Dear Friend of Guest House,

In the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions seeks to give a fuller explanation of the proposed steps along the pathway of sobriety. It describes one type of alcoholic as the “intellectually self-sufficient man or woman,” the ones who believed they could handle all of life’s issues, even those created through alcoholic behavior, by intellect and tenacity. That was the starting point, which eventually brought me to the doors of Guest House in late June of 2006.

I was blessed with a capacity to achieve progressive academic success, and after my studies, I was hired at a small Catholic college where I spent the next 25 years as professor, campus minister, and eventually chief academic administrator. It also allowed me to develop drinking habits which would, at times, cause very negative consequences. But as the literature says, I made the invention of alibis a fine art, and even when sincerely questioned about my drinking by concerned friends and colleagues, I denied there was a problem. I believed I could handle it.

A life-changing encounter

The reality was that there was a very big problem, and those denials could no longer be ignored after an encounter with the local police. Due to various circumstances, I was not arrested that evening. But the encounter was my moment of revelation, the very moment of grace in which I said out loud: “I am an alcoholic.”

Rediscovering spirituality

I entered treatment at Guest House seven weeks later. One of the things I remember being told during my welcome into the program was that the first thing that alcohol robs us of is our spirituality. The next three