To Slake a Thirst, The Matt Talbot Way to Sobriety, by Philip MaynardYou won't get any dreary "Here's how I finally hit bottom" tales from this book by an alcoholic who stopped drinking more than 15 years ago. Instead, Philip Maynard lets us look into the mind of the alcoholic. According to Maynard, drinking provided a release from daily stress and the feeling of being lifted "above the world" to a realm of unsurpassed pleasure and self-knowledge. The drinker is, in effect, "fooled into believing he has hit on the key to an easy transcendence over the world."
After drinking heavily for most of his adult life and repeatedly trying to quit, chiefly with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, Maynard was able to stop for good when he realized that the thirst he was trying to satisfy was actually a spritual one. His life changed when he acknowledged that the "transcendent" feeling he got from liquor was a crude and destructive substitute for the love of God. Maynard came to that realization when he learned about the life of Matt Talbot, a Dublin dockworker, a confirmed alcoholic by his 20's, who gave up drinking at 28 and whose spirituality so soared in the process that he is now a candidate for sainthood. The Matt Talbot way to sobriety, as laid out by Maynard in this book, is a set of spiritual exercises intended to keep the drinker focused on God, through Jesus, instead of on the alcoholic high. Maynard claims the Matt Talbot Way can be followed by any Christian; it seems to this writer that it holds promise for anyone who can recognize a spiritual dimension in him or herself.
It is said that Matt Talbot was an alcoholic by the time he reached his teens. He lived to drink. But all that changed one day when he was 28. He was broke; his weekly paycheck had already been passed to the bartender. He stood outside the pub for several hours, waiting for one of his friends to invite him in. No one did. He went home and told his mother: "I'm taking the pledge," to which she replied, "Don't take it if you can't keep it." With no A.A., no sponsor, no weekly meetings to attend, he had to rely on God alone. He found a way to sobriety that not only enabled him to give up drinking from that time on, but led him to adopt a way of life such that, at his death in 1925, word of his holiness spread throughout Ireland and his cause for canonization was begun almost immediately. He was declared venerable by Pope Paul VI in 1975. This is his story and his method. It has been set forth here to provide an answer to those for whom other programs have not worked or who have been looking for a way that addressed more specifically their own most deeply felt spiritual needs.
