To be fair, many have pointed out that Colgate is probably not unusual in this regard. Binge drinking is common on most college campuses.
During our Bicentennial Celebration, someone asked me what I thought Colgate’s founders would have thought of all this? No answer was needed.
In his book, Further Along the Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck refers to addiction as "the sacred disease." He points out that it occurred to the psychiatrist, Carl Jung, "that it was perhaps no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as spirits, and that perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition."
Peck writes: "[Addicts] are people who want, who yearn, to go back to Eden--who want to reach Paradise, reach Heaven, reach home--more than most. They are desperate to regain that lost warm, fuzzy sense of oneness with the rest of nature we used to have in the Garden of Eden..."
Could it be that so many of our young are having a problem with alcohol because we (parents and churches) have neglected their spiritual needs?
©1996 C. David Hess