You walk into Bailey’s or O’Neill’s or McCann’s. In the soft light, the sounds of ice clinking and glasses being put on the polished wood plank punctuate the oldies from the jukebox. Someone at the end of the bar is reading the newspaper, and a couple of young men are playing darts, their beers in dripping steins on the shelf beside them. You breathe in the smell of sawdust and memories as the bartender pulls a glass from behind the bar for your sacred regular drink. It’s the first draft beer of the day, or a vodka and grapefruit, or if you are nursing a hangover, a glass of white wine and soda and a Fernet Branca.



You take a sip and the bright street and blaring horns fade away, replaced by soothing, time-honored rituals: the fifth drink on the house, the way you can ask for a “traveler” in a plastic cup if you’re leaving, the bills you leave on the bar so that the price of each drink is subtracted without the tawdry business of asking for money. Time stops. Sometimes, when the light is just right or you are with a certain person, you look into the mirror behind the bottles at the back of the bar — you always look wonderful in that mirror — and experience a moment of breathtaking transcendence. You are entirely at home in the world, the song on the jukebox is exactly the right song, the drink is perfect, and everything, everything is exactly as it’s meant to be.

I spent decades in bars, at home in the low light and the three-draft brilliance of the men I drank with. Some of my earliest memories are of the old Menemsha Bar on 57th Street in Manhattan, where my father smoked Camels and drank Gilbey’s and I ate maraschino cherries. A generation later, my son’s father took him to the bar on the corner near our apartment at bedtime for a nightcap or in the morning for an eye-opener. The bartender fixed my son’s regular drink without being asked: a Shirley Temple, heavy on the fruit. On Saturday there was sometimes a baby in a carrier on the plank because a father had decided to let his wife sleep.

The bar was always a kind of secular church. It was there that as an adult I confessed my problems to the bartender, there that I savored knowing the holy rituals of the place just as I loved knowing the responses to the questions in the Book of Common Prayer. At church I also stood in front of a plank of polished wood — the altar rail — and drank a bit of boozy communion from a chalice instead of a shot glass.

Looking back it seems to me that, as a drinker, I was on a low-level search for God and for what they call in church “the peace that passes all understanding.” I’m not the first to notice a parallel between drinking and the divine. “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man,” wrote A.E. Houseman. When he was asked about help for those who drink too much, Carl Jung wrote to Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson that he thought men and women could only stop drinking after having a spiritual conversion. The cure for drinking he wrote, was spiritus contra spiritum.

For some drinkers it turns out that God is not in the bars of their drinking days, nor at church, but in another set of rituals, those practiced in the 12 step rooms of A.A. even though the program is not officially religious and has no prescribed God. In the last years of his life my father took me to A.A. meetings, as he had taken me to bars, as he had often taken me to the early communion service at All Saints church.

On the surface these three places — an Irish bar, an Episcopal Church and an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting — don’t seem too similar. They are not even sympathetic to each other. In bars they don’t like to hear about A.A., and in A.A. they don’t like to hear about church. But in many ways they are the same, whether we pass a plate or a basket, whether we sit in uncomfortable pews or on uncomfortable folding chairs, whether we share our experiences, tell our troubles to the bartender, or confess to our minister. They are all part of our human search for the divine, places where through ritual and community we reach for transcendence and sometimes find it.