Pints With Aquinas - Is Coffee a Drug? | Fr. Gregory Pine O.P.

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

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Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines for the Aquinas. I want to ask the question whether coffee is a drug. The implication of that question is if it's a drug, maybe we need to quit it. And a lot of people, in just hearing that, are terrified. They're like, Fr. Gregory, don't ruin this for me. Well, I thought about this question on God's Planting in a livestream with Fr. Patrick and we sussed out some arguments and I was partially satisfied with those arguments and partially dissatisfied with those arguments.

So I thought about it a little more. I don't know if more means better, but here we go. We're going to suss out those arguments further and determine whether or not coffee is the drug that need be quit. Okay, so you might think to yourself, have I ever even asked this question? I would guess that many of us have, and in part because it's the type of thing that you ask whenever you find yourself addicted to a particular substance, whether it be food or drink or otherwise, you know?

So when you find yourself in a relationship of quasi-dependence and you think, I could quit it, but it'd be hard to quit it, Then you're like, okay, maybe I'm addicted. Maybe that's bad. And then, you know, when you have taken an attempt at quitting the aforementioned substance, let's say you give up coffee for Len at one point, and you experienced the withdrawal of it for a day or two, however long. And you're like, wow, I didn't realize the degree or extent to which I needed this thing in order to stave off.

Uh, yeah, headaches or just settle my stomach or to quell my fears or whatever it is. Okay. So I think the experience of addiction and withdrawal is unsettling for some. And as a result of which we just don't know, okay, is this whole coffee consumption thing, in fact, a healthy habit, uh, or if it's unhealthy, is it really compromising my freedom? And should I look to move on from it or should I look to heal and grow beyond it?

Okay. So I just want to take on those two impressions of addiction and withdrawal and then think more about the health considerations involved with coffee consumption and then try to reframe the argument or reframe the question entirely in terms of different criteria because I think it'll be helpful for us to grow and mature in our own freedom and then to exercise it. So here we go. When we compare coffee to a hard drug, I think we're using the words addiction and withdrawal

in different ways. So sometimes you hear a word said and you assume that it applies the same in every conceivable circumstance. Like I'm addicted to water and I'm addicted to coffee and I'm addicted to methamphetamines and I'm addicted to coffee and I'm addicted to methamphetamines and I'm addicted to prayer. It's like we're saying addiction in very different ways in those four sentences. So when we're talking about addiction with like hard drugs or alcohol, I was talking to a gentleman recently who was describing his struggles with alcohol abuse and he was saying at a certain point

he came before the Lord and just said, Lord, I think you made me without an offsetting. So when he starts drinking, he just doesn't stop drinking until he blacks out and makes really dubious decisions. So that's a different thing. I wouldn't say that most coffee drinkers, any coffee drinkers probably, have that experience where it's like you start drinking coffee and then you just can't stop drinking coffee. And I think that the way that some of these hard drugs

are just insidiously addictive. People are talking a lot right now about fentanyl. But you can think about just the opioid crisis in general. Yeah, it's scary. It's scary stuff. And it's the type of thing which makes you just feel the fragility of your humanity and its weakness and woundedness and with a kind of holy terror if you come to such conscious thought. But when we're talking about coffee, I think we're talking about something that's just very different.

And I think that's borne out by the withdrawal or the difference in withdrawal. Typically, when you stop drinking coffee, depending on how many cups you have, you're sick for a day or two or three. And that you have a headache, you might have some problems with nausea and vomiting, you might have some problems with diarrhea, whatever it is, right? But that usually passes and then you kind of reset provided that you drink a lot of water. Whereas with some of these hard drugs, I mean with alcohol, hard drugs, there's a certain

sense in which you're always addicted, right? Alcoholism just signifies the fact that you're just, you're just disposed or inclined such that when you touch a drop of it, you're going to fall off the wagon. Or with hard drugs, like some of them you need to get kind of ramped up on another controlled substance so that you can ramp off whatever it is that's destroying your life. And you might be on that controlled substance for the rest of your days, you know, going to a methadone clinic like two or three times or whatever it is, okay? So we're talking about addiction withdrawal in different ways. And I think it's when we talk about coffee as a drug, it's not helpful

just to lump it in because it makes for what, you know, exciting or titillating conversation. I, you know, titled the video as I did in a certain way to generate clicks which is just click-baity and stupid and I apologize. But it's to provoke this so that we can kind of drill down on this distinction. Okay, let's move on. Now, with coffee, I think we might have serious concerns or we might have serious reason to distance ourselves from it or to cease the use of it if it were really, really bad for your health. Now, we can list ways in which it can be bad for your health depending on how it applies

in your case. It might cause you to have yellow teeth. That's not nothing. It might cause you to have reflux. That is the case for me. I can't drink drip coffee because I start burping and then my throat gets scorched and then after a few days I can't preach, which is bad. Okay, so, was that a sheep?

Regardless, so other things that might be more alarming for you would be high blood pressure. It can cause osteoporosis and so far as caffeine accumulates in the bones and can kind of compromise the stability of. It can cause headaches and confusion and heart arrhythmia and other things besides. But those aren't by and large widely observed in the coffee drinking community. That's usually if you're over ingesting. On the other side of things, it's consistent or it can be consistent with good health. Okay, so the things that we drink coffee for like alertness

or like decrease in sadness. Coffee is also associated with decreased risk of suicide. Those are again not unrelated. Some people attribute to it a decrease in the risk of cancer with you know, like mouth, nose, throat, etc. The question, I mean it strikes me that when you have this kind of offsetting goods and bads, which depend largely on who you are, what your constitution is, and your experience of drinking coffee, the question is just how much and when do you drink it?

Because if you're gonna drink a ton of it, and if you're gonna drink it late into the day, it might cause increased heart rate, and it might cause anxiety, and it might cause insomnia, and it might cause your life to come to pieces, right? But that's largely a matter of when you drink it and how much you drink. So I think that it's one of those things that you should limit the use of or moderate the use of such that it doesn't control you, you can control it.

And even if you experience a modicum of dependence upon it, the question is, what's the nature of that dependence, okay? And so here in this last section, I just want to talk a little bit about dependence and ritualization because a lot of people say to you, okay If you're dependent upon a thing then you should get rid of it and I just that's not a good argument That's that's a bad argument because I think there are plenty of things in life upon which we are dependent which aren't there by bad Like we mentioned food and drink. Okay. Those are things upon which we're dependent air shelter clothing, etc Not bad dependence is because they reflect our nature.

And I think that the argument for coffee, I'm not saying you have to drink coffee, but I'm saying that you can reconcile the drinking of coffee to your human condition because it reflects something of our human condition. Part of our human condition is to be on the way and to experience the way as sometimes sad or sometimes cold or sometimes boring or sometimes, you know, cold or sometimes boring or sometimes whatever else. And I think coffee will often fit into those parts or places of our life, which is okay. It is totally okay.

St. Thomas Aquinas in answering the question, like, what are remedies for sadness? He gives you a variety of options and he gives you some ones that you might expect from a theologian like the contemplation of truth and the company of good friends. But he also gives you ones and largely inherited from St. Augustine, in his description of his sadness after the loss of his mother St. Monica, which reflect a kind of tender appreciation for the fragility of our human state. He'll say like, tears, tears help, you know? Cheers.

Baths, warm baths help. It's like, oh my gosh, it's incredible. So I think that we want to take our humanity in hand and treat it with a similar gentleness, not in the sense that we baby ourselves onto sin and vice, but that we recognize the fact that we're not all put together, and that's okay, all right? God's gonna put us together, but often enough,

it'll be in a kind of domestic or familial setting, which takes account of our weakness and woundedness and helps us to kind of mount up on wings of eagles albeit gradually. So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about dependence and ritualization. We're dependent on many things. Some of them are essential, some of them are non-essential. Just because they're non-essential doesn't mean that we need to be rid of them. The point isn't to be wholly independent. The point is to be dependent in the right ways. Alastair McIntyre has a book that's called Dependent Rational Animals and I really like that title because it reflects our human nature. We're made to be in relationship

and relationship always entails a modicum of dependence. We depend upon others for the truth, we depend upon them for love, we depend upon them for human communion and community. Those are all good things. And I think that you see it with coffee. Coffee helps us with slow starts, it helps us with long hauls, it helps us with the sadness of life. And those are all, you know, it seems, or it strikes me, good enough reasons to drink coffee. Now you might be saying, well, Father Gregory, but like people are drinking coffee all the time and at the same hours of the day, might not that be a sign of an unhealthy addiction? I think that's a sign of a certain ritualization.

We do all kinds of things at the same time throughout the course of our days, like shower and shave and brush our teeth and make breaks in our long work days to be recollected in the sight of God and, you know, take our meals and whatever else it is. You know, like we do a lot of things ritualistically and that's okay because there's a certain regularity of the life and we want to ritualize that regularity of the life because too much chaos or too much uncertainty or too much spontaneity even can be unsettling. If you feel like you have to constantly reinvent your life with the passing of each day, it's overwhelming and it can actually be anxiety inducing. I think there's a sense in which we steep in our past decisions that causes us to take on a certain flavor

and then life assumes that character hence forward. So I don't think it's a bad thing to have a few cups of coffee even if you have them at the same time of day. Now at the end of all this, if you are still somewhat unsettled by your dependence upon caffeine or your dependence upon coffee, that's fine. I'm somewhat unsettled by my dependence upon caffeine or my dependence upon coffee. For me it's a largely practical thing because of aforementioned reasons. So reflux and then anxiety and insomnia,

which, you know, it's what it is. Problem with anxiety and insomnia is it's usually a coming together of factors. You need to try to isolate for all of them and then remove them, which is hard. So it'll often mean like when I have anxiety crop up and I'm not sleeping well on a night by night basis, I'll typically dial back on a number of things.

You know, it's like I'm not gonna drink coffee and I'm not going to do whatever other things like look at screens after 9pm or blah blah blah, nothing such, so that I can kind of get it under control and maybe reintroduce those things in a healthy way while I can still sleep. So I think if you're worried about coffee consumption, you're worried that it might be a little bit out of control or off the rails, then take Lent as a time to dial it back. Maybe half your consumption during Lent. If you drink two cups, drink one.

If you drink eight cups, drink four. That's just one suggestion. You can do it in another way. You could potentially cut it out. I've cut out coffee a couple times in the last 15 years, and it's been good each time that I've done it, but I've always brought it back. Why?

Because I like coffee, because it tastes good, because it makes me feel nice. You might also work it into a more regularly recurring ascetical practice, like half it on Wednesdays and Fridays. If you find that makes you miserable, okay, maybe that's not the move. But at the very least, what I would suggest to you is this, don't tell yourself lies. Don't tell yourself lies either on the one side, I'm addicted, you know, or on the other side, I can't live without it.

You know, like, you might be asking yourself, sides of what are you talking about, Father Gregory? I think that we should abide in the truth, and we need to have a healthy relationship with coffee, and coffee's good, and we ought to relate to it well. But we don't want to become slaves to it, nor do we want to become so, like, afraid of becoming slaves to it,

that we become finicky and puritanical about it. I think it's just, yeah, it's a human thing, and human things are often complicated, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be overly complex in our diagnosis or prognosis. So if you're worried about it, just bring it to the Lord in prayer,

and just say, hey, Lord, I wanna be yours, holy and entirely, I wanna be a slave for you, of you. I don't wanna be a slave of anything that would keep me from you. I don't wanna pose obstacles or hindrances to my pursuit. And I just want to be open to whatever graces you have in store. So help me to be free in the way that you intend me to be free. Help me to be dependent in the way that you intend me to be dependent so that I can be, again, open and honest and sincere in the context of relationship, but

open, honest and sincere in the setting of my human life Which is which is a weird hilarious and silly thing. All right, that is what I intended to share with you folks and What else do I have this is pines for the quantities if you haven't yet Please do subscribe to the channel push the bell get sweet email updates when other things come out Also, I mentioned God's playing the podcast where I first had this conversation with father Patrick do check out God's planning on YouTube or on your podcast app. And then Dominican Rosary Pilgrimage is coming up. That's going to be a jammer. September 30th, Washington, D.C., Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

It's like a day of recollection. Starts mid-morning and then it'll go to, you know, early evening. And it's going to be a couple of talks, opportunity for adoration, confessions. You can take your lunch out, you know, like the different restaurants in the area. Meet the friars of Tumisic Institute and God's Blending, the Dominican province, St. Joseph more broadly. And yeah, and then there's going to be recitation of the Rosary. There's going to be a vigil mass preached by Father James Brent.

I'm going to give a couple of talks. It's going to be awesome. Hope to see you there. And I think, oh, wait, one more thing. God's Blending, we have a retreat for young adults coming up November third through fifth. Check that out. God's Blending.org. a retreat for young adults coming up November 3rd through 5th. Check that out, godsblending.org. Hope to see you there, meet you there, pray with you there. Let's go, as the youth say.

All right, that's all I got. God bless you. Please pray for me, I'll pray for you, and I look forward to chatting with you next time on Ponds with Aquinas.