Ready for Lent - Parched, by Heather King

"My own life was a mystery to me"

                                               Heather King, Parched

I have spent time in recent weeks reflecting on Heather Kings’s 2005 memoir Parched.  I’m gearing up for Lent and giving up alcohol is on my short list of Lenten observances this year.

The book chronicles Ms King’s life as a drunk and her eventual recovery.  The stories in her book provide plenty of reasons to lay the bottle down for six weeks and remind me that there is a price to be paid even for casual drinking. 
Letting go of the habit for forty days will help me re-assess the role drinking plays in my life and the extent to which it may interfere with my relationships with others and with God. 

But Parched is a great Lenten reflection not because it is about giving up drinking, it’s really about giving up everything. 
From her first beer in ninth grade and over the following twenty years her whole life centered around alcohol. As she describes it...

 "A normal person would regard the next two decades of my life, scratch his or her head and say, “Why’d you do that? Why didn’t you just stop?” But already I couldn’t have stopped. I didn’t know that by taking that first drink I had surrendered my free will: the thing that distinguishes me from an animal”

For Heather King, to stop drinking was not a matter of giving up one thing, it required giving up the entire life she had cultivated over the previous two decades. It also required the grace of God.

Toward the end of the book, King recounts how she was set up by her family. She was picked up at her apartment in Boston by her younger brother under the pretense they were going to a family gathering to celebrate her father’s birthday. She arrives to find her family sitting in a circle with an intervention counselor, a pitcher of lemonade, a litany of examples of how her drinking had hurt them and a plane ticket.

A few days later her family put her on a plane to Minnesota where they had booked her for a thirty day stay in a treatment facility. Her life, such as it had been,was now over.

A cynic might say that she did not recover through the grace of God, but through the intervention of her family. If a loving family isn’t a grace from God, what is? 


And what is a Lenten sacrifice if not an invitation to grace?


While we're on the subject of drinking, Merle Haggard, John Lee Hooker, The Louvin Brothers, George Jones and others are featured on my short Spotify playlist,
Songs by for and About Drunks.