Dry January and the Art of Temperance—Health, Joy, and the Fellowship We Need

Dry January at its best is not a grim wellness contest with an app that cheers for you like a caffeinated gym teacher. It is a small unruly school of freedom in a noisy thirsty culture where for once the homework is to sit still and notice what you actually want. It becomes humanizing when you discover with a wince how often the glass has been doing side work as courage, anesthesia, and lullaby, and you find yourself groping back toward friendship and God instead of a shinier wrist device.

The body, ever the unamused accountant, has been keeping meticulous books on every pour while the soul waves its hand and says Everything is fine. Somewhere in a quiet office a researcher announces that there is no truly safe level of alcohol for cancer risk and taps the list of organs that would prefer less of it. Even the gentle drinker nudges up the risk for the mouth and throat and colon and liver and that tender architecture of the breast that once fed someone at three in the morning. This is not a vibe. This is the biologist in the corner clearing her throat and pointing to the Group 1 carcinogen label on the bottle.

Yet one sober month does things. People who lay the glass down for January often sleep harder, wake clearer, lose a sly pound or two, and find their blood pressure and lab numbers behaving with unexpected politeness compared to friends who keep pouring. Even the ones who only half succeed, who trim instead of quit, report a quieter mind, steadier mood, and a sense that the day is a little less like herding cats inside the skull. Oddly, perhaps miraculously, many also report a rise in that most mysterious of human resources, self-efficacy, the small interior sentence that says in a surprised voice, “Maybe I am not stuck like this after all.”

So a month is not magic but it is not nothing. It is laboratory time for the soul. It is the moment in the experiment when the fog lifts for a night and the subject sits up blinking and says Oh. So this is what eight honest hours of sleep feels like. No angels. No fireworks. Just a quiet, almost embarrassing clarity.

Of course the calendar lurches onward. February walks in with its box of chocolates and its ball games and its invitations to celebrate survival. If January becomes proof that you are an excellent person who deserves your body, or worse proof that your uncle who could not get past day five is a moral failure, then temperance has been quietly repackaged as spiritual cholesterol testing. You pass. He fails. God presumably keeps the scores. Dry January research talks about feeling more in control of drinking, which is good and grown up, but there is always the risk that control curdles into self-righteousness and the empty glass becomes just another way to look down your nose.

The deeper cost hides in the corner. If Dry January turns into a private project with carefully staged mocktail photographs, an app that throws digital confetti, a secret calendar of gold stars, then health slides away from wholeness toward a sort of curated narcissism. The soul was not made for continuous self-monitoring. The soul was made for communion, for being interrupted, for being late to bed because someone needed to talk in the parking lot. A pristine liver unshared is a poor bargain.

So picture a parish fundraiser on a bleak Saturday in January. The Knights have summoned heroic vats of chili from the deep places. There is a live auction featuring a hand-carved cribbage board and a weekend at a cabin that absolutely does not have cell service, which is either a feature or a human rights violation depending on your temperament. There is usually a small bar tucked in the corner with a plausible Merlot, a beer that knows its place, and ice that arrives late. But this year, several parishioners have announced their Dry January and the committee decides in a burst of solidarity to go alcohol free.

Out come the big glass pitchers of sparkling water with lemon slices, grinding their teeth. A very proud teenager unveils a signature blue punch that tastes like lime and maybe penitence. Something lovely happens. The pregnant women, the folks in recovery, the people on medications that do not like to dance with Chardonnay, the ones who just do not enjoy wobbling through the night, are visibly relieved. They are not second-class citizens this time. They are on home turf.

Something awkward happens too. A large part of the crowd hovers uncertainly with their plastic cups, missing the familiar ritual of the first pour, that tiny clink and shared sigh that says The evening has begun. The bidding on the cribbage board is a little subdued. Someone jokes a bit too loudly about smuggling in real beer. The room feels a touch self-conscious, like a middle school dance where the chaperones are aggressively present and play the music slightly too low.

The experts would nod at this. They point out that alcohol is woven into many social environments like thread through a favorite sweater so pulling it out can leave people standing there in their emotional undershirts. The same research that praises the individual benefits of Dry January admits that much of modern social life is organized around drinking and that hitting pause can reveal how few places remain where you can belong without a glass. Other studies suggest that when people are offered substance-free activities, and those activities are actually fun, their mental health improves and their drinking often lessens, not because they have become saints but because they have somewhere to go and someone to talk to.

You do not need a randomized trial to know that humans crumble without fellowship. Even the most independent man on the mountain eventually comes down for a potluck. So while the wine-free parish fundraiser may be holier for the liver, there is a real pastoral question sitting on the checkered plastic tablecloth: by the end of the night, are people more connected or less? Did we trade tipsiness for a certain tight-lipped distance?

The point is not that wine is necessary for joy. Many a magnificent feast has been mounted with nothing more intoxicating than coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright. The point is that joy is necessary for us in the ferocious way oxygen is necessary, and many of our current rituals of joy are braided tightly around alcohol. To cut the alcohol without lovingly reimagining the ritual is to yank out the scaffolding without building a new porch, and then stand there puzzling over why everyone is still huddled on the steps, cups in hand, waiting for something or Someone to arrive.

Here the saints and near saints shuffle into the conversation, hats in hand, sniffing suspiciously at the latest wellness fad. Chesterton in particular is already at the pub by the time we arrive, laughing at his own jokes and saying shocking things about Americans. He insisted that drink should follow happiness not manufacture it. Drink because you are happy, he said in a rule that should probably be written on every bar mirror. Never because you are miserable never because you are wretched without it. The man who reaches for gin in his misery calls up not the beast but the Devil.​

For Chesterton the great value of temperance is not that it increases restraint but that it increases enjoyment. The secret is proportion. Ale and wine are good gifts meant to accompany conversation and friendliness not dissolve them. When drink is rightly ordered it deepens laughter and gratitude. When drink is asked to replace courage or consolation it becomes a liar. Dry January, for Chesterton, might be a kind of temporary fast to see whether our delight is still rooted in the Giver of gifts or whether we have quietly hired the bottle as a substitute host.​

Josef Pieper the philosopher who somehow saw through the rubble of the twentieth century to the importance of feasts would warn us against joyless health. For Pieper a true festival is a human Yes to reality a way of affirming the goodness of God and man and world. There is no such thing as a feast without gods he liked to say meaning that real celebration ultimately draws life from divine worship and gratitude rather than from calories or alcohol content. All the accidental arrangements free time, cakes, flowers, wine, clever playlists only make sense if there is an objective reason to celebrate behind them.​

When Pieper looked at sham festivals he saw the same thing that haunts some Dry January parties: a restless attempt to feel good without any clear answer to the question What are we celebrating? If the only reason for the gathering is that the office thought it should have one, or the only reason for abstaining is that your fitness app dared you, the whole affair collapses into vague boredom. The longing for joy is not the same as joy itself.​

Benedict XVI picks up the same thread and braids it directly into the chalice. In preaching on the image of the banquet Benedict notes that Scripture constantly uses feasts and wine to speak of the joy of communion and the abundance of the Lord’s gifts. In the Eucharist Christ himself becomes the true vine his Blood the wine for which creation was waiting the drink that does not betray. For Benedict the feast of the Church is not about stimulation but about being drawn into a communion that will outlast death.​

Here the line between temperance and friendliness becomes thin and bright. Catholic wisdom does not aspire to a sterile sobriety that is afraid of the party. It wants a rightly ordered capacity to enjoy. Temperance is the virtue that keeps delight as delight instead of dependence. It is freedom for love and laughter and worship rather than sheer gritted teeth.

If Dry January is to be a Catholic sort of thing it must therefore be judged not only by liver enzymes but by whether it moves us toward clearer minded charity. Does the month off help me love my family better? Does it make me more present to the poor more awake at Mass more available for conversation that goes past the usual jokes? Does it teach me to say Thank you for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them as Chesterton suggested in his mischievous way?​

So what might it look like to keep the good of a Dry January a sharper health conscience, a lighter step in the morning, a little more mastery over the corkscrew without draining the color out of community?

First, a simple strategy: host deliberately joyful alcohol free gatherings instead of quietly not drinking at the gatherings that already exist. Behavioral research suggests that substance-free activities are associated over time with better alcohol outcomes and mental health because they give people real connection and fun rather than just the absence of a substance. That could mean a monthly dry supper club with embarrassingly good food, ridiculous desserts, and a rotation of homemade bitters and sparkling concoctions that genuinely taste like celebration or a game night where the stakes are high and the jokes higher and the only buzz is from the competition.​

Second, redesign ordinary hospitality rituals so that alcohol is present, if at all, as an option not as the price of admission. Social wellness advocates note that alcohol free gatherings often lead to clearer conversation and deeper bonds because people stay fully present and unblurred. At a parish level that might mean Friday socials with live music and serious coffee, or a feast of St Joseph that features regional sodas and elaborate toasts to the fathers in the room, or a young adult group that rotates through hikes, movie discussions, and volunteer nights where the central drama is mercy, not merlot.​

Interiorly the month can become less a contest and more an examen. Instead of merely counting nights without a drink, a person can spend 10 quiet minutes each evening asking, "Why did I want to drink today?" Was I bored, angry, ashamed, lonely, exhausted? Behavioral studies on Dry January emphasize that the real gain for many participants is a reframed relationship with alcohol rather than sheer abstinence. A Catholic can go one step further by carrying those answers into prayer: Lord, I am trying to pour courage from this bottle. Lord, I am afraid the silence will swallow me. Then, very slowly, replacing the reflex to numb with other small practices: a brisk walk, a phone call to a friend, a psalm muttered in the kitchen, a visit to the tabernacle where the true wine waits quietly.​

The virtue at stake here is temperance, but not the pale counterfeit that never laughs. It is the robust kind that Chesterton loved, which increases enjoyment by putting things in their rightful place. Practiced in this way, Dry January trains temperance by teaching the body and soul together that joy is possible without intoxication and that courage can be summoned without liquid backup. Each time someone chooses the conversation over the refill, the walk over the nightcap, the parish game night over another lonely streaming session, the muscles of temperance and charity flex a bit stronger.​

Perhaps the most humanizing version of Dry January is one in which people make their little experiments in freedom together. Not as a club of the morally superior but as a fellowship of the slightly fearful and hopeful who suspect that their thirst is really for company and for God. The health benefits will follow along faithfully like a doctor with a clipboard. But the main miracle will be that in a damp and anxious world a handful of people discover they can be both more sober and more festive, more clear eyed and more delighted, and that their deepest hunger is not for drink at all but for the One who turned water into wine and then into his very self so that every feast might end in love.