We can all benefit from this advice to addicts

Four hundred people attended a lecture last Monday evening. Not bad, for any lecture, but when it is one entitled, "Addiction and Spirituality: the Illusory Search for Pain Relief and Pleasure, Meaning and Wholeness", it does cause one to blink a little.

Some years ago, when I started writing opinion pieces, I was chatting through ideas with a media-savvy friend. Contentious areas such as poverty and inequality, reducing the numbers seeking abortion, and how we treat children in our society were fine, but when I suggested writing about our attitudes to alcohol he looked aghast. "For God's sake, stay off that. You don't want to alienate people." Things have changed somewhat, but not enough. We are beginning to grow up a little and to acknowledge that we have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.

However, we focus that anxiety on the fact that our young people have one of the highest rates of binge drinking in Europe. But it is easy to bewail the behaviour of young people. Much more difficult is to examine what we as adults present to them. Every social occasion is lubricated with drink.

Wetting the baby's head is a jokey reference to the fact that even a christening is unthinkable without alcohol. Literally from the cradle, we teach our children that every good time is better with alcohol.

The lecture was given by Maura Russell, as part of the Rutland Centre's Addiction Awareness Week. She is a former director of the Rutland Centre, now in private practice as a psychotherapist, consultant and trainer. It is her contention that: "Addiction and other symptoms of mental, emotional and spiritual distress are emerging in a society where there is now a spiritual vacuum. The search for ways to cope with the pain of meaninglessness, spiritual insecurity and loss of soul is expressed in addiction."

Maura Russell believes that in other countries alcohol is used, respected and enjoyed, but we have not reached that stage in Ireland. Our accident and emergency rooms are filled with the fallout from excessive drinking, not just in car accidents but in domestic violence and many other ways.

But she is not particularly interested in telling people not to drink, but just to look at what our drinking tells us about ourselves. She believes that alcohol abuse is connected with an essential part of our humanity - the quest for something more than the everyday, a sense of connectedness. The addicts with whom she works often referred to their first experience with drink or drugs as a glimpse of heaven, and they then expended great energy in trying to re-create that glimpse. The challenge, she believes, is to hold on to that desire for something more, without burying it in destructive or addictive behaviours.

Her prescription is simple. We need to find more time to listen and talk to each other, to give each other space to explore the realities of our lives, rather than drowning such questions at the bottom of a glass.

Oddly enough, I think our society is more comfortable with addictive behaviour. Someone who regularly gets locked will be seen as great craic. Someone who wants to explore what life is all about is likely to find people sidling uneasily away from them.

A month has passed since the terrorist attacks on America. There has been much talk about the rediscovery of the importance of friends and family, of connectedness and of getting priorities right. The average age of those who died in the Twin Towers was 31. They left an extraordinary number of orphans behind them, because so many were single parents.

I have no doubt that the events of September 11th will lead some people to reassess their lives and to establish healthier priorities. But, equally, I have no doubt that many more will find themselves seeking forgetfulness in destructive ways such as addictive behaviours.

The shock of September 11th was that the unthinkable can happen. Impregnable America was in reality completely vulnerable. Yet the events of that day are only the essential facts of all our lives writ large. None of us knows, if you will pardon a rather grimly inappropriate image, what will fall out of the sky on us. It is called the human condition, and not to feel radical anxiety at that reality is to exist to some extent in denial.

Coming to terms with that radical anxiety demands an ability to tolerate ambiguity, to accept all aspects of the human condition, including fallibility and death.

Maura Russell believes we desperately lack a forum where people can explore the seeming contradiction between the fear and the anxiety which human beings face, and the latent potential for growth inherent in those realities. In past times the extended family and the church provided anchors for people's lives. She feels that to some extent people have lost faith in the church's ability to fulfil that function. There is a huge challenge for the church to meet the spiritual yearning and longing and at the moment they are just not meeting that challenge.

There are twin dangers inherent in a time when it is difficult to find a forum for spiritual matters. The first is to dismiss the questions and become busy seeking distractions. The second is to indulge in a kind of narcissistic spirituality.

I fully acknowledge the moral seriousness of spiritual seekers, and among my friends who are alcoholics I have often been humbled by the depth of their spiritual awakening. Certainly, much of our Sunday rituals are insipid.

However, I also feel that the ordinariness of remaining rooted in a great religious tradition, however anaemic the local version may be, often provides the better chance of avoiding the danger of comfort zone spirituality.

Alcoholics are not so different from the rest of us. Most of us spend our time stumbling around, finding myriad ways to avoid facing the hard realities of life. In highlighting the spiritual void in many of our lives, Maura Russell has done more than addicts a favour.

bobrien@irish-times.ie