Alcohol often loosens the tongue

Waithaka Waihenya

Some years back when there were few African Catholic priests, which meant that many parishes in the country did not have enough to go round, I loved attending the third mass. Not just because this mass came almost in mid-morning, which meant that I did not have to wake up early, but because the priest was much more interesting then.

He was an Irish priest whose name I will not mention because I have a lot of respect for him. He had a lot of courage. Even when he was in the departure lounge of his life, he never got worried that there would never be a next flight.

In the mornings, the priest was feisty and cantankerous. His sermons were jeremiads and he looked annoyed, like a victim of some irritable bowel syndrome. By the second mass, he would loosen up and give a fairly enlightening sermon. By the third mass, the man would even dance at the sanctuary, happy with himself, happy with the Lord, happy to be ministering. We used to wonder why he was always more interesting on the third mass. Yet, no one had the courage to ask him. Much later, the audacious young man that I was decided to seek an explanation from him. He denied that that was the case, insisting that he did everything liturgically and sanctimoniously.

But I insisted that that was not the case. The old man, with his eyes that seemed to see through the souls of the parishioners looked at me and coughed. "My boy," he told me, "At every mass, priests do take some wine."

"Aha," I said innocently, not guessing what he was driving at.

"Wine has some alcohol you know. By the third mass I have taken nearly three doubles…"

I got the drift.

Years later, I got interested in knowing why it is that people who take alcohol appear happier and more reverential than the sober. This Christmas, as indeed all Christmas seasons, Kenyans will drink alcohol copiously. But observe that when a sober man is heading to his drinking den, he looks gloomy and serious. After a few drinks, everyone becomes a friend. When he staggers home, he seems happy and light, he sings, he worships. When they are playing Mugithi or Jesu e Muoyo (Christ is alive) the patrons in a bar come alive. Drunkards are seized by some spiritual paroxysm. They raise up their hands in a way they don’t do in church.

Spiritualism

When alcohol is on the tongue, the drunken man worships. Like in my priest, alcohol has this ability of bringing out the divinity in us. In that state, we rise up and forget our miserable humanness and seek to transcend the limits of our possibilities. It is a state that allows some of us to "cross the surly bonds" of our earthliness to touch the face of the God we seek to worship in our sobriety but whom we cannot connect with in our ordinary lives.

Alcohol, it must be said, has a way of propelling us into a heightened state of spiritualism. It has a way of embellishing our psyches in such a way that, even those who spend days arguing there is no God, suddenly find him in that state of inebriation.

Could it be that when inebriated, we are who we actually are? In vino veritas (under the influence of alcohol one tells the truth) the Italians say. When we are drunk, we have few pretensions. We can insult our neighbour and blame the alcohol.

Fight

But that is what we have always wanted to do anyway but we have never been ourselves enough to do it. In alcohol, we become true to ourselves. When we are drunk, we fight the other man. But that is what we are predisposed to in our normal lives only that we have never been in that state of faithfulness to ourselves to enact out that disposition.

When Noah’s daughters wanted to get children and lacked the men to sire the children, they got their father drunk and lay with him and got children. I don’t know if this is what they had always wanted to do but they recognised that, even in creation, alcohol can play a role, albeit an unwelcome one.

So, it could be that, in spite all the bad name it has been given, alcohol makes us true. It makes the third mass interesting, it makes the drunk worship. If these are alcohol’s redeeming qualities, then little wonder no ceremony could proceed without it, even in the Old Testament. And today I understand why the third mass is always far more interesting.