Allergy

My friend Farquar told me that he had to stop drinking because he was allergic to alcohol.  Say what?  Farquar said that he would break out into immorality.  But what puzzled him was that those times when he did not drink, because he was broke or had a spasm of spirituality, he felt like a square peg in a round world.  Nothing seemed to fit.  Immorality was his solution.  I did not press him on what constituted immorality for him.    He did not finally surrender to his recovery program until the pain got too bad and his solution too futile.  Farquar surrendered not only the booze but his whole way of living.  He would not have done that if he had some smaller misfit issues.  Most of us don't have super serious issues in our lives that are destroying us, so we never can really surrender.  We lived patched up lives.  No one on a truly spiritual path seems to suggest patched up as a solution.  Some people ask me, "How do I surrender?"  Well, when you are miserable enough, but don't die, the path will appear.  Farquar found it to be so.