Thought for the Day, 2 September 2004

Dr Giles Fraser

Good morning. The battle against smoking continues. Scotland’s first minister Jack McConnell has just returned from Ireland to review the effect of the Irish ban on smoking in public places. "I am now closer to the idea that a consistent ban would be advantageous" he said. Elsewhere, the Greencroft school in County Durham has been making the news for giving out nicotine patches to children as young as 14.

But for all the government initiatives and programmes, giving up smoking is necessarily a singular business, a matter of individual conversion, so to speak. It’s been five weeks since my last cigarette, and since then I have been wrestling with demons. Trying to give up, I dream about smoking. I wake up in cold sweats. In times of stress I think of cigarettes as friends who carry and support me. I love them and they love me. Except I don’t love them – I hate them. Like Gollum, I speak to myself in two voices.

What a perfect metaphor for what we used to be comfortable calling sin. The voice of my tempter goes like this: focus on the craving. Can you feel the emptiness? And just think, with one cigarette, all those swirling emotional and physiological needs will be satisfied. Relief will be instant. But far from defeating the craving, relief is constantly deferred, the site of supposed satisfaction is the place for yet further desire – desire for something that remains cruelly forever out of reach. St Paul describes sin as a power to which one has become enslaved – and that’s just what it feels like.

But not only do the demons of addiction crawl all over my need, they also lead me into great clouds of self-deception. Consider the following, all of which I have believed at one time or another. 1. I will not be able to think or write properly without a cigarette. 2. I like smoking because I like the idea of being a bit of a rebel. 3. Smoking makes me more approachable as a Vicar. 4. Smoking is so bound up with my identity that if I give it up I will no longer be me. Sad isn’t it. My demons tell me that without cigarettes I won’t be clever, cool or confident.

The battle with cigarettes is one that is played out in the desert spaces of my imagination. And like many of the great spiritual battles of the soul, it involves staring into the face of death. It was ten years ago today that Roy Castle died of passive smoking. On hospital wards the length of the country, hundreds more will die again today. To misquote St Paul: the wages of smoking is death.