Drinking My Way to Jesus

In the Church, we often hear the advice to guard our eye-gates and ear-gates because the sin is contagious and the influences we allow into our lives through these exposures will alter our realties and attitudes in ways we might not notice until we find our relationships with Christ have changed, either for better or worse.

As an atheistic college student, I regularly went out drinking with my new friends and acquaintances. Once drunk, we'd noisily head back to our dormitory, and my contribution to the night's hilarity was to serve as group songleader. I could have chosen "Jungle Boogie" or for that matter the theme song to "Mister Ed". (If you've never heard of this early 1960's sitcom, let me know. If I have that many youthful readers, I'll try to dedicate a future post to that talking horse.)

However, the song I chose as our drunk and rowdy theme was "Onward, Christian Soldiers". Why? Maybe because I was familiar with it since my childhood days at Christ Episcopal Church, and I liked it's jaunty marching beat, or maybe I chose "Onward Christian Solders" because the drunken students I had in tow were almost all Jews and I enjoyed the irony.

Though I thought I'd picked the song at random, I believe now it was no accident. The picture and sound of me leading groups of non-Christians boldly through the late-night streets of Greenwich Village, NYC, shouting a celebration of Jesus night after night after (albeit impaired) night, had to make an impression in my subconscious as well as my conscious mind. So much so that nearly three decades later, my very first sermon began with those words..."Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus marching on before."

By then, I'd stopped getting drunk on Michelob or Tangeray, having switched to intoxication by the Holy Spirit. Onward, indeed.

(Photograph by Jan Jelinek)

Comments

[Marcus Goodyear]

That is quite a story, Diane. I always wonder about the power of words when I read stories like that. Sometimes saying something aloud to ourselves seems to change us and the world around us.