It’s hip to be square

Pastor Joe Focht, never one to tiptoe around an issue, recently took on alcohol abuse from the podium of his Philadelphia Calvary Chapel church. He is not in favor of it.

Here are a few excerpts from a sermon last spring:

“Alcoholism is not a disease. It’s an illness. And if it’s an illness why do breweries sell it? It’s like selling the flu.”

“2.5 million people a year die of alcoholism. It’s the number one threat. It ain’t slick, cool or savvy”

“50% of teen driving deaths are alcohol related.”

“Half a million kids between the ages of 9 and 11 are alcoholic”

“There are 16 million alcoholics in the USA, and 76 million who don’t touch alcohol.”

“Alcohol is accepted, available and advertised.”

His final word is that “we should be careful about our choices in life. There is, he says, “legalism on one side, carnality on the other. Walk circumspectly.”

In the end, Pastor Joe makes drinking alcohol a matter of personal responsibility, but he doesn’t drink and neither do the pastors on his staff. He doesn’t think its proper to take money from parishioners and spend any of it on alcohol.

As for the rest of us, he says, “You can do what you want. Whether or not you get in heaven has to do with the Holy Spirit, not alcohol.”

In the “tell it like it is” department, I find Pastor Joe’s candor refreshing, and, yes, even “hip.”

And there are signs that others feel the same way about churches. In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center the first week of September, 49%, of the respondents, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, said they support churches and other houses of worship expressing views on political and social questions. That’s up from 40% two years ago.

I had always wanted to be hip. In 1937, when I was eight, my parents relented and bought me my first pair of corduroy knickers and knee length socks for Christmas. They were the rage and all I really wanted. At sixteen, I wanted a zoot suit with the broad shoulders and pegged pants. No dice.

When I was eighteen, I went to college, joined a fraternity made up of callow youths like me and the World War II vets returning to college. They were older, drank a lot and had an air of world-weariness. (Well earned and authentic I might add).

For me, there followed a period of social drinking through two years of graduate school and three years in the Navy.  I was mustered out at 90 Church Street in lower Manhattan (wiped out in the attack on the World Trade Center 44 years later) and headed up town to Y & R, a leading New York ad agency where I began my descent into alcoholism.

In 1978 I attended my first AA meeting and sobered up.  In the process I began to feel hipper than I had ever been. I had a new and growing faith in God, family relations were beginning to be restored and enriched, and eventually I was able to help others achieve sobriety. This to me was the beginning of contentment and ultimate hipness

In the early 1980’s Huey Lewis and the News, a band with a new hit song “It’s hip to be square” came to Little Rock. They were playing one night at the Robinson auditorium, and I ran into one of the members that afternoon in the locker room of my athletic club. Both of us had been working out and were in the steam room.

Like me he was in a recovery program, was involved in church and was raising a family. My new friend told me some of his story, and it fit the lyrics of the first verse of the song, “It’s hip to be square.”

I used to be a renegade.

I used to fool around

But I couldn’t take the punishment and had to settle down

Now I’m playing it real straight, and yes, I cut my hair

You might think I’m crazy, but I don’t even care

Because I can tell what’s going on

It’s hip to be square

It’s hip to be square”

He and I were on the same path, and we rejoiced in it.

Author Mary Karr, who wrote a great book a few years ago about her recovery. “LIT-a memoir,” is, to me, the very essence of hipness.

         Near the end of her book, when she expresses doubts about her Christian faith and wonders whether it is all a big scam, another mentor, Toby, sets her straight.

         “Toby tells me how being a Christian during the Roman occupation was (as scams go) not so lucrative. The followers weren’t rich guys but riff raff—tax collectors and whores.

        “So let’s say Jesus was sincere. Maybe it’s the Church. Maybe Paul’s the big fakir.

        “You think Paul’s conversion made him some rich cult leader? That’s a laugh. He essentially resigned a CPA job to ride with the Hell’s Angels.

        “Early Christians,” Toby reminds me, “partly won converts by going to death singing. I mean, a lion is eating your face, and you’re singing.”

         In the end, Mary has become a woman of faith, but she is not without her occasional doubts, which she discusses with Father Kane, a retired priest.

        “I sit weeping across from him, fully aware of the ingratitude I’ve occasionally nurtured and fertilized like a garden of black vines. Which posture rankles him. ‘Oh, get up, Mary,’ he says. ‘You know damn well God loves you.’

        “And I do. I (mostly) always do.

        “I’d like to say I never waver from that place, but on a crowded subway I still pine for a firearm some days.”