Addiction and Grace

[Guest]

I'm reading a fantastic book entitled "Addiction and Grace" by Gerald G. May, M.D. and wanted to recommend it. May's basic premise is that all humans are addicted to various things. Alcoholism and drug addiction are just extreme examples of a basic tendency that we all have towards addiction. As he puts it:

Addiction exists wherever persons are internally compelled to give energy to things that are not their true desires. To define it directly, addiction is a state of compulsion, obsession or preoccupation that enslaves a person's will and desire. Addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest, truest desire for love and goodness. We succumb because the energy of our desire becomes attached, nailed, to specific behaviors, objects, or people. Attachment, then, is the process that enslaves desire and creates the state of addiction...

God creates us for love and freedom, attachment hinders us, and grace is necessary for salvation. In and throughout this condition, God loves and longs for us, and we love and long for God...

Ultimately, our yearning for God is the most important aspect of our humanity, our most precious treasure; it gives our existence meaning and direction... I think it is this desire that Paul spoke of when he tried to explain the unknown God to the Athenians: "It is God who gives to all people life and breath and all things... God created us to seek God, with the hope that we might grope after God through the shadows of our ignorance, and find God." The psalms are full of expressions of deep longing for God: thirsting, hungering, yearning. And God promises a response: "When you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me."

For me, the energy of our basic desire for God is the human spirit, planted within us and nourished endlessly by the Holy Spirit of God. In this light, the spiritual significance of addiction is not just that we lose freedom through attachment to things, nor even that things so easily become our ultimate concerns. Of much more importance is that we try to fulfill our longing for God through objects of attachment...

Even the briefest look at television and magazine advertising reveals how strongly our culture reinforces attachment to things other than God, and what high value it gives to willful self-determination and mastery....

More importantly, however, I think Paul's words about the unknown God indicate another reason for God's hiddenness; full and freely chosen love for God requires searching and groping. What would happen to our freedom if God, our perfect lover, were to appear before us with such objective clarity that all our doubts disappeared? We would experience a kind of love, to be sure, but it would be love like a reflex. Almost without thought, we would fix all our desires upon this Divine Object, try to grasp and possess it, addict ourselves to it. I think God refuses to be an object for attachment because God desires full love, not addiction. Love born of true freedom, love free from attachment, requires that we search for a deepening awareness of God, just as God freely reaches out to us.

In addition, full love for God means we must turn to God over and against other things. If our choice of God is to be made with integrity, we must first have felt other attractions and chosen, painfuly, not to make them our gods. True love, then, is not only born of freedom; it is also born of difficult choice. A mature and meaningful love must say something like, "I have experienced other goodnesses, and they are beautiful, but it is You, my true heart's desire, whom I choose above all."

With this realization, we may begin to reclaim our primary desire for God. Like the prodigal, we may choose to come home...

The journey homeward, the process of homemaking in God, involves withdrawel from addictive behaviors that have become normal for us. In withdrawel, attachments are lessened, and their energy is freed for simpler, purer desire and care. In other words, human desire is freed for love. Constance FitzGerald puts it this way: "In the process of affective redemption, desire is not suppressed or destroyed, but gradually transferred, purified, transformed, set on fire. We go through the struggles and ambiguities of human desire to integration and personal wholeness."

There are many spiritual names for this homecoming process: detachment, affective redemption, purification, purgation, ongoing conversion, sanctification. The term FitzGerald uses, transformation of desire, is the most appealing.

To appreciate it with accuracy, we need to acknowledge both its beauty and its fierceness. It is beautiful because it is a homecoming, because it is a liberation from slavery, and because it enables love. But it is fierce because it entails relinquishment, letting go, risking, and enduring losses that are very real and painful.