Some Random Ramblings

As I said in my testimony earlier, I gave up drinking alcohol (in the early summer of 1980). Once I joined the Anglican Church (in 1984), the only way to partake of Holy Communion was to consume wine.  I gave myself a 'dispensation to drink', but only on those occasions, working on the assumption that God would protect me from myself, and my predilection for going out and getting roaring drunk.

All was well for many, many years until October 2012, when we went, as a family, to Rome for a holiday to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. We stayed in a 'Religious House' (run by the 'Ressurectionists' - a mainly Polish order), and one of the first questions asked over lunch on our first day there was why I didn't drink alcohol.  As the week wore on, I began to rethink my position on alcohol.  I wrote a few notes on my iPad, which formed the basis for my discussion (both 'internal', and with friends).

The tentative question I asked myself was whether I might start drinking moderate quantities of alcohol again? And so I took a wander through 'The Maker's Instructions' (as the bible is referred to sometimes), to see whether I could shed any light on the matter, and wrote more notes on my iPad. The first thing I wondered was whether there was any evidence that wine was 'unclean' along with other 'foodstuffs':