Before I graduated from Blanchet High School, I asked Fr. Michael G. Ryan, “Is it a mortal sin to get drunk?” I was too young to have learned an important lesson: If you don’t want the answer, it is best not to ask the question. I also didn’t know that Fr. Ryan was one of the most well-known priests in Seattle. He was the chancellor of the archdiocese and protégé of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, one of the most well-known bishops in the United States. All I knew was that Fr. Ryan always had time for me and for my questions.
He replied to my question “Is it a mortal sin to get drunk?” with a single syllable, “Yes.”
Well, this was not the answer I was hoping he’d give. Why not some nuance, some equivocation, some degrees of gray? Surely there was a German theologian who had examined the Q source through a Heideggerian hermeneutic and found a more accommodating answer. California Coolers beckoned, so the little lawyer in me had a follow-up question, “How much can I drink before it becomes a mortal sin?”
Fr. Ryan gave an answer I’ve never forgotten. He looked at me with compassion and said, “You may drink as much as you want—provided that it is compatible with loving God with your whole heart and loving your neighbor as yourself.” A silence stood between us, and I knew better than to ask him a follow-up question. I didn’t notice at the time that, like a master teacher, he gave me an answer to the question that I should have been asking.
I did ask myself the natural follow-up later: “If I am to love God with my whole heart and my neighbor as myself, how much can I drink?” The answer took me more than thirty years to figure out, mostly because a large part of me didn’t want to know. I was a bit like the man in the joke who said, “Please God, if you find me a parking spot, I promise I will go to church every Sunday and never touch a drop of alcohol again!” A moment later, the man sees a parking spot open up right next to the entrance. He gasps and heads toward it. “Never mind. Found one!”
I was also a bit like Winston Churchill in setting up rules around my drinking. Churchill wrote, “When I was younger I made it a rule never to take a strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.” Indeed, for Churchill, there was something divine about drinking. After being told he could not drink in front of the Saudi king due to the king’s religious beliefs, Churchill said, “My religion prescribed as an absolute sacred rite smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and if need be during all meals and the intervals between them.”
Churchill was not alone in finding something divine about drinking. “Drinking,” Leslie Jamison writes in her book The Recovering, “is a thwarted flight into transcendence, like a dog, chained to a post, barking at the sky.”
The draw of drinking can be to seek what is good as well as to avoid what is bad. In his fantastic autobiography, Treasure in Clay, Fulton Sheen said that some people drink because they like the stuff; other people drink because they do not like something else. Christopher Beha, author of The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, seemed to fall into the second category. He writes:
I suffered for many years from terrible insomnia. Each time I tried to sleep, I became convinced that I would never wake up again. On many nights, I treated this problem by drinking myself into oblivion. When things started to change for me, one of the things that changed was this: I prayed myself to sleep instead. This habit eventually became central to my spiritual life, the moment when I asked myself whether I had spent the day that was ending as I ought to have spent it and committed myself to living the day to come as well as I could.
I am a binge listener to Dr. Andrew Huberman, the Stanford School of Medicine professor and podcaster, who helps me to live my days better than before. His two-hour podcast episode “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health” has more than seven million views for a reason. Though Huberman doesn’t say a word about God or love in this podcast, he helped me think through the question that vexed me for so long. Finally, after so many years, the answer to the question “How much can I drink that is compatible with loving God with my whole heart and my neighbor as myself?” came to me as the rising sun: slowly, surely, but finally overwhelmingly. It was not the first time—nor would it be the last—that Fr. Michael G. Ryan and Andrew Huberman changed the trajectory of my life for the better.