My earliest memories of alcohol are inseparable from my earliest memories of belonging. One of my first memories is from a wake for a distant cousin when I was around five years old. His body was laid out in the dining room of a relative’s row house, the coffin surrounded by flowers and flickering candles. The rosary droned steadily from the living room while stories rose and fell over cans of beer and cigarette smoke. I sat cross-legged on the floor near the doorway playing jacks with my cousins, the small metal pieces scattering across the hardwood while adults moved around us carrying grief, ham salad sandwiches, and drinks. No one seemed to find anything unusual about children playing beside the dead while laughter and beer spilled nearby. It was sorrow and hospitality braided tightly together.
My father and uncles bartended holiday parties at the Knights of Columbus, and I spent those nights on the floor behind the bar with my cousins, eating maraschino cherries out of beer glasses. The cherries were bright and improbably red and carried the thrill of being included in something. I didn’t understand then that I was learning something about festivity, ritual, and what it meant to belong to a people.
St. Patrick’s Day meant watching my great-grandmother’s Waterford crystal pitcher fill with green beer, the crystal so thick you couldn’t see the dye pooling at the bottom until it was nearly full. That pitcher was an heirloom, brought from Ireland, used once a year. It held both the family history and the Budweiser.
I think there is a particular kind of dissonance that can emerge when faith, family, celebration, and alcohol become so intertwined that they stop registering as separate things at all. Especially in communities where the sacred and the social are deeply woven together.
I didn’t notice the architecture of it for a very long time. You rarely do when you’re built inside a thing.
Benedictine monks brewed beer. Trappists made some of the most sought-after ales in the world. Augustine of Hippo, of the restless heart that could not rest until it rested in God, is the patron saint of brewers. Brigid of Kildare, Celtic abbess and holy fire-keeper, left behind a poem wishing for a great lake of beer for the Lord of Lords. The memes write themselves. The culture had written them long before the internet existed to distribute them.
When I was a few years into parish ministry, I worked at a church where the Holy Thursday Mass included a full table in the vestibule, covered end to end with bottles of wine and loaves of bread brought by parishioners. After Mass, you took a bottle and a loaf home with you. It was generous and communal and beautiful, and also, I understand now, completely invisible to me as a moment worth examining.
I used to joke in early recovery that AA wasn’t for me because I would have known every priest in the room.
It was a good joke. It landed every time. And I think now it was a kind of armor.
Here is what I want to say carefully: I am not making an argument against wine at the reception, or beer at the parish fish fry, or the Trappist ale poured with reverence and genuine craft. I am not interested in prohibition by another name. Faith traditions have long and legitimate relationships with fermentation, with the grape and the grain as gifts.
What I am saying is this: when alcohol is woven so completely into the fabric of a community, even a sacred community, especially a sacred community, it becomes invisible. And things that are invisible cannot be examined. They cannot be chosen. They simply are.
When alcohol is woven so completely into the fabric of a community, even a sacred community, especially a sacred community, it becomes invisible. And things that are invisible cannot be examined. They cannot be chosen. They simply are.
Anne Marie Cribbin
For a long time, I could not see alcohol at church events as a choice. It was like the weather. It was just there. It was the way things were done. And because the church was also the community where I had discerned my vocation, had prayed beside people through grief and birth and illness and doubt, had felt most held and most known, the thought of navigating it sober felt less like a spiritual challenge and more like exile.
I was not ready to be exiled from the place that had shaped me.
The turn didn’t come with a sermon or a sacrament. It came with an invitation to something called Thirsty Thursday at The Well.
I found my way to a women’s bible study carrying this name, organized by a woman who had no idea what she had done to me simply by choosing those words. In college, Thirsty Thursday had meant 25-cent draft night. It had meant loud bars and cheap pitchers and the recklessness of a midweek night that pretended to be a weekend. It had meant not being alone.
The Well was different. The Well was a Gospel story, the Samaritan woman who came to draw water at noon, in the high heat of the day, because the weight of her history meant she could not come when others came. She was not hiding so much as she was trying to take up as little space as possible. And Jesus was already there, waiting without judgment, not asking for her credentials but simply: give me a drink.
It was the collision of those two images, the 25-cent draft night and the woman at the well, that broke something open in me the way a window lets the light in.
I had been thirsty for a very long time. I had been reaching for connection, for presence, for the feeling of being met exactly where I was. Alcohol had offered a version of that for years. The church had offered its own version. And somehow I had never fully understood that both were gestures toward the same need, and that one of them was consuming my ability to experience the other.
The thing that the Thirsty Thursday moment clarified was not that the church was an unsafe place to get sober. It was something harder to articulate and more important: alcohol had followed me everywhere. It had come for my holidays and my heritage and my friendships and my creative life. It had also come for my faith. It had made itself at home in every room in the house, including the rooms I thought of as sanctuaries.
I think about this when I hear people say that faith communities are natural homes for recovery. And in many ways they are. The language of surrender and grace and showing up imperfectly is not foreign to any tradition I know. But I also think that faith communities, perhaps more than most, have work to do in learning to see what they have made invisible.
Not a prohibition. An awareness.
A glass of sparkling water at the reception that isn’t treated as an afterthought. A Holy Thursday table where sobriety is not treated like an exception to accommodate. A community that has genuinely asked itself whether the person sitting in the third pew has a reason to dread the social hour after Mass.
The woman at the well came in the heat of the day to avoid being seen. She carried shame like a second skin. And what met her there was not judgment, and not a rule, and not a policy. What met her was presence. Recognition. An offer of something that would actually quench what she was thirsty for.
That is what I had been looking for at the Holy Thursday table, and at 25-cent draft nights, and in thirty-day challenges and white-knuckled Sundays and every other place I had tried to pour the right thing into the wrong kind of thirst.
And I don’t think I’m the only one who has looked for it there.
SPIRITUAL GANGSTER: How Do You Feel About The Serenity Prayer? Here Are 10 Serenity Prayer Alternatives
THIRSTY FOR WONDER: at The Sober Curator, led by Anne Marie Cribben—a passionate recovery coach and spiritual companion based in Washington, DC—offers 1:1 coaching, spiritual guidance, and recovery support rooted in compassion and empowerment. As the creator of The Wellspring: A Celtic Recovery Journey, Anne Marie blends the Celtic calendar with sobriety, connecting participants to ancient wisdom and the rhythms of nature.
A fierce advocate for sobriety as liberation and self-love, she challenges the targeted marketing of alcohol to women and champions authentic, joyful living. Her work goes beyond addiction recovery, fostering a life of vibrancy, purpose, and connection.
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How Are Faith Communities Connected to Alcohol Culture?
Many faith communities have long histories with wine, beer, hospitality, ritual, and celebration. Alcohol may appear at receptions, fish fries, holidays, parish events, wakes, and family gatherings connected to church life. The issue is not always the presence of alcohol itself, but how invisible and unquestioned it can become.
Is This Article Arguing That Churches Should Ban Alcohol?
No. The article is not making an argument for prohibition. Instead, it asks faith communities to become more aware of how alcohol functions in their spaces and whether sober members, people in recovery, or those questioning their relationship with alcohol feel fully included.
Why Can Church Drinking Culture Be Difficult for Sober People?
Church communities often represent belonging, family, tradition, and spiritual safety. When alcohol is deeply woven into those same spaces, sober people may feel isolated, overlooked, or quietly exiled from the social life of a community that once helped shape them.
What Can Faith Communities Do to Be More Supportive of Sober Members?
Faith communities can offer appealing alcohol-free options, avoid making sobriety feel like an exception, consider how alcohol-centered events may affect members in recovery, and create social spaces where connection is not dependent on drinking.
What Does Sobriety Have to Do With Spirituality?
For many people, sobriety and spirituality are deeply connected. Recovery often involves honesty, surrender, community, grace, and learning how to be present. These themes also appear in many faith traditions, which is why spiritual communities can be powerful sources of support when they are thoughtful about alcohol and recovery.
Why Does the Article Reference the Woman at the Well?
The story of the woman at the well offers a powerful image of thirst, shame, recognition, and being met without judgment. In the essay, Anne Marie uses that story to explore the deeper longing beneath alcohol use: the desire for connection, presence, belonging, and something that truly satisfies.
What Is the Main Message of the Article?
The main message is that alcohol can become so normalized in faith communities that people stop noticing it. Anne Marie invites churches and sacred communities to examine what has become invisible and to make room for people whose sobriety deserves belonging, not exclusion.
