at least that there is some kind of moral mystery in the life of a drinking alcoholic. I remember another good priest who used to let a local methsdrinker sleep close to a corner of the church, under cover of a buttress, in shelter from the weather and out of sight of visitors. Frequently some kind page 267 of homing instinct will lead an alcoholic in his semi-psychotic condition to go to sleep in or near churches. I think it is a way of looking for some kind of maternal shelter. One drunk I knew well used always to lie down in the entrance of the nearest police station. At any rate, the priest I have mentioned would wait till his alcoholic friend had wakened and then bring him a cup of tea. But on one occasion he was not present, and a younger priest discovered the meths-drinker asleep in his usual place, and proceeded in impatience or panic to ring the police. The alcoholic was taken to jail, and the older priest was much distressed about it. I think he had obscurely recognised that God has his own way of dealing with alcoholics, and was doing what he could to be of help.

There are other possible mistaken attitudes, ranging from a punch on the jaw for the alcoholic who is not at the time causing any trouble to an endless worried cushioning by which the intending benefactor of the alcoholic drives himself crazy by trying to become a substitute father, bed-finder, permanent confidant and banker. By this attempt the benefactor will himself almost invariably be dragged down in the negative emotions of the alcoholic vortex, and end by washing his hands of the situation. It is necessary to consider, however, what members of a Christian community can wisely do to help their alcoholic neighbours; and I can tentatively recommend the following positive attitudes.

It is not only close to the facts, but also a great subjective relief, if one can recognise that the degree of moral culpability of the alcoholic is probably negligible. After all, if we are Christians, we fear much more the happening of moral harm to others than any physical or financial damage, or even the arrival of death itself. Once we have grasped that the alcoholic (even if he has just robbed a poor-box or beaten up his wife) is probably no better or worse than ourselves, the road is clear for further understanding.

It is well to remember that there are usually a cluster of compulsions that surround the central drinking compulsion itself – they may involve brawling, blasphemy, offences against property, or various bizarre forms of sexual behaviour; but almost invariably, if the central compulsion can itself be shifted, they too tend to dissolve rapidly. It is, however, often these secondary compulsions which cause the alcoholic himself the greatest shame and anguish of mind. If he is deeply and negatively religious they may even lead him to the mistaken conclusion that he is suffering from diabolical possession.

It is useful if the neighbours of an alcoholic can express a readiness to help in small ways. An occasional handshake, small gifts of money or food or clothing which one can easily afford, and above all the attempt at unworried man-to-man conversation these can be a great consolation to the destitute alcoholic, who is often one of the loneliest men alive. And even if he is not destitute, but has retained his job and possibly his family as well, the sense of moral isolation can be equally acute. Material gifts, however, immediately page 268 become poisoned if they are accompanied by ‘good advice’ or condescension. Here, it may be helpful to keep in mind that a man who is filthy in person, ill-clothed, and without full control of his bodily or mental functions, is in fact an afflicted man, and thus very likely to be much nearer to God than one is oneself.

Perhaps genuine clinical advice is the most valuable gift one can make to an alcoholic, if it is offered at the time when he seems most ready for it. To have access to accurate clinical knowledge, it may be well for the intending benefactor to do some reading about alcoholism; but if he lacks this knowledge, it may still be of great value if he can give the alcoholic the local telephone number of an Alcoholics Anonymous group, or of the National Society on Alcoholism. The best time to approach an alcoholic with this kind of information is when he has struck his ‘rock bottom’ – when he is, at least temporarily, in a state of great physical and mental discomfort after a long bout, or when he has just lost a job he values, or when his family have just left him. At such a time the shell that alcoholism erects around the true bewildered personality of the sufferer is for the time broken through.

I have never seen a case in which members of an alcoholic’s own family were able to affect a direct cure. Tragically they are often the people who want to help most and are in fact able to help least, because alcoholism is at least in part a disease of emotions, and the emotions of an alcoholic towards his family usually include a strong mixture of resentment and remorse, a situation that forbids mutuality. At the same time, the alcoholic process commonly affects at least twelve other people who are associated closely with the alcoholic; and often these people can be helped, even when the alcoholic himself cannot. Here, material help may often be of use, though it has to be given with great delicacy and tact; and beyond this, the information for the equally bewildered relatives that they can get in touch with the National Society on Alcoholism or the Alanon Family Groups which have sprung up alongside Alcoholics Anonymous. By contact with such groups many relatives of alcoholics can achieve a relatively stable and harmonious way of life even if the alcoholic himself does not stop drinking.

The value of prayer should be self-evident to any believer. And it is worth keeping in mind that one is not praying for a moral reformation (the alcoholic may not be morally disordered) but essentially for the intervention of the hand of God at the time and in the way that He chooses. There is a lot of truth in the old saying that God watches over drunks and fools – though I am not wholly in favour of the implication that alcoholics are stupid people. But at least He seems to stay very close to us, perhaps because His massive intervention is necessary to bring about our cure, when we have travelled beyond human help.

Whatever comments I have made about alcoholics who are men can be applied equally to alcoholics who are women, with the provision that the page 269 basically unwarranted moral stigma that attaches to alcoholism in our society hits women with three times the force with which it hits men.

It has been natural in the past for both the clergy and laity who are interested in the problems of alcoholics to approach the matter from a temperance angle. This approach has many drawbacks; and it may be of use if I try to outline the reasons why the temperance approach has so often failed.

Strictly temperance is that virtue by which the affections and appetites are subject to the rule of charity. A theologian no doubt would find my definition defective; but this is temperance as I know it, the ordering principle, allied to prudence, that enables the spiritual Daniel to stay alive in his own den of lions. It has nothing special to do with the use or abuse of alcohol. An intemperate desire to watch TV, which led to a violation of charity through a failure to maintain human communication withone’s visitors for the evening, would be perhaps the commonest example of intemperance for our times. But plainly the disease of alcoholism will shatter the practice of objective temperance as it shatters the practice of most other virtues.

In popular language, however, temperance has acquitted a secondary meaning – abstention from the use, or the avoidance of the abuse of alcoholic liquor. It is this secondary non-theological meaning of temperance which I intend to discuss in relation to the stage of the drinking alcoholic.

Let us make a brief sketch of the intemperate drinker. He likes his grog rather too much. Every Saturday he goes down to the local pub, to drink and discuss racehorses with his masculine friends, letting his wife make her own arrangements for the family outing. If there is a party on, he might leave the pub with a bottle or a jar tucked under his overcoat; otherwise, he’ll probably do without it. Apart from the occasional hangover, his work suffers little from his excesses; in fact, he is severely intolerant of the alcoholic drinker who works alongside him, below par, often too sick to work well and sometimes too sick to work at all. He cites his own case as an example of control, and advises the alcoholic drinker to imitate him.

Sometimes he drives his car with too much grog inside him. Once he was pulled up by a traffic officer. But he does not fail to remember what happened at the party and how he got home from it, According to his temperament, he is rather more jovial – or quiet, or cantankerous – with drink taken than when he is dry. But he does not suffer any personality change. Sometimes, when he is well on the way, he pays too much attention to other women; and this has caused some domestic contention; but he has been able to pull in his horns and get his life back into order.

If the doctor told him he had to lay off the grog completely, he would do it rather hard – he likes his grog, it seems to balance out some of the ordinary miseries and pressures of human existence – but of course he would do it because it had to be done. If he is a Catholic, he will from time to time be obliged to confess faults of intemperance. He is aware of some conflict page 270 between his desire to drink and a strict fulfilment of his obligations to his neighbours and to the Almighty. But it rarely, if ever, reaches explosion point.

It could be said with some truth that he has a weakness for the drink. But drink does not actually obsess him. He has no compulsion to drink or get drunk; his physical and mental reactions to alcohol are quite ordinary. Once in a while, in special circumstances – on a holiday, at a friend’s wedding, in a time of grief after a death in the family – he may go on a drinking bout. But still the control is real.

This man would be, I think, an ordinary intemperate drinker. Subject to human self-deception, he might think himself a good deal more temperate than he is. He could even be an alcoholic drinker who is still treading the uncertain borderline between social and compulsive drinking, at the beginning of the first of the three stages of alcoholism; but if so, his problem is still wholly concealed from himself and others; it is still embryonic. The odds are that with ordinary self-control, and – if he is a Catholic – with the regular reception of the Sacraments, he will avoid serious trouble. Whether or not he chooses to exercise control, he is always capable of drinking in moderation. This man may have moral problems in regard to alcohol; but he is a thousand miles away from the situation of the active alcoholic.

I once asked a priest why a regular reception of the Sacraments, in particular of the Sacrament of Penance, could not by itself work a cure for the alcoholic. And the priest said: ‘The Sacrament of Penance was not instituted to cure neurotic or psychotic disturbances; it may, of course, help to stop them from developing; but its essential purpose is to provide spiritual reconciliation and grace to cope with the ordinary moral problems of a Christian life. . . .’

I hope I’m not misquoting the good man, but that was the gist of what he said. He made a clear and, I believe, a correct distinction between the faults which are subject to the control of the will and the faults which are wholly or partially outside the area of possible control.

The temperance movements of the last century were, I think, in fact a zealous and desperate attempt to tackle the problem of alcoholism by means of a difficult voluntary abstinence; and there is a tragic incongruity in the methods used. It was the sight of the great damage done by alcoholism in the social sphere, and particularly in family life, which stirred up Christian men and women to practise and advocate abstinence. I don’t think I’ve ever met a really zealous temperance enthusiast who had not had close contact with a drinking alcoholic in his or her immediate family circle – generally a parent or grandparent whose drinking behaviour had adversely impressed him or her during the years of growth.

The tragedy, as I see it, lies in this – that the intemperate drinker, who could, with good advice and personal effort, have got rid anyway of his problem with drink, was the man capable of voluntary abstinence; whereas the dyedin-the-wool alcoholic, for whom the temperance movements originated, was page 271 generally unable to profit by them. The man who had already got an overcoat was given one; the man who had none could not wear the one he was given.

One cannot, of course, fail to recognise that a number of active alcoholics have recovered by direct religious means. The successes of the Salvation Army in the field of alcoholism are well known, though perhaps at times exaggerated. But the point about Salvationist techniques is that they demanded of their members a dramatic personal conversion, a handing over of the life and will of the convert to the power of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, the Salvation Army often had converted drunks working with unconverted drunks. The issue was in fact not one of a difficult voluntary abstinence, but of a profound change in the personality of the alcoholic worked by a special miracle of Divine intervention.

I say ‘a miracle’ advisedly; for that is what is needed for the cure of an active alcoholic – a suspension, by Divine action, of the natural process in the body and mind of the alcoholic which would otherwise bring him eventually to insanity or death. In this context one may consider also the case of Matt Talbot, the Irish alcoholic who is now subject to the process of canonisation. It strikes me that Matt Talbot had to walk in the dark. I find particularly moving the account of his regularly going to bed at night with statues of the Holy Family clasped in his arms. On the natural level this action would be, I think, an expression of the infantilism of the alcoholic – as a child may go to sleep clasping a doll or a teddy bear to ward off the terrible night fears. I do not deny the probably supernatural implications of his action – but I find it painful to think that he had to meet without any human help the massive disturbances and irrational fears of an alcoholic who is drying out – a process that may take, on the mental level, not a week or a month but many years.

It is no longer necessary for alcoholics to walk alone in the dark. And in fact, for the one or two alcoholics whom I have met who have been able to make a hard recovery by the help of the Church alone, I have met thousands, or at least hundreds, of devout Catholics, who were sinking slowly in the alcoholic bog, still firmly grasping their rosaries. No doubt they were assured of a place in Heaven; but their life on earth was in appearance much more like an inferno.

The temperance movement with which New Zealand Catholics are likely to be most familiar is the Pioneer Group. Now, I have a great deal of respect and affection for many members of the Pioneer Group; but I find it necessary to point out that their spiritual aims, however commendable, actually sidestep the problem of alcoholism.

They become abstinent for a sacrificial purpose – in order to help the weaker brethren, and in order to make reparation to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord for the pain caused to Him by sins of intemperance. That is what I recall their aims to be from conversation with then. The point is, though, that the abstinence of the Pioneer is voluntary; and in practice this must page 272 mean that his or her use or abuse of alcohol could never have been really compulsive. No doubt within the Pioneer Group also there are alcoholics who have experienced the miracle of Divine intervention; but they are in a sense sailing under false colours – for them, there has been no voluntary choice of abstinence, but a direct deliverance from forces well beyond their control.

It is not the good intentions of the temperance movements that trouble me; it is the muddle in their approach to the problem of alcoholism, particularly the confusion of the voluntary and involuntary spheres. It is the element of struggle which is the Achilles heel of the alcoholic who wishes to recover from his sickness. The struggle not to drink produces powerful mental and physical tensions; and these tensions in their turn bring him inevitably to the explosion point where he ‘breaks out’ again – for alcohol, unfortunately, is for a while the perfect sedative. If the element of struggle can be removed, or at least greatly diminished, and if the alcoholic can acquire insights into his condition instead of trying to hoist intolerable weights in the dark, then his prospects are much more positive. In the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, the way of recovery with which I am personally most familiar, the whole stress is laid on alternative action. Instead of hoisting the drink he at that moment desires more than life itself, the dry alcoholic is advised and encouraged to engage in group therapy with his fellow alcoholics. He is also advised to set his life in order by certain simple and massive spiritual steps. But the core of the healing process still lies in frank and positive communication with fellow alcoholics.

I remember at a certain stage in my own recovery, walking down a street in a certain town, and having a sudden sense of intolerable anguish and panic – as if a vulture had suddenly descended on me from above – and I remember the means I took to deal with this situation. First I went to the nearest church and performed the Stations of the Cross several times running. I was, as it were, treading in the footsteps of Matt Talbot. But when this spiritual exercise brought no alleviation of my condition, I took stock of the situation according to the advice I had received in Alcoholics Anonymous, and remembered the simple advice – ‘Talk it over with a fellow drunk.’ So I went on to the Salvation Army home for alcoholics, and spent a most relaxing and profitable afternoon discussing the shape of life with various older alcoholics, few of them yet on the road to recovery, some of them meths-drinkers. There was, of course, no difficulty whatever in communicating with them, since their problems and mine were basically identical. And the vulture flew away and faded into nothingness.

If I could sum up the true distinction between alcoholic and intemperate drinking, it would run something like this:

(a)	Generally speaking, an alcoholic, dry or drinking, does not only lack the power to stop drinking after he has taken the first drink; he also at page 273 recurring moments in his life wholly lacks the power to avoid taking that first drink itself.
(b)	The recurrence of these moments is determined by a psychological and biological process no more in his control than the circulation of his blood.
(c)	An intemperate drinker, on the other hand, invariably has the power (though he may find it at certain moments difficult to exercise) both to avoid the first drink and to avoid the succeeding drinks at whatever point he chooses.

The distinction implies that the alcoholic drinker can only be culpable in a very slight degree for his drinking and behaviour pattern when drunk; it also implies that his situation is a peculiarly desperate one, requiring a quite unusual restoration by God Himself of faculties absent from the start or damaged beyond natural repair. In practice God very often does just this; or, more exactly, He takes the alcoholic problem into His own charge, giving back to the alcoholic the power to exercise moral freedom in other spheres, but reserving this sphere to Himself. If this is the case (as I think it to be) the temperance approach is really an irrelevant one to the problem of alcoholism.

One can hardly speak of a total recovery from alcoholism; for this would imply that the alcoholic had ceased to be an alcoholic, and could ‘handle his liquor’, if he chose, without re-animating the alcoholic compulsion. In fact, I have never seen this happen. What does and can happen is the arrest of the active factors of the disease, so that the alcoholic can become permanently dry (barring voluntary or involuntary lapses) and function with at least an outward social normality.

That, after all, should be a sufficient miracle for any of us – no more bouts, hangovers, clashes with neighbours and the police, absenteeism or loss of jobs, acute family disruptions, or those terrifying periods of amnesia. Again, there is the restoration of the capacity to maintain ordinary relationships with other people, to enjoy a meal or a walk on the beach, to do a job of work without the constant fear of a lapse that might wreck it all, to be able to take one’s share in family decisions, and – if one is a Catholic – to be physically and mentally able to attend Mass and receive the Sacraments.

These quite usual matters appear often to the recovered alcoholic inestimable gifts, as the sight of trees and stones and human faces must have seemed to Lazarus when he rose from the tomb; though, of course, being human, we often fall into forgetfulness and ingratitude. Above all, one has an imperative wish to share the miracle of sobriety with the brother alcoholic who is still hidden and lost in the terrible half-world that the disease constructs for us to live and die in. I cannot speak for Alcoholics Anonymous; no member has the right to do that. But I can express my unchanging reverence and gratitude for that organisation through which God works so powerfully for page 274 the healing of alcoholics. In two places I can find God without hindrance – before the Blessed Sacrament in a Catholic church; and at the heart of an A.A. meeting, when the quiet, irresistible force of the Holy Spirit wells up in the hearts of those who are standing together on the same rock of reality. And when I speak of recovery, though I think first of my own experience, I have the shared experience of others continually in mind. Through them my liabilities were turned into assets; and from their brotherly and sisterly love I too learnt how to love.

As I see it, the basis of A.A. spirituality is the recognition of a common destitution that waits for God to transform it into fertile love. Our badges are wounds; our language, ordinary, sincere, sometimes halting, conceals many chasms of light and darkness. Our central blessing is that we know at least who we are – alcoholics – people who were created to come to God by the direct road of accepted humiliations. We are able to be joyful.

To put the cork in the last bottle, or to pour it down the sink, is merely the first step and the beginning of a lifelong journey. One does not cease to be an alcoholic because one has ceased to drink. After three days or a week of abstinence the violent physical pains of drying-out will have begun to fade. Alcoholics who are hospitalised often quickly recover a strong sense of physical well-being as a result of a few days of rest and care and good food. The mental compulsion may itself fall temporarily out of sight. But when, with an unchanged personality structure, they go out the hospital gate, the compulsion is certain to reassert itself. They will find themselves in the nearest pub, glass in hand, beginning again the terrified and despairing descent to the half-world that seems to be their natural habitat.

At the centre of the A.A. programme of recovery lies the absolute necessity for personality change – the Twelve Steps were set down by the founders of A.A. (themselves alcoholics) with this goal in mind. These are the twelve suggested steps of Alcoholics Anonymous:

1.	We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.
2.	Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3.	Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4.	Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.	Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.	Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.	Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.	Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. page 275
9.	Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10.	Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11.	Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12.	Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practise these principles in all our affairs.

The Steps themselves, carried out deeply and in conjunction with regular attendance at A.A. meetings, are sufficient to bring about the unnecessary personality in any drunk who does not have some other mental disease in addition to alcoholism; and I have known them to be successful in cases where there was some such additional disease. They have perhaps the same kind of radical and deceptive simplicity that belongs to the Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. And they are designed by alcoholics for alcoholics. In my own case, I took them slowly, haphazardly and reluctantly, making excuses, wasting time and deceiving myself; yet over a period of seven years they removed entirely from my life the alcoholic compulsion and brought in its place a workable pattern of behaviour.

The keynote of the Steps is progress, not perfection. We drunks are peculiarly given to forms of spiritual make-believe, by which we convince ourselves that we are all but saints because we have given somebody a two-dollar note. I doubt if the weakness is terribly culpable. It is too childish for that. But one has to recognise it when it shows itself, and say, in effect – ‘Not perfection, mate; progress – that’s what you are cut out for.’

Alcoholism, as my sponsor and spiritual elder brother in A.A. used often to say to myself and others, is essentially a cancer of the emotions. We just have to get our emotions under control. We speak chiefly of serenity as our final spiritual goal. I think that the serenity envisaged by A.A. members is really identical with the holy indifference which the Church so strenuously recommends to us – a spiritual condition of basic peace, connected closely to a personal abandonment to the will of God, and unshaken by external or internal changes. After thirteen years in A.A. I occasionally have a taste of this blessed manna, and there is no other food like it on earth.

The road of recovery, however, is almost always rocky. Something of the terrible dryness of active alcoholism lingers in the inner lives of recovering alcoholics – we have, I think, a spiritual landscape of rock and water. We are Bedouins, who have learnt that to travel on one’s own is to be lost, shifting on from waterhole to waterhole. Because we are in company we do not die of thirst. There is always the fresh shock of joy and discovery when, after a long page 276 dry trek, we find the river flowing and the waterhole brimming over. It is these moments which can make some A.A. members say, quite genuinely – ‘I am glad I am an alcoholic.’

I have often debated inwardly whether the journey is rougher for the single or the married alcoholic. Some of the most joyful and tranquil recovered alcoholics I have known have been single people; possibly because they could give an uninterrupted assistance to their fellow-drunks. Though the life of the recovering married alcoholic may seem on the face of it emotionally richer, he or she is likely to have the problem of being torn between two vocations, marriage and that service to other drunks which is an essential factor in recovery. Also, a home which has known the ravages of active alcoholism is like a town still standing over a hurricane: one emerges thankfully from the cellar to look with relief at the no longer raging sky, but when one looks at the ground one can easily be frightened by the enormous necessary work of reconstruction. The fact that one’s relatives will almost certainly feel that one’s own voluntary decisions were the cause of the hurricane is inclined to make this work more difficult. I think most alcoholics in their first year or so of recovery wisely concentrate on getting themselves in order. It may then be galling for the family to see dad or mum apparently more interested in people who were previously strangers than in themselves; yet the situation is positive, in contrast with the negative state of active alcoholism. And I doubt if the recovering alcoholic really has much choice. He or she has to begin to understand and work the A.A. programme to survive at all; and the programme can only be learnt from those who are already working it. Moreover, the complex and highly demanding relationships of family life may well be beyond the power of the newly recovering alcoholic to cope with; it is better if he or she can let old wounds heal a little, and not rush in with a clumsy bandaging which may do more harm than good. When an unanxious and confident sobriety is once established then the task of family reconstruction can go ahead; but I think some kind of breathing space is nearly always necessary, both to protect the delicate stability of the alcoholic and to give the relatives time to adjust to a new situation. I have often noticed that those alcoholics who are temporarily separated from their families in the first year of the recovery make better headway, if and when the family is reunited, than those who start trying to re-establish a vigorous home life from the day they put the cork in the last bottle.

These are all matters of opinion and may vary from family to family. One common source of difficulty, however, may be that all that is required for the alcoholic’s recovery is that he or she should be occupied with restoring good relationships within the home, and that the recovery programme is in a sense an extra burden and an unwarranted intrusion, I think this view, though very natural on a human level, is unperceptive. In fact, an active concern for one’s neighbour outside the family should be a normal part of Christian life; its page 277 avoidance is all too common in our notoriously secular times; and the A.A. programme is scarcely at fault in changing the balance, even if at first it may seem to tip rather too much the other way.

The family as well as the alcoholic may have a number of cramped, negative attitudes which will need to change if they are to get peace of mind. A typical situation is that the attention of the relatives has become intensely concentrated on the disturbances of the alcoholic, to the forgetting of their own moral and mental maintenance – while the fear of a relapse on the part of their alcoholic is still with them, this is likely to continue. But when they see that he or she can at last cope with life, they can begin to relax and turn their attention to other matters, including their own spiritual progress.

There is often a real problem when, for example, dad begins to take over his legitimate authority and responsibility in the home. Mum may have got used unconsciously to being the head of the house, and may strongly resent being reduced from captain to first mate; or she may be quite well accustomed to play the role in relation to her husband of the mother of a grown-up delinquent child, but be unable to cope with the more complex demands of emotional equality. In these circumstances it is up to the alcoholic to make his moves gently and gradually, perhaps to accept for some years a lesser status. Otherwise he may find himself single again, not because he drinks but because he has begun to be awkwardly sober. His children may resent it when the drunk around the place comes suddenly to life and tells them what they should or should not do. Here too it is best for him to take things gradually. During these difficult periods a regular attendance at A.A. meetings will tend to ease his mind and give him a sense of perspective – so many of his fellow-alcoholics will be passing through similar crises.

In general the everyday problems of recovery can be put under the three headings of finance, romance and itchy feet. The recovering alcoholic may have many large debts; and he may be tempted to give all his attention to paying them off, instead of giving it first and foremost to the work of acquiring a contented sobriety. I have known men who finally died on the booze because they could not learn to put sobriety first and financial obligations second on the list.

The problems of romance can of course be manifold – the recovering alcoholic may have developed during his time of drinking a habit of philandering almost as compulsive as his hoisting of the booze – and if he happens to strike, say, a year of celibacy at home, he may easily become resentful and slip back into this immature habit. The fact that alcoholism is predominantly a disease of acute physical and mental tensions which persist long after a technical sobriety has been established can also cause trouble. When fellow-alcoholics have discussed their sexual tensions with me, I have always tended to stress the medical side of the equation rather than the moral one – it is rather absurd to offer moral maxims to somebody who has page 278 just spent a couple of nights lying awake in a state of tension and excitation which was not of his own making. The wives or husbands of alcoholics often find that the intimately painful and sometimes revolting processes of active alcoholism have over the years made it impossible for them to respond with any enthusiasm to their partner. They have opted for a quiet life; and who can blame them? It is best if the recovering alcoholic does not brood about this problem. A cheerful, casual and positive attitude is the thing to aim at; accepting whatever small attentions may come his or her way in the home – rejecting whatever is offered from outside the home – but never demanding a response.

Again, the problem of itchy feet may lead the alcoholic to shift from job to job, to come up suddenly with new plans, and so on – it is really part of his discovery of the meaning of his new freedom, his development of previously unused potentials, and will probably in itself do little harm – it is not essential that everyone should stick at the same job, or laboriously climb the promotion ladder. Most dry alcoholics are capable of enormous bursts of working activity often interspersed with periods of lethargy – the kind of job that allows for this may be the best kind. But it doesn’t really matter; not if the alcoholic is in charge, under God, of his own life.

It is a fatal mistake for the recovering alcoholic to demand understanding from others, especially from his relatives. It is unlikely that he will get much, though he may get quite a lot of bewildered goodwill. If he demands it and does not get it, he will very likely become first frustrated, then resentful – this is where the red light goes on for all alcoholics – and be in grave danger, if he does nothing positive about it, of returning to the bottle. Resentment is the number one killer for the alcoholic. One should be thankful for whatever understanding one gets; but, in the terms of St Francis’s magnificent prayer, ask for the desire to understand others rather than to be understood, to give love rather than to receive it.

But I do feel a burning compassion for those of my fellow-alcoholics who never reach the haven and sanctuary of Alcoholics Anonymous. Even if they were not bound to die painfully or go insane – since alcoholism is a fatal and progressive illness – they would still be the loneliest men and women on the face of the earth. You will understand then why I feel continually impelled to reach out to them.

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