Addiction reflects a God size hole in our souls

 I have some personal experience with alcohol addiction, and indeed with addiction in general.  When friends suggest I might like a drink, I tell them that I have already had a lifetime supply of the stuff, so thank you but no thank you.  This is said humorously, and the "joke" is taken as such and the conversation move on.

So, I was interested when I saw Andrea Widburg's post at the American Thinker entitled A retired New York Times columnist offers an incredibly classist take on alcoholism. The columnist that Ms. Widburg is writing about is one Nicholas Kristoff, who grew up on his family's vineyard and cherry orchard. But despite this upbringing, his parents were college professors, and young Kristoff went to Harvard, and then took a job at the NYT. Widburg notes Kristoff's huge blind spot concerning alcoholism and the class of people who drink the fine Pinot Noir produced by his family's vineyard:

So, despite his execrable political views, Kristof seems like a decent human being. It’s that decent quality that makes all the more interesting his strange views about alcoholism. As far as Kristof is concerned, people in his class don’t have that problem. It’s a poor person’s thing.

In an article published in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, the author describes a walk through Kristof’s vineyard, on the farm on which he grew up, where he grows grapes used for Pinot Noir. Kristof acknowledges the scourge of alcoholism, but denies any connection between that and his grapes:

“I don’t think that most people appreciate that most years, alcohol kills more people than drugs,” Kristof told me, though he clarified that he does not believe this is true of the type of alcohol that he makes. He also does not think that profiting off the sale of alcohol and lowering rates of alcohol addiction, two of his stated immediate goals, are in conflict. “You know, I’ve lost friends to alcoholism, but I haven’t lost any to Pinot Noir alcoholism,” he said.

The article’s author apparently suggested that Pinot Noir could be a “gateway” alcohol, but Kristof wasn’t buying it:

“I take your point that some people start with nice Pinot Noirs and then… ,” he trailed off. “But I think that is much less common, and those who die, the mortality from alcoholism, it’s driven really by working-class Americans, and it’s in kind of bulk hard liquor particularly. I don’t think that good wine and cider add significantly to the problem.”

Widburg is correct that alcoholism affects all classes of people, the poor, the rich, even the religious. And despite my experiences with alcoholism, I feel sorry for the "wine moms" Widburg cites, because they often have a hole in their souls due to paying too much attention to the World.  I do not look at alcohol itself as the evil thing, and Kristoff is not a bad person for making fine wine. Alcohol  just is an inanimate object, with no will of its own.  It is, rather a symptom of a deeper issue. The Evil One takes advantage of alcohol to tempt us. In other words, it is fundamentally a spiritual problem, an attempt to fill a hole in our souls left by God when we kick him out. Of course God could force his way in, but that is not His way.

I have said this before, but perhaps not often enough, we humans are spiritual beings in a material World.  It is easy for us to pay too much attention to the material, and not enough to the spiritual.  We Christians must be in the World, because that is where God placed us, but we can not be of the World, as the other animals are.  We can not, for instance, retreat as the Monks do, because we must be in the World.  At the same time, we can not become depressed by the events of the World because He is in control.  And this Easter season is a good time to begin paying attention.  Your church may have Maundy Thursday, the day Christ celebrated Passover, Good Friday, the day he died, an Easter Vigil Saturday, and Easter celebration Sunday.  If they do, please attend as much as you can, to bring you more into spiritual awareness. 

May His will be done!