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And behold, others he flattereth away, and telleth them there is no hell; and he saith unto them: I am no devil, for there is none—and thus he whispereth in their ears, until he grasps them with his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance. (Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 28:22)

        My acceptance into the Master’s program in Family Life Education at Brigham Young University ended three precious years of teaching seminary. We moved from Idaho into a new but modest home in Provo, Utah. Situated across the street from our home was a fruit orchard and a willow-lined canal. Over the next three years, this location would provide a playground for cross-country skiing and swimming with my two children. My wife and I would enjoy our fireplace on winter evenings. I had renewed hope that a break from the pressures of teaching seminary combined with learning marriage-skill principles in my course of study would eliminate home-life conflict and breathe new life into my marriage.
        Arriving several months before school started, I found work with a chain-link fence company. Digging postholes all day was hot and exhausting work. But, after three years of mostly mental effort in a classroom, I welcomed the hard physical labor. I liked my fellow workers. Initially, they seemed skeptical of me. But, over time, my genial attitude and willingness to work won them over and we became good friends. However, their beer drinking ritual at day’s end was a far different celebration than the good-natured fun seminary teachers shared at the end of their workday.
        Part of me enjoyed watching these hard-working fellows celebrate at the end of a day’s labor. Their refreshment was always the golden brew touted by advertisers as the official drink of the blue-collar worker. I secretly envied their carefree attitude. Throughout the summer, I had an aggravating feeling of wanting to join in their day’s end revelry. It was exasperating that the notion even entered my mind. After all, I was a Latter-Day Saint, a BYU student, and a seminary teacher. I tried to ignore these thoughts and hoped my friendship and good example was having a positive effect upon my new peers.

July 15, 1974

        I type out this note of record with aching, sore hands as a result of my new job building chain-link fence. It doesn't pay much but it is work–and I do mean work!
        It is interesting to watch the men I work with keep their not totally foreign to me habit of observing “beer-thirty” as each work day ends. I don't criticize or look down on them. I wish I could convince them of the futility of using alcohol as a source of happiness. The bright face of my clean, sweet little boy greeting me at the end of the day is far greater reward than the cold beer the boys toss down. Oh yes, far more. How grateful I am to have been granted this insight.

        My coworkers’ drinking beer had a powerful effect on me. In my mind, I went through the motions of drinking with them. I was naive to the truism that every action is preceded by a thought, or in the case of the alcoholic’s action—every drink is preceded by a think!
        My moments of joy, including feeling the influence of The Holy Ghost, had been decreasing proportionately to my increased use of prescription drugs.

July 17, 1974

        Sitting on the porch, I sang and played John Denver songs deep into the warm summer night and then came down into my makeshift basement office to write these few lines. My empty journal doesn't indicate all that is happening. To keep a personal record one must feel good about one's life. I believe President Spencer Kimball said that.
        Having stayed up as late as two a.m. several nights this week, I have been violating much of what I thought I believed in. No early morning runs, just heavy nights–heavy with pills borrowed from my wife's private dispensary. I have been losing the battle without much fight each night this week. I wake with spirit aching and make promises to myself only to repeat the same behavior again.
        I tucked my precious daughter in bed earlier tonight (or would it be last night?) and talked of Jesus for several minutes. We talked of His forgiveness, His love for us and our hope to live with Him again. My heart burned with love for her when she said, ‘I feel Jesus when I’m in Primary. It makes me feel warm and happy all over.’ The humble testimony of a little child sweeps over this proud, Babylonian world like stardust on the soot-covered stacks of Geneva [Steel]. All this I am desecrating with my weak will.
        I guess watching those I work with affects me more than I admit. An older man named Bob, trying to turn a buck for booze, works by my side. The sweet smell of alcohol pours from his sweating body as he beats the ground with a pick all the while quoting scriptures about the ills of man and speaking of his love for Jesus Christ. He has made me think more about the meaning of ‘Love thy neighbor’ [John 15:12]. Jesus ate with the sinners and publicans. ‘The whole have not need of the physician, but the sick’ [Matthew 9:12]. Let me understand the devil's power—drugs, men fallen and caught—love them, help them!
        So, must I be tried in the Refiner's fire? Yet I am so weak and fail. Am I burning up? My Father, please help me!

        Most alcoholics are perfectionists who focus relentlessly and unrealistically on their own (and others’) imperfections. My personal failures resulted in extraordinary guilt, more than was warranted by my shortcomings. As a seminary teacher, I didn’t dare seek counsel for my covert actions. I judged and convicted myself over and over. Guilt oozed from my journal entries.

August 16, 1974

        More and more I search for escape. These few journal lines become my only confessional, a place to lay down my weighty burden for a few moments, to express what lies beneath all this hypocrisy, and sin, and heartache. Yet, I don't even know what this is all for.
        Tonight, my heart aches as if bitten in the chest by a snake whose deadly venom spreads throughout my body. The pain is real and I can't find an antidote. I say to myself that maybe a drink would help or another pill to dull the bitter pain; but I am helpless. Under the Lord's omniscience, I hide nothing.
        So, in this complicated turmoil, I reel from study books to knees to service. I try to understand why my wife is so angry. I pray and I try. We concentrate on the bitter and allow the daily wound to go unhealed. I have nearly forgotten what it is like to hold someone I love—to touch and be touched back. For my wife, nothing to offer or to receive—neither a touch nor a kiss. No words spoken, but many thought: competition, control, criticism, resentment and frustration. These empty words don’t console, they just hide me.

        My BYU courses began with many activities and responsibilities. Graduate courses required learning a new language fraught with complex ideas and expressed in fancy words. Teaching college-aged students was challenging. The drugs I had flirted with during the summer now retreated into winter shadows—a short respite.
        Writing graduate essays, correcting student papers, and preparing for and giving final exams placed great demands upon my time. As the months drew on, I began using a different, subtler drug—caffeine.16 [Be sure to review this endnote.] Although not as powerful as pain pills, it still affected my mind, body, and spirit. I began depending more and more on my new drug of choice.

April 19, 1975

        It is with a rather numb body that, at this 1:00 a.m. hour, I peck out a few words of record for the past week. It is Finals Week and I find myself in the usual mess of attempting to show evidence of learning while seeking the same from my students.
        My body is saturated with caffeine and weary from stress. From a stupor, I view the world passing by and continue in my self-deception. My soul is truly weary and tired. My nerves feel ragged and overloaded as if electricity is shooting through them in every bizarre, unordered direction.

        I had used caffeine earlier in my life, but had abstained from using it for several years. Now, last-minute cramming required extra energy. Cola drinks provided me the pep I needed to maintain the late night grinds. I soon discovered that caffeine tablets were a faster and more convenient method for getting the drug into my system. I enjoyed this quick form of energy, and gave little thought to its addictive effect. It seemed to help me accomplish things that I thought I couldn’t get done otherwise. But there was a trade-off. Caffeine was dulling me spiritually. It increased my over-all feelings of anxiety and numbed my sensitivity to be thoughtful toward my family. Within as short a time as a day, or even as long as a week of my ingesting caffeine, I found I had little patience with my children and even less desire to listen to my wife. Everything seemed annoying. The more I used the drug, the less I felt like praying or studying the scriptures. Somehow, depending upon this “energy booster” removed my feeling that I needed to depend on my Father in Heaven. My caffeine habit was continuing to excavate spiritual material from the deepening hole inside me.
        Although my personal discipline was weakening, I was having marvelous experiences at BYU. Seeking a Masters Degree in Family Life Education, I had been teaching undergraduate courses in marriage and family relationships and child development. At the end of my second year at BYU, because of my seminary-teacher status, I was assigned to teach in the Department of Religion. I was provided a small office in the basement of the historic Joseph Smith Building. Teaching religion at BYU! What an honor! I was deeply grateful.
        Learning the material and preparing to teach in this new role inspired me. In spite of my shortcomings, the Holy Ghost’s influence was still present in the classroom as I taught courses in Gospel Principles and Practice and Book of Mormon. I was enthusiastic for teaching and had a special love for my students. And I felt their love for me.

June 12, 1976
(Student’s Letter Retained in my Journal)

Dear Brother Phil,
        I just wanted to let you know how grateful I am for having you as a teacher. I thank my Heavenly Father daily for you and for your preparation of the Book of Mormon classes and most of all for your testimony. You have strengthened mine so much and I am so grateful. You have made me realize how to relate the Book of Mormon to everyday experiences and to live a better life.
        I also want you to know that you have influenced and guided my friend Dorothy to the point that she wants to be baptized when she gets home. I have noticed a remarkable change in her. She has a beautiful spirit and I am so happy for her. [Dorothy was later baptized.]
        It is also important to me that you know that I know Jesus is the Christ and that the Book of Mormon is the word of God. I am so grateful for my testimony. It is my most precious possession.
Thank you for everything!
Marnie

        Teaching religion provided me spiritual highs, but there were an equal number of lows as a result of my wife’s and my ongoing marital conflict. For three years, I had studied the principles of a healthy marriage, but my hope for a better relationship had not materialized. My schooling had taught me valuable principles, but I had not internalized ways to change my own behavior. If anything, our relationship had worsened in spite of my “superior knowledge.” Now that I was a marital expert, I increased my attempts to control my wife. This was only met with resistance and disdain. Whenever possible, I medicated my pain with prescription drugs.
        In my teacher preparation time, I came across warnings from Church presidents and other members of the Counsel of Twelve Apostles17 that, all too often, described my own condition with painful accuracy.

Journal Entry—1976
Quote From Brigham Young
For a man to undertake to live [as] a Saint and walk in darkness is one of the hardest tasks that he can undertake. You cannot imagine a position that will sink a person more deeply in perplexity and trouble than to try to be a Saint without living, as a Saint should, without enjoying the spirit of his religion. 18

        I wanted to be a saint, but I also wanted to escape reality through drugs. During this time I wrote: “A monstrous battle rages within me between two foes—my natural-man19 body—ignorant of God—bent on my own destruction, and my spirit—born of Heavenly Parents—fighting to save me. This struggle is leaving me a scarred and torn battlefield.”
        During this period, I kept a personal tradition that resulted in some of my spiritual victories. At the end of each summer, I went backpacking alone into the mountains to meditate, pray, and prepare for another school year. These trips were special pilgrimages and free from drug use.

August 13, 1976
        I write by candlelight from my sleeping bag while Parley [my dog] lies curled up on my coat outside the tent flap.
        A warm canyon breeze rustles the aspens causing their leaves to shimmer silver in the moonlight. The evening campfire has reduced to a soft flicker. The soft sound of the creek nearby enters my body to touch yet one more sense.
        The richness of this moment adds a final capstone to a pure and precious three days spent hiking over 75 miles in the mountains above my childhood home. Abstaining for the last 24 hours from food and water has heightened these feelings.
        All of this has touched my soul with great effect. I am filled with peace and joy and the incredible awareness of God's presence and His creations. Since that night in Panama, I have never doubted.             
        Tonight, I am left to wonder why I should be granted these experiences; this intense sense of well being that God lives and loves me. Surely I have not earned the right to this feeling.
Tomorrow, I have been invited to speak in Sacrament Meeting in the ward where I grew up. I plan to continue my fast until then, praying that I will have the Holy Ghost’s influence to speak with the ‘tongue of an angel.’20
        Tonight my body, my being, my soul is filled with God’s presence, His marvelous work and wonder, His Light! Tonight I know He lives! He loves! He forgives!

        The following day’s spiritual experience ranked as one of the most profound that I had known since the Panama night when my life’s pendulum swung back toward God. Having been invited to speak at my parent’s Sacrament Meeting (the ward of my youth), I used self-made charts and maps to lead the congregation through ten centuries of Book of Mormon history. As a result of fasting, prayer, and my three-day purging trek, spiritual power seemed to flow through me and out to the congregation as though it were quickening light. My prayer to be able to testify by the Spirit had been granted.
        I was grateful for a special side benefit, that of honoring my parents. They were proud of me. Their tears were not uncommon in the congregation as I ended my talk by playing the guitar and singing, “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief.”21
        In the months immediately following this spiritual experience, it was as though Satan began authorizing devils to work on me overtime. I’m sure a large number were dispatched with the orders: “Tempt Phil with his weakness for liquor.”
        Until this point, I had avoided drinking alcohol. It is revealing to review my circumstances. Along with the constant use of caffeine, I had again started using prescription pain pills and other mood-altering drugs, including marijuana a few times. One occasion was on a visit to my parents.
        My father, as county sheriff, had seized a large crop of illegally grown marijuana and was holding it in a metal shed behind his house until it could be properly destroyed. I obtained the key to the shed and secretly removed a small supply of the substance.
        Incredibly, even with the marijuana, I never considered these substances in the same seriousness-of-sin category as liquor. I had abstained from using alcohol, not because I was alcoholic and knew I could not handle the first drink, but rather because I was fearful of breaking the Word of Wisdom, which specifically counsels personal abstinence from “tea, coffee, liquor, and tobacco.”22 I reasoned that I could not answer the temple recommend23 questions truthfully if I were using any of these substances. But I also was not putting myself out for any voluntary appointments to be interviewed for temple worthiness. I was pretty sure I wasn’t.
        Late in the summer of 1976, I gave in. I did not consume hard liquor, but rather, cooking sherry purchased from the supermarket. I rationalized that entering a state liquor store would be a greater sin than going into a grocery store. Along with the sherry, I bought several steaks to disguise my intent. If someone recognized me, they would never suspect such an innocent purchase. My behavior was not unlike other legal addicts who readily buy prescription drugs to feed their craving but who would never think of meeting a drug pusher for heroine. But the truth is, alcohol is alcohol, whether purchased as cooking sherry or in whiskey bottles; and drugs are drugs, whether purchased in plastic prescription bottles or hastily wrapped plastic bags. What we use doesn’t matter. Why we use does!
        On a hot Friday afternoon, early in September 1976, after sprinkling a little sherry on the barbecuing steaks, I stepped into the hot stuffy darkness of my carport closet with the sherry bottle in hand and pulled the door shut. Ignoring thoughts of the consequences, I guzzled the nasty, warm salty liquid. The alcohol entered my blood and flowed to my brain bringing an immediate release of tension and anxiety—a cheap, counterfeit answer to dull my emotional pain. After the deed was done, there were more than a few “conscience” pains. The chilling memory of a scripture shot through me like lightning and comprehension thundered through my soul: “And yea and behold, Satan doth subtly drag them down to hell.”24
    Years later, I searched my journals for the impact of that “first drink” but found only disguised references to my increasing use of alcohol.

January 7, 1977

        We went ice skating on New Year's Eve afternoon. I will not soon forget glimpsing my children here and there amongst the crowd and skating arm in arm with my wife. However, I couldn't seem to get into the New Year's Eve spirit, so later I tried artificially. I'm afraid the old year went out not in good fashion, as I once again imbibed a little heavily in the wine meant for steaks.
        My heart is heavy. Why must I submit to such . . . but I hurt. I didn't take the sacrament Sunday, Fast Sunday. I fasted, going without food or water my normal 24 hours. I cried during the last ten minutes of the meeting, probably just melancholy mingled with regret.
        Walking from church, my little Sunshine asked me why I was crying. I couldn't talk. I just squeezed her hand tightly.

        In a journal entry, written after a trip to Wyoming to scout out my next potential seminary-teaching assignment, I wrote with deepening awareness that the path I was on was becoming a dangerous tightrope.

June 1977

        We spent the night in a cozy, cabin-like motel in a small town deep in the mountains of Colorado. It had rained. I remember how rich the damp night air, mingled with pine and fireplace smoke, smelled. What prompted me, my desire, I don’t know. Maybe no romance in such a romantic setting. My wife was asleep early in the evening.
        Lonely and restless, I walked the quiet wet streets of the little town for over an hour. Not far from the motel, I stopped at a late-closing grocery store to buy a snack. Instead, losing the spirit-body battle, I purchased a bottle of wine. Used to Utah’s stringent liquor laws, it was unusual and tempting to see wine in a grocery store. I knew no one, except He Who Counts, would know of my Word of Wisdom infraction.
        I fought the desire that night and didn't drink the wine. I thought I had won a major battle. Stupid me. Not throwing away the full bottle should have been a tip-off.
        We parked the next day at a rest area beside the Green River. The bottle of wine was in the camper refrigerator–waiting. I barely fought. The old familiar warmth filled me as I secretly drank the wine. Sitting in a lawn chair on the grassy bank, I watched swirls of water like melting chocolate, appear and disappear, as the muddy river moved by.
        I don’t know why I record this. I just feel I must for its significance in my life, be it for good or evil. If nothing more, perhaps someday someone will read my journals and learn firsthand of the folly of tempting personal destruction by choosing to walk a tightrope. It is funny I should even write this way, as though I can't—or won't—stop.

        The BYU-graduate-student era ended. I had finished all course work but still lacked a thesis paper to complete my degree. Three years of around-the-clock school had been enough. Believing that I would return to BYU the next summer and finish my thesis, I accepted a seminary position in Wyoming.
With deep melancholy, I packed up my basement office in the Joseph Smith Building. It was difficult saying good-bye to university life and young people who had touched my life. I felt as though I was leaving the best part of me behind (and perhaps I was). I had played guitar and sung and loved and borne my testimony to the most wonderful young people on earth. I had known a degree of peace and joy well beyond the normal. Despite the emotional pain of my deteriorating marriage and my growing addiction, I regrouped around this new opportunity. For now I was flying high, high enough to soar over the eastern Rockies to the windy prairies of Wyoming—where I would come down.