Faith and Sobriety

“Being alcoholics in recovery was only one part of our friendship; but it was a big part.”

By David Dupree

“Alcoholism, if unchecked, is a progressive malady nicely summarized in the Caribbean motto, ‘First the man takes the rum, then the rum takes the man, then the rum takes the rum.’ For reasons that are as yet unclear some people drink alcohol in an attempt to medicate a problem of adjustment to life and then become trapped as the ‘medicine’ becomes a poison that they cannot resist without help. The book Alcoholics Anonymous, which has done more than any other single work to show alcoholics a way out of their affliction, regards alcoholism as a spiritual disease. That is, as Carl Jung and William James variously put it, the alcoholic is a failed mystic. He or she is trying to reach a state of consciousness more noble and splendid than the workaday one, and is deceived by Dionysus into thinking that alcohol is the royal road to heaven but finds, sometimes too late, that it is a blind alley, or even a road to hell.”

A Friend

Roger and I were from a particular generation, and that generation's substance of choice was alcohol.

Roger and I met at an AA meeting over sixteen years ago in San Francisco. I had moved from Atlanta, my family home for generations, to San Francisco for the wakening I thought I needed as a newly sober gay man. Sitting near me was a white bearded man who spoke with a stammer which somehow seemed to disappear when I listened closely to his words. I knew I had to know this man, and went up and asked him to go to lunch with me. Graciously, he accepted and we became fast friends, with Roger staying with me during his summer visits from Duke University. That was in the long years before he retired to the Bay Area.

Being alcoholics in recovery was only one part of our friendship; but it was a big part. Addiction to a substance can be deadening to the spirit. Just not drinking anymore wasn't really enough though, since the reasons I drank were still there: I had used alcohol abusively to mask my personal history and feelings which I did not want to acknowledge or understand. This seems true for most addicts – particularly when a substance or lifestyle has destroyed the things we held dear. Roger and I were from a particular generation, and that generation's substance of choice was alcohol: it was socially sanctioned, legally available, and its abuse was considered a personal failing – to be disapproved of, perhaps, but not necessarily to be investigated.

Roger had eight years of sobriety, and I found myself relying upon him for guidance.

A Mentor

The book, Alcoholics Anonymous, which has done more than any other single work to show alcoholics a way out of their affliction, regards alcoholism as a spiritual disease.

When I was developing Roger's memorial service – which we both wanted to be a remembrance, and not just a ceremony – I knew I had to share with those assembled our common reliance on Alcoholics Anonymous as gateway onto a recovered sense of life. I knew I would have to use the form of an AA testimonial. Please listen to it as it comes online.

Roger credited AA for some of his ability to succeed. He chose the publication of Monica Furlong's biography of Alan Watts – featuring Watts's troubled life with alcoholism – to publish a few of his own reflections on the relationship between the mystic character and the alcoholic in our culture. The quotation above is from this review. But that quotation is only part of the general reflections; Roger turns his remarks to a direct and startling and very personal address:

“Without a medical diagnosis, which cannot of course now be given, it is impossible to say for certain whether Watts was an alcoholic. But if we assume he was, and that he was therefore a failed mystic, I believe we have the key to the tragedy of his life. His vision was wonderful, ‘the joyous cosmology’ indeed, but he mistook the means of securing it. Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion became, in time, the necessity to consume spirits and, although some of his friends and relatives were horrified at his deterioration, others (technically called enablers) excused his escapades (which make distressingly familiar reading to anyone who has known an alcoholic) as ‘zen effects.’ Toward the end, depression and paranoia, typical of advanced alcoholism, set in, and we can speculate that, to our great loss, he did not die because of a failed experiment in samadhi but that his heart failure was alcohol-related. And, our hair may stand on end at the suggestion, made on the last page of the book, that Watts has been reincarnated as Jano's daughter Laura who, when ‘a tiny girl,’ went straight for the vodka. We can and should be grateful for the many valuable gifts he gave us, particularly his attempts to see how Buddhism and Christianity might meet for at some profound level, but we need to confront his failure directly and be sad about it. It may serve as a warning to some of us still living.”

Roger's review was originally published in Buddist-Christian Studies, Vol. 9 (1989).

You can read this review through the San Francisco Public Library (link); or you can access it directly at your own by using JSTOR (link).