Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions, by Gerald May

 

 

 

 

 

Aren’t There Some Good Addictions?

Having looked over these lists, one might be prompt­ed to ask whether all addictions must be seen as negative. Couldn’t some of them be beneficial? What about a mother’s “addiction” to her children? A husband’s “attachment” to his wife? Or, for that matter, the spiritual person’s “attachment” to God? Might it not be constructive to be attractionally addict­ed to some of the good things in life and aversionally addicted to the bad? After all, aren’t there good habits as well as bad ones?

Such questions bring us into one of the most difficult terri­tories we must cross in our exploration of addiction and grace, for the answer is as unequivocal as it is unpleasant: no addiction is good; no attachment is beneficial. To be sure, some are more destructive than others; alcoholism cannot be compared with chocolate addiction in degrees of destructiveness, and fear of spiders pales in comparison to racial bigotry. But if we accept that there are differences in the degree of tragedy imposed upon us by our addictions, we must also recognize what they have in common: they impede human freedom and diminish the human spirit.

It is surely good for parents to care for their children and for people to be kind to one another and to seek God. It would be wonderful if we could make a habit of such activities. But there is a vast difference between doing these things because we free­ly choose and doing them because we are compelled. In the first case, the motivation is love; in the second, slavery.

One could make the case that motivation is not so important, that what counts is getting the good things done. In short-term situations this seems to make sense. Some good things are done because of addiction. If someone is hungry, it is indeed better that they be fed by someone who is attached to doing good deeds than that they starve because someone else is “free” to choose not to feed them. But consider this hypothetical second person for a moment. If he or she were really free from attach­ment, there would be no reason not to feed the hungry one. Love, the core of our creation, would call it forth spontaneously. The only reason we could have, for “choosing” against true com­passion and Charity is that we are addicted to something else. Uncharitable behavior can never be justified on the basis of freedom from attachment; to try to do so is to engage in mind tricks, not freedom.

Further, the entire situation posed here is irrevocably hypo­thetical, for no one is truly free from attachment. We must work with our addictions, seeking the grace within them and trying to minimize their destructiveness instead of spending our time fantasizing what it would be like to be totally free of them. Total freedom, religion tells us, is paradise—the final salvation and the full reign of God. It is a goal that we must work toward, but it is also something we must hope and wait for. Paul speaks of this in words that we will hear again in our exploration of addiction and grace: “From the beginning till now, all creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; we too groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free. … It is something we must wait for in patience.”

No, we must try to put to rest any notion that addictions are good. The only goodness in them is that they can defeat our pride and lead us to more openness to grace. It may also help o remember that the destructiveness of addiction does not lie in the things to which we are attached, nor even in our simple desires for them. The things themselves are simply part of cre­ation, and God made them inherently good. The destructive­ness of addiction lies in our slavery to these things, turning desire into compulsion, with ugly and loveless consequences for ourselves and our world. The more we can understand about how enslavement happens to us, the more we may be able to turn in the direction of freedom and love.

 

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

Excerpts from Chapter 3.  Mind: The Psychological Nature of Addiction

pp. 42-43

Addiction attacks every part of what Freud called our “mental apparatus.” Subjectively, however, the attacks seem focused on two primary areas: the will, which is our capacity to choose and direct our behavior, and self-esteem, which is the respect and value with which we view ourselves. Addiction splits the will in two, one part desiring freedom and the other desiring only to continue the addictive behavior. This internal inconsis­tency begins to erode self-esteem. How much can I respect my­self if I do not even know what I really want?

The greatest damage to self-esteem, however, comes from re­peated failures at trying to change addictive behavior. Even if I do feel clear about what I really want, I cannot make myself behave accordingly. I seem to be honestly out of control; yet, in all truth, I have only myself to blame. This failure can decimate my self-respect. In some other culture, in a society that reveres the mystery of human nature more than ours does, such fail­ures at self-mastery might not be so devastating. They might even be seen as affirmations of one’s essential connectedness with the rest of creation and of one’s essential dependency upon the Creator. But in modern Western society, we have come to see ourselves as objects of our own creation. When we fail at managing ourselves, we feel defective.

The best way to understand this devastation of will and self-esteem is to examine the actual experience of people who have suffered from major chemical addiction. The mind’s battle to deceive itself, with all its insidious tricks and strategies, can be fully appreciated only by people who have suffered such life-threatening addictions. Yet, as they describe their experience, we sense something with which we can all identify. It is as if these severely addicted people have played out, on an extreme scale, a drama that all human beings experience more subtly and more covertly.

Following are short descriptions of these mind tricks: Self-Deception, Denial and Repression, Rationalization, Hiding, Delaying Tactics, and then May continues with three more:

pp. 47-63

“I Can’t Handle It”

Repeatedly failed resolutions eventually lead to depression and to some kind of admission of defeat. Failure may take either a passive or an aggressive form, both of which help to continue the addiction. In a passive response to defeat, the addicted per­son is besieged with feelings of shame, remorse, and guilt. This self-hatred may lead to suicidal impulses, but more often the person simply surrenders to /the addiction. “I give up. I can’t handle it, and I’m too tired to even go on fighting. All I can do is accept my addiction and go on drinking.” There may be some grace in this admission of defeat, but it is still misperceived by the addicted person. If the person is sophisticated in the lan­guage of Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, she is likely to try to convince herself that this, finally, is the rock-bottom sur­render that will somehow save her. But the “higher power” to which she is surrendering is not God; it is the addiction itself. The more aggressive response to repeated failure says, “To hell with it.” This embittered, cynical reaction still has a de­pressive quality, but it seeks to preserve some vestiges of self-respect by bringing everything in life down to its own sense of worthlessness. “Yeah, I may be no good, but neither is anything else.” “Who cares? What difference does it make?” “It’s not worth it. I’m going to do whatever I want because nothing real­ly matters anyway.” When performed with finesse, such nega­tivity can convince the addicted person that he is engaging in revolutionary rhetoric or philosophical nihilism. But, just like the passive response, it is simply another ploy to continue the addiction.

“I Can Handle It”

If, instead of failing, the person temporarily succeeds in stop­ping the addictive behavior, the greatest mind trick of all comes into play. It starts out very normally, with the natural joyfulness of liberation. “I can do it! I have done it! And it wasn’t even that difficult! Why, I actually don’t even have any desire for a drink anymore. I’m free!” Before long, the natural joy will undergo a malignant change; it will be replaced by pride.

The fall begins, in a day or a week or a few months, with the recurrence of an impulse to have a drink or a fix. It comes subtly and innocuously, certainly not as a conscious desire to resume the whole pattern of addictive behavior, just to engage in it once. Sometimes the desire appears unconscious. “I don’t know what happened, I honestly don’t. Everything was going so well, and I wasn’t even thinking about drinking, but all of a sudden there I was, with a drink in my hand, and I was already feeling high.” The downfall can seem for all the world like a demonically mystical happening. “It was as if there were another person inside of me I didn’t even know was there. All the time I was feeling so good about my success, he was in there waiting for the chance to take over. And in a moment when I wasn’t looking and my guard was down, he did.” More often, the desire to have a drink, a pill, or a snort just gently surfaces in awareness, like a harmless little notion. “A drink would sure taste good right now.” “Boy, if I weren’t straight, this would sure be the time to get high.” Or it may come more philosoph­ically: “I haven’t had a single pill for three weeks now. I wonder what it would be like. I bet it would be different now that I have no desire for it and I’m no longer hooked on it.”

These impulses have a subtle but exceedingly important effect upon the person’s feeling of success. The joyful sense of “I’m free” is changing to “I can handle it.” For a while, “I can handle it” means the person feels she can fight off any impulses to engage in the addictive behavior. Before long, however, “I can handle it” means she thinks she can engage in the addictive behavior without becoming enslaved to it again. People have even been known to have a drink to celebrate their success at stopping drinking. The brilliance of this masterful mind trick is now evident; the pure joy of success and freedom has been transformed into an excuse for renewed failure and enslave­ment.

Even after the failure occurs, one can continue to believe one is somehow handling it. “I’m moderating it.” “No more than three snorts a day.” “I only drink on social occasions where it would be embarrassing to say no.” “I only have one drink be­fore supper.” “I take a pill or two only on weekends.” “It’s not the occasional beer that gets me in trouble, it’s the hard stuff.” On and on the tactics go, until, again, it becomes painfully obvious that one is not handling it at all. Wherever “I can han­dle it” surfaces, the fall follows.

Breakdown

The fall is tragic in the classical sense, an abject crashing down after the pinnacles of pride have been attained. Once recognized, it brings guilt, remorse, and shame in bitter proportion to the pride that preceded it. Self-respect disappears. Suicide is considered. Without even the will to resist, the use of the chemical increases dramatically, further impairing judg­ment. A critically dangerous situation results. Through the haze of intoxication and depression, the mind continues its bat­tle with itself. Increasingly bizarre forms of rationalization and resolution surface—forms that are possible only because the person’s reason has been cruelly eroded. Other drugs are used to substitute for the primary substance, and secondary addic­tions develop. Desperately seeking a way out, unrealistic schemes are hatched. “If I could just get a hundred thousand dollars, my life would be different.” “I’m going to leave every­thing and start life all over again in another country.” These grow into proportions that can only be called psychotic. “If it weren’t for my boss treating me the way he did, I wouldn’t be in this state. He doesn’t deserve to live.” “It’s a lousy, rotten world anyway. Who cares what I do? I’ll show them I’m some­body.” “It’s all a matter of radio waves and vitamins. I’ll eat lots of vitamins and figure out some way to hide from the radio waves.”

Fortunately, not all major chemical addictions progress to this degree of devastation. But all of our addictions, even our non-substance addictions, share similar dynamics. And the most serious of our non-substance addictions even share a similarly ominous potential. Addiction to power, money, or relationships can drive people to distort reality just as much as can addiction to alcohol or narcotics.

Collusion

The mind tricks of addiction share yet another quality: they are contagious. No matter how much it may be kept hidden, addiction is never a completely individual thing. From the very first stages of the attachment process, other people are in­volved. Friends, family, coworkers, and even professional help­ers affect and are affected by changes happening within the addicted person. Nearly always, some of their involvement helps to support the addiction. Their unwitting collusion has been well publicized in recent literature; it is called codependency. Codependency is not simply a matter of other people trying to cope with the addicted person’s behavior. They actually create their own interweaving webs of deception. They may even un­consciously develop new, more inventive mind tricks for the addicted person to use. Ironically, it is the most sympathetic, compassionate, loving persons in the addict’s social circle that are most likely to fall into such collusion.

Professional medical or psychological helpers are by no means immune to this problem. Physicians may prescribe other drugs to help people quit the primary chemical, thus producing multiple chemical addictions. Psychotherapeutic help may pro­long the addictive behavior while therapist and client spend months or years trying to uncover nonexistent childhood expe­riences to explain the addiction. It is as if the therapist teaches the addicted person to think, “I have become addicted because of some personality defect or old psychological trauma. I must spend months, perhaps years, trying to identify and solve my psychological problems (and while all this goes on, I have an excuse to keep on being addicted).”

From the standpoint of the addicted person, all the mind tricks and self-deceptions have one dedicated purpose: to con­tinue the addictive behavior. Likewise, there is only one dedi­cated action that really counteracts addiction, and that is to stop the addictive behavior. When the community surrounding an addicted person tries to help in any way that does not support ending the addiction, it will wind up supporting the addiction instead.

If we cut through all the camouflage and false complexities that addiction creates, we come back to the fundamental issue of contradictory motivations. At one level, both the chemically addicted person and his or her immediate community know that the taking of the chemical simply has to stop. Both the person and the community truly desire this. But at another, more insidious level of desire, they find themselves colluding with the addiction.

For the addicted person alone, struggling only with willpower, the desire to continue the addiction will win. It will win’, because it resides, as we shall see, at the level of biological conditioning, and it is always operative. Willpower and resolutions come and go, but the addictive process never sleeps. The caring community around the person has more potential than this. Even though this community is bound to have its own mind tricks and mixed motivations, it has a chance for a better perspective. Most importantly, the people who care about a chemically addicted person have one another. Grace is always a present possibility for individuals, but its flow comes to full­ness through community. Grace flows toward appreciating the truth, toward an accurate understanding of what is going on beneath the confused surface of addiction. During the first third of this century, Sigmund Freud and his followers laid the foun­dations for such an understanding.

Psychoanalytic Insights

Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts proposed that all mental activity was fueled by a psychic energy they called libido. The exact nature of this energy was never made clear. Freud saw it as physical and sexual in nature, while Jung described it in more metaphysical terms. Both agreed, however, that psychic energy is invested in the activities, things, or persons that are especially important to an individual at a given time. The Greek word for this investment of energy is cathexis, literally meaning “holding.” Freud’s original German word was besetzung, mean­ing “being occupied with.” According to psychoanalytic theory, then, cathexis is the investment of psychic energy through which we hold on to or occupy ourselves with whatever is im­portant to us. Obviously, cathexis is the psychological equiva­lent of spiritual attachment.

Freud felt that our cathexes were determined by two dynam­ics: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He saw pleasure principle motivations as seeking quick pleasure or im­mediate relief from distress: “I want what I want when I want it.” In contrast, he felt decisions based on the reality principle required postponement of gratification in favor of more long-range or altruistic endeavors. In the light of modern behavioral psychology, Freud’s pleasure and reality principles may seem outmoded. But they established pleasure and relief of pain as important determinants of behavior, thus laying a foundation for the motivational psychology that was to follow.

Psychoanalysts were also quick to point out that many sig­nificant cathexes occur unconsciously. The mind uses denial, repression, and a host of other defense mechanisms to keep us unaware of the truth of our motivations or to justify them false­ly. For example, while I may know that much of my psychic energy is currently invested in writing this book well and clear­ly, I may not realize that some of the same energy is also in­vested in less admirable motives like trying to impress or compete with my colleagues. In terms of the spiritual life, we may think we are seeking to love God with purity of heart, but quite different and even conflicting motivations are normally present beneath awareness. Perhaps we are also trying to build a holy image of ourselves or to meet the expectations of others or to earn higher favor in the eyes of our image of God.

From a psychoanalytic standpoint, then, our unconscious motivations keep us from true purity of heart. We are not alone in the struggle. The writings of spiritual giants throughout his­tory reveal their repeated struggles to find purity of heart and wholeness of love in the midst of their own mixed motivations. Further, as they grew in purity, they became ever more hum­bled by the apparent endlessness of their attachments. This is one reason why authentic spiritual growth is accompanied by increasing awareness of one’s own need for God’s mercy rather than pride in one’s holiness. It may also be why Jesus revered the simple honesty of the tax collector’s prayer: “God be mer­ciful to me, a sinner.”

To summarize, psychoanalytic psychology has contributed the following important insights toward our understanding ad­diction: attachments form through the investment (cathexis) of psychic energy in certain activities, things, or people that bring us pleasure or relief from distress; many of these cathexes are kept unconscious by means of self-deception, so our motiva­tions are never completely pure and may be quite contradictory.

The Myth of the Addictive Personality

In my opinion, at least one psychoanalytic theory pertaining to addiction has proven more harmful than helpful. This is the concept of the addictive personality. In brief, it assumes that chemical addictions occur because of preexisting personality defects. Early researchers observed that chemically addicted people seemed to operate on the basis of the pleasure principle. Addicted people were called “narcissistic,” self-centered, ma­nipulative, and devious, and they suffered from low self-es­teem. The researchers concluded that some deep neurotic problem was responsible for the onset of addiction.

When I began working with substance abuse, I noted that addicted people did indeed tend to have little self-respect, and they often seemed manipulative, devious, and self-centered. At first I agreed that these were symptoms of an addiction-prone personality disorder. If that were the case, however, the symp­toms should have been apparent before the addiction ever be­gan. But detailed histories revealed no supporting evidence. Some people had become addicted as a result of seeking chem­ical relief from anxiety, depression, or other physical and emo­tional distress. Most, however, seemed to have led relatively normal lives before the addiction started. They had been capa­ble of authentic respect for themselves, and in their dealings with others they had demonstrated compassion, honesty, and straightforwardness.

I had to conclude that the symptoms of addictive personality were caused by the addiction, not the cause of it. Suffering the extreme devastation of will and self-control that addiction brings, people necessarily become self-centered. The humilia­tion, shame, and guilt that erode self-esteem also breed deviousness and manipulation. Severely addicted people feel unworthy and incapable of getting what they need in straight­forward ways, no matter what masks of competence or grandi­osity they may wear. It is true, then, that a particular kind of personality distortion occurs with addiction, not as its cause but as its effect. It is an addicted personality instead of an ad­dictive personality.

If we cannot blame addiction on some preexisting personality problem, we must look elsewhere for its causes. We will find considerable help in the more modern understandings of be­havioral psychology.

Behavioral Insights

The roots of behavioral psychology go back to a seventeenth-century philosophical idea called associationism. Beginning in the thinking of the philosophers Berkeley, Hobbes, Locke, and Mills, and later verified in direct experiments by psychologists and physiologists, associationism recognized that new patterns of activity or learning occur because one sensation or response becomes associated with another. The best-known early exper­imenter in this arena was the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. His studies of conditioned behavior in dogs spawned a whole field of studies of how human beings learn, adapt, and respond to the world around them. Pavlov inaugurated modern behav­ioral psychology.

In contrast to psychoanalysis, behavioral psychology restricts itself to objectively observable behavior; it avoids considering interior, subjective experience. So not only is behavioral psy­chology more precise and verifiable than psychoanalytic theory, but it also focuses on dynamics of learning and habit formation, which have been somewhat ignored by psychoanalysis.

In behavioral psychology, the law of effect replaces what Freud called the pleasure principle. The law of effect simply says that if a behavior is associated with an effect of pleasure or relief from pain, that behavior tends to occur more frequently. This is a component of learning called positive reinforcement. Con­versely, if a behavior is associated with pain or removal of pleas­ure, it will tend to occur less frequently (negative reinforcement). Repeated experiences of association between behaviors and their effects constitute the form of learning known as condition­ing.

Simply stated, if I do something that makes me feel good, I am likely to do it again. If I keep doing it, and if it keeps making me feel good, I will probably make a habit of it. Once I have made a habit of it, it becomes important to me and I will miss it if it is taken away. In other words, I have become attached to it. The most important behavioral insight into addiction, then, is that attachment takes place through a process of learning. The learning need not take place on a conscious, intentional level; it is not a matter of consciously noticing the effects of a behavior and then deciding to make a habit of it. Instead, the process takes place automatically at a deep physical level. In fact, most such learnings never do reach conscious awareness until they are already well entrenched, and many may never come into awareness at all. Because habits and attachments formed through this conditioning process are so deep and automatic, they can be extremely powerful and difficult to break.

To spiritually sensitive people, behavioral psychology some­times seems cold, austere, unresponsive to the subtle feelings of the human heart. It is true that behaviorists try to base their observations on objective, measurable phenomena; they feel, rightly, that science requires precision. But it is precision that makes behavioral observations so helpful in clarifying the de­velopment of addictions. If we combine some relatively simple behavioral understandings with a few psychoanalytic insights and with the actual experience of addicted people, we can form a workable—and I think quite accurate—model of how addic­tions develop through the process of attachment.

How Attachment Happens

We can understand the attachment process as occurring in three stages, which I call learning, habit formation, and struggle.

Stage One—Learning

The learning stage is characterized by associating a specific behavior with a feeling of pleasure or relief from pain. Let us say I engage in a behavior. It might be any behavior, intentional or unintentional, from taking a drug to counting my money, from biting my nails to thinking of God in a certain way. When I first perform this particular activity, I experience a feeling of pleasure or relief from distress.

My brain automatically associates these effects with the behav­ior. If the pleasurable effect is immediate and powerful, my brain will make a strong association between the behavior and its effect in this single experience, and already it will be push­ing to repeat the behavior. If the feelings are weaker or less immediate, it may take many reenactments of the behavior for my brain to solidify the association and start to request repeat performances. Either way, each time the behavior occurs, the association is reinforced, making me more likely to repeat it. Thus, certain attachments can develop almost instantaneously, while others may take a long time. This form of learning is known as conditioning; it is the primary way we “learn” to be addicted, and it can happen altogether unconsciously.

Stage Two—Habit Formation

Up until now, the behavior and its effects have been associ­ated only with each other. When the conditioned pattern be­comes associated with other experiences in my life, I will become more active in repeating the behavior. Then a full-fledged habit develops. For example, I may be feeling a little depressed because of some disappointment in my life. My brain will make the association that if I “do” this particular behavior, I will feel better. Therefore I find myself wanting to perform the behavior as a way of dealing with the depression. Now I not only repeat the behavior for its own direct effects, but I also actively seek it as a reaction to stress or discomfort in other areas of life. This is the primary effect of Stage Two: increased frequency of the behavior.

The second stage involves actively seeking the effects of the behavior in a variety of life situations. Doing the behavior for its effects seems much more intentional than the automatic rep­etitions of Stage One, but it can still happen completely outside of consciousness. In most cases, I will be totally unaware that I am using the behavior in this way until Stage Three, when something prevents me from performing the behavior, or when it starts to cause problems.

Stage Three—Struggle

By now my associations have become so entrenched that the habit is an integral part of my life. Upon encountering any upset or distress, my desire to do the behavior surfaces like a reflex. And even in the absence of stress, I begin to feel uneasy if I go too long without repeating the behavior. Whether the behavior involves taking a chemical, losing myself in some plea­surable interpersonal experience, or holding a particular image of God, I am now becoming dependent upon it, needing it, and wanting more and more of it. This is the beginning of tolerance.

With this increasing need and frequency, something is bound to interfere with my habit sooner or later. Such interferences may occur in any number of ways. If my behavior involves a drug, food, money, or some other substance, I may have trouble keep­ing myself supplied. If it involves another person, any change in the relationship will threaten my attachment. Or perhaps someone points out my growing dependency, or I become aware of it on my own and decide to quit or moderate it. In this last case, I myself become the source of the interference.

Regardless of how such interferences arise, the behavior that I have become accustomed to is blocked, and I react with dis­tress. In other words, the habit has now become its own source of stress. In addition, the blocking of the behavior produces backlash feelings that are the opposite of those that first caused the conditioning; instead of pleasure, I feel pain. Depending on the nature of the behavior, this distress and pain may range from mild uneasiness to true agony. Either way, the circle of attachment is completed with withdrawal symptoms.

For several reasons, interferences actually reinforce rather than lighten my attachment. First, since I have now learned to deal with stress by repeating the behavior, the stress of having my behavior interfered with only makes me want to perform the behavior more. If I become my own source of interference by trying to quit, I learn firsthand about mixed motivations as my attempts to quit continually increase my desire to continue!

Second, behavioral psychologists have long known that inter­mittent gratification is a powerful means of conditioning. A habit is more strongly reinforced when the positive effects of the be­havior occur intermittently than when they are constant. This is one reason gambling, fishing, hunting, and other behaviors that have intermittent and unpredictable payoffs are so addic­tive. It is also why attempts to moderate or cut down an ad­dictive behavior usually fail so abysmally. In my struggles to make gratification less constant, I am actually reinforcing my attachment.

The implications are clear. The only effective way of ending an addictive behavior is to stop it. Anything less will almost surely aggravate the situation. But of course I will neither be able to accept nor to accomplish this simple reality. All the pieces of the circle of attachment have reinforced my addictive behavior, making me repeat it. And with each repetition, my learning has become more deeply ingrained. With the circle complete, addiction is born. Even when I consciously try to stop the behavior, my brain is unconsciously learning it better and seeking it more. My motivations are truly mixed, and I am fully at war with myself. My attachment has become like quick­sand; the more I struggle and flail about with my willpower, the more mired down I become. All the mind tricks and self-deceptions we have spoken of now come into play—rational­izations and denials and the seductiveness of “I can handle it.” My self-esteem crumbles as I sense how truly out of control I am. I am in the clutches of the enemy, and the enemy is clearly myself.

The Development of Aversion Addictions

As I have said, the dynamics of aversion addictions are mirror images of those of attraction addictions.

The power of aversion attach­ment is invested in blocking a specific behavior, avoiding a par­ticular experience. It does this through negative reinforcement. An initial association is made between the behavior and un­pleasant effects of pain or distress. This is the basis of aversive conditioning. Repeated aversive conditionings and associations with other aspects of life cause one to actively avoid the expe­rience and its effects. This leads to intolerance, the opposite of tolerance, in which even the smallest taste of the experience is repulsive. A good example would be getting food poisoning from a particular food; for months or years afterwards even the smell of that food can be repugnant.

If the experience cannot be avoided, one undergoes what might be called approach symptoms, feelings of repulsion, panic, and anxiety not at all unlike the withdrawal symptoms of at­traction attachment. Examples of approach symptoms include the panic experienced by phobics who must fly in a plane, climb to a height, or be confined in a small space, and the repulsion felt by anorexics who are forced to eat. Just as all aspects of attraction addiction serve to perpetuate a behavior, everything here seeks to avoid it.

Summary

I have presented only an outline of the psychological dynam­ics of addiction. The actual process is more complicated. Hu­man experience can never be captured in charts or diagrams, nor does it ever fit neatly into stages and phases. For example, the effects of a behavior are never wholly pleasurable or painful; there is always a mixture of positive feelings that reinforce the development of an attraction addiction and negative ones that interfere with it. In addition, I have not done justice to the impacts of genetic inheritance, early childhood conditioning, or social and cultural forces, all of which exert powerful determin­ing effects upon the kinds of addictions a given person devel­ops. It has been well demonstrated, for example, that a propensity for alcohol addiction can be genetically inherited. It is reasonable to assume that other such specific proclivities are also a part of our genetic makeup. Our basic humanity means we will be addicted, but our individual heredities have much to say about the specific forms our worst addictions may take.

Finally, the dynamics I have described are based solely on psychological observations and theories; they reveal very little of what is really going on in the brain. In the mid-twentieth century, some authorities began to think of the brain as a “black box.” Psychoanalytically, we can listen to a person’s subjective account of what is going on in that black box. Behaviorally, we can observe the external results of those mysterious interior happenings. From these accounts and observations, we create theories about what might be actually going on in the box.

Sooner or later, however, we reach a situation in which, as Nobel laureate F. H. C. Crick says, “Several rival theories all explain the observed results equally well. At that point,” Crick continues, “there is no choice but to poke inside the box.” It remains for neurology to shed light upon the actual workings inside that box, and this is where we must now look.

 

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

Excerpts from Chapter 4.  Body: The Neurological Nature of Addiction

 

Equilibrium and Stress  (pp. 72-78)

As a first step toward appreciating how the brain functions in addiction, we need to review the importance of balance and equilibrium in brain activity. The societies and systems of brain cells form a very real ecology in which equilibrium of activity is critically important. All brain functioning, like the rest of bodily activity, depends upon delicate shifts of balance among chemicals, cells, and systems of cells.

Like human beings, nerve cells can never act in complete isolation from one another. Their interconnections are so exten­sive that anything happening anywhere within the nervous sys­tem is bound to have effects elsewhere. A change in one cell shifts the balance of its local group and of all its functional systems. These changes, in turn, affect the larger systems of the brain, and these then cause changes in the other systems of the body. The great “ecological system” that is the person is altered.

In truth, we must acknowledge that the reverberation of ef­fects is not limited to an individual human being. As we well know, a change in one person affects other people. The individ­ual affects family and friends; these in turn shift the balances of the larger society, and on it goes. Certainly the activities of one nerve cell in the occipital lobe of your brain will not measur­ably affect the life of someone on the other side of the world, but it cannot be denied that some reverberation, however miniscule, must happen. Just as the billions of cells in each of our brains form a vast interconnected community inside our skulls, so do we human beings—whether we wish to or not—partici­pate in the community that is our earth, our solar system, our galaxy. And just as vast universal systems depend upon their natural ecological balances, so do the systems of cells within our brains.

Both Eastern and Western medical sciences have long under­stood that maintaining natural balances is the body’s greatest priority; if the systems of the body are going to work at all, they must work together in harmony. When equilibrium is thrown off balance, the result is stress. By definition, stress is the body’s reaction to disequilibrium. Stress includes both the alarm responses that signal imbalance and the coping mecha­nisms that seek restoration of equilibrium. Within the nervous system, cells cope with imbalances by means of three basic re­sponses: feedback, habituation, and adaptation. These three mechanisms are also the neurological dynamics of attachment. Progressively, like three stair steps descending into slavery, feedback, habituation, and adaptation lead to addiction.

Feedback

I have said that certain results of a cell’s activity can be fed back to it by other cells, causing it to modify its functioning. Feedback is the first line of defense against stress, the initial reaction to imbalance. Feedback can occur in one of three ways: cells that are overactive may be inhibited; cells that are under­active may be stimulated; and cells that are doing well may be facilitated.

As an example of inhibitory feedback, let us say I am walking barefoot and I step on a tack. Systems change; stress occurs. Cells in my spinal cord have almost instantly caused a reflex withdrawal of my foot. At the same time, thousands of cells higher up in my spinal cord become very active in response to the sensation of pain. They are sending messages of alarm and stress to functional systems higher up in my brain, demanding response. Unchecked, the alarm messages could imbalance my higher systems, causing me to overreact, to panic, to become crazed over a minor incident. To restore a semblance of equilib­rium, and to enable an effective response, some of the receiving cells will send inhibiting messages back to the original cells, in essence telling them to settle down. In this way, the balance of function is kept from being too distorted, and an appropriate response is possible. My higher systems then only have to in­crease my pulse and respiration temporarily, get me to curse and hop up and down a few times, and help me pull the tack out of my foot.

Although we must remember that millions of cells are in­volved in any such activity, we can liken feedback between two individual cells to two people talking together. If the first per­son is speaking at a normal volume and rate and saying some­thing the second person is very interested in, the listener may give facilitating feedback by saying, “Oh, yes, please go on.” If the first person is speaking too softly to be heard, the listener will experience a little stress. She may then give some stimula­tory feedback: “I can’t hear you; please speak up a little.” Or if the first person is very excited, speaking too loudly and rapidly, as the nerve cells were in the last example, the listener may feel quite stressed and need to draw back and say, “Whoa, slow down. Now tell me slowly and quietly.” This is inhibitory feed­back.

The vast majority of feedback that naturally occurs in the brain is inhibitory. The cell systems that initiate activity are, for the most part, in a constant state of readiness and potential activity, so the higher systems of the brain must maintain bal­ance and function primarily by inhibiting them. The cerebral cortex inhibits deeper centers; the right and left sides of the brain mutually inhibit each other; cells in the brainstem inhibit cells in the spinal cord. Effective action primarily takes place through selective inhibition.

I have often marveled at this arrangement of things. It seems to indicate that human beings—and perhaps all other creatures with brains—are inherently active, dynamic, vibrant. Maybe it is in the nature of sentient life not to have to be stimulated in order to act, but to be always ready to go. It means we are not simply passive responders to external stimuli. In the very es­sence of our being, we are initiators. Perhaps, in the image of our Creator, we ourselves are endless creators.

To return to our earlier analogy, the most common relation­ship between neurons is like the listening person telling the excited person to settle down and speak more slowly. If this inhibitory feedback works, the excited person calms down quickly, the normal balance of the relationship is restored, and effective communication can continue. If the initial feedback is not effective, however, or if it must be given repeatedly, the listener will experience even more stress. Her next option is more aggressive; she can try to force him to shut up. Failing this, she will try to tune him out. In nerve cells, the two re­sponses happen simultaneously. It is as if the listening person both stuffs cotton in her ears and clamps her hands over the speaking person’s mouth. In the language of neurology, habit­uation has begun.

Habituation

Habituation can be a misleading term; it does not mean form­ing a habit. As we shall see, habituation is the neurological cause of tolerance, but technically it refers only to the process by which nerve cells become less sensitive and responsive to repeated stimuli. Habituation can occur in two ways, depend­ing on how long the stress persists.

The first kind of habituation occurs when cells continue to receive repetitive stimuli over a short period of time, perhaps only minutes or hours. The cells actually restrict the transmis­sion of the incoming impulses by inhibiting their own receptors and by actively suppressing the conduction of those impulses by the sending cells. The receiving cells are no longer simply informing the sending cells of their excessive activity; now they are using brute force to restrict the conduction of impulses along the axons of the sending cells.

We experience such habituation countless times each day. It is what makes us unaware of background noises. When you first go for a walk on an ocean beach, you appreciate the sound of the breaking waves. Since this sound is so repetitive and does not demand any particular response from you, however, you will soon become unaware of it. A long time may go by before you notice it again. This is because the receptors of cells in’ your auditory system have become less sensitive to that sound, and its conduction along fibers connecting those cells is actively being suppressed. It happens with virtually any system of cells in the brain. When you first enter a building you notice the smells, sounds, and general atmosphere of the place. After a few minutes pass, you usually become unaware of these things.

A number of studies indicate that certain forms of meditation help to decrease automatic habituation, thus enabling one to remain more continually attentive to all that is happening in the present moment. The meditations that work in this way encourage an attitude of relaxed openness, not tense concentra­tion.

We use a similar kind of suppression when we are paying attention to or concentrating on one thing and trying to shut out distractions. It is also a way that psychological repression happens, keeping unwanted internal sensations from entering consciousness. It can take a lot of work to suppress the trans­mission of internal and external stimuli, especially if the un­wanted sensations are strong. This is why we become tired after a long period of concentrated attention, and why active psycho­logical repression can sap our energy for other things.

Because of the effort receiving cells must use to suppress the transmission of unwanted stimuli, they would become exhausted—depleted of neurotransmitters and energy sources—if they kept it up for too long. Therefore a different technique is nec­essary to handle stimuli that go on for more than a few hours. In this second form of habituation, the nerve cells begin to undergo actual physical changes. They start to destroy their own neuro-receptors and even sever their synaptic connections with the sending cells.

The analogy of two people talking becomes absurd at this point. We would have to say the listening person first punc­tured her own eardrums and then walked out of the room. So let us drop the analogy for a moment and simply say that full habituation involves actual physical changes in nerve cells and in the connections between them. The physical changes estab­lish a long-lasting system of defense to protect the equilibrium of the larger system. This is the real meaning of habituation.

Both feedback and habituation are ways of trying to keep new stimuli from too strongly affecting the normal equilibrium of ongoing systems. Feedback simply communicates a “quiet down” message. Habituation uses more force to prevent mes­sages from entering the systems it is trying to protect. When neither feedback nor habituation is effective, the repeated mes­sages move in and disturb the natural balance of the systems. Then a new balance must be created. A new normality must be established. This is adaptation. Another word for it is attach­ment.

Adaptation

If all attempts at habituation have failed, the receiving cells will increase their responsiveness; they will “join in” rather than trying to “tune out.” As a result, the normal interaction among cells is thrown out of balance. Once again, the process produces stress.

If this imbalance lasts only a short time, the old equilibrium can be quickly restored when the situation passes. But if the change is prolonged, the rest of the system must adapt to it.  Countless systems of cells must adjust their functioning to ac­commodate the new situation. When adaptation is complete, stress goes away because a new equilibrium has been estab­lished. With this new equilibrium comes a new sense of nor­mality.

A mild example of a change in normality is adjusting to dif­ferent time zones. If I take a brief trip to the other side of the continent, the time there will feel unusual and a bit stressful to ” me. I will probably try to hold on to my old sense of time until I return home to my normal time zone. But if I spend more than a few days there, I will have to adapt; if I do not, the stress of trying to hold on to my old rhythms will become too great.  I When I do adapt, the new time will become normal for me, and my old time zone, when I return, will seem unusual. With each change, I experience stress when my old normality is altered, relief when the new normality is established.

Adaptations occur through physical changes in the cells of the nervous system: synapses formed and dissolved, connec­tions established and broken, neurotransmitters changed in kind and amount, neuro-receptors altered in number and responsiveness. Adapting to change, then, means going through the stress of withdrawal from the old normality and finding relief when a new normality is established. At this most basic level of human functioning, attachment has made its appear­ance. I am attached to whatever makes things normal for me. I don’t let that normality change without a struggle.

We human beings are the most adaptable creatures in God’s creation. Our adaptability has allowed us to dominate the world. But our very capacity to create new normalities for our­selves also makes us vulnerable to countless attachments. As every attachment forms, a new normality is born. With each new normality, addiction exists.

 

pp. 86-90

The longer an addiction continues, the more things will be­come associated with it and the more entrenched it will become. Some behaviors or chemicals that produce a rapid, direct, and powerful effect may result in addiction after only one or two experiences. Others may require many repeated experiences be­fore they become entrenched. But regardless of how an addic­tion begins, the longer it lasts the more powerful it becomes. Attachments are thus like spreading malignancies, steadily in­vading and incorporating their surroundings into themselves. To apply the words of Isaiah, addictions are like “greedy dogs, never satisfied,” or as Habakkuk said, “Forever on the move, with an appetite as large as sheol, and as insatiable as death.”

Stress Addiction

The phenomenon of becoming attached to stress itself is of particular spiritual significance, and it is a good example of multiple system involvement. Only recently described, stress addiction has received considerable attention in the popular press. Therefore I will discuss it only briefly in the context of neurology.

The body naturally creates adrenaline, noradrenaline, and other chemicals that are important in responding to stressful situations. In addition, some of the body’s natural opiates, such as the endorphins and enkephalins, are often released in times of stress. All these stress chemicals act as neurotransmitters. They may be generated by nerve cells and act as message car­riers across synapses, or they may be released elsewhere in the body and travel through the bloodstream as hormones. Adren­aline, for example, is manufactured by the adrenal gland and acts as a hormone. Whether stress chemicals come across syn­apses or through the bloodstream, they exert powerful effects when they arrive at neuro-receptors of nerve cells.

Normally, the body is accustomed to a low level of stress chemicals in the circulation, with intermittent bursts of higher amounts during times of crisis. Most normal stresses are of relatively short duration, and the brain’s natural responses cope with them quickly. In our hectic modern society, however, many individuals find themselves in prolonged stressful situa­tions. Many jobs today are geared to continually high stress levels, and some professionals even pride themselves on the amount of stress they habitually live with. The effects of such protracted stress have been well demonstrated in terms of heart disease, ulcers, and the like. Jogging and other exercise pro­grams, by stressing the body physically, help accustom the body to coping with high stress levels so it more readily han­dles them as normal. With all of this, stress becomes a habit.

What happens is not difficult to understand. In responding naturally to a stressful situation, the body increases its produc­tion of stress chemicals. The chemicals have their expected ef­fects on the cells that receive them, and things return to normal when the stress passes. But if the stress continues, the receiving cells must cope. They try their feedback mechanisms to achieve a lower level of stress chemicals, and, if this doesn’t work, they habituate and adapt. Their adaptations establish a new normal­ity that includes an excessive quantity of stress chemicals.

The body suffers in a variety of ways. The circulatory system, for example, must adjust to a normality that includes much more work. Of special significance to our discussion, however, is what happens when the stress-addicted person tries to relax and slow down. If the person takes a vacation, goes on a re­treat, or even tries to settle down to pray for a while, the re­moval of external stress causes less stress chemicals to be generated. This is precisely what the person wants and ex­pects—a time of relaxation—but she does not expect the re­sponse of her brain cells to this reduction of stress chemicals. The neurons, having adapted to high levels of stress chemicals, now react as if something were wrong. They send signals, iron­ically, of stress to the rest of the body, trying to get things going again. Thus the person who is trying to settle down may find herself becoming increasingly anxious, looking around for something to do, and not at all experiencing the rest and relax­ation she had hoped for.

Further, other cells that have become habituated to stress chemicals may go through a backlash withdrawal and “crash”; they become lethargic in what now seems to them a virtual absence of stimulation. Thus in addition to agitation, the per­son may also feel great fatigue and sleepiness. “I never knew how tired I really was until I settled down.” Again, both phe­nomena tend to encourage the person not to relax. The choice is limited: either a crash-like sleep (which is often impossible because of agitation) or just getting back to doing something demanding and stressful. A severely stress-addicted person can thus be in a completely no win situation, becoming increasingly fatigued but at the same time increasingly uncomfortable with any situation that might offer rest.

In most average cases of stress addiction, people simply find they need extra time to wind down before they can begin to relax. Some individuals know this pattern so well that they plan their vacations around it. “I have to take at least a two-week vacation because it takes me almost a week to relax, then a few days just to sleep, and then I can have a couple of really enjoy­able days.” With more severe stress addiction, people may be totally unable to relax unless they do something that gives them their fix of stress chemicals. Many people choose jogging or some other physically stressing activity. Such activities have be­come immensely popular among the stress-addicted because they provide enough chemicals to keep withdrawal symptoms at bay, while at the same time freeing the mind from normal worries and work tasks.

It is in the realm of spiritual practice, however, that attach­ment to stress becomes most obvious. Spending time in quiet, receptive openness is an essential part of prayer, meditation, and most other spiritual practices. In such settings, even mild addiction to stress becomes rapidly and painfully evident. For many modern spiritual pilgrims, the simple matter of taking time for daily prayer can become a battle of will excruciatingly reminiscent of that encountered in chemical addiction. The mind can generate wondrous excuses to do something instead of just being open and present. The struggles that go on be­tween being and doing can be awesome. Issues of control and will power, surrender and defeat rage with all the drama of true spiritual warfare.

There are many things all of us might rather avoid in prayer: we might rather not relinquish our sense of self-mastery; we might rather not hear what God might ask of us; we might rather avoid the self-knowledge that comes to us in quiet. Now, in addition, increasing numbers of us are discovering that we would rather not experience the discomfort of being peaceful.

Permanence

As we have seen, the process of attachment takes place psy­chologically as a form of learning. This learning happens through reinforcement and conditioning, and it is accompanied by physical and chemical changes in the brain and elsewhere in the body. Since multiple functional systems are involved, the learning becomes entrenched.

Sadly, the brain never completely forgets what it has learned. Because of the deep and pervasive physical power of strong attachments, their potential exists forever in us, even after we have effectively broken the habit of acting upon them. We may joke about never forgetting how to ride a bicycle, saying, “Don’t worry; it will come back to you.” But the permanence of addic­tion memory is not funny. It stands ready to come back to us with only the slightest encouragement. The brain learns how to “do” its attachments far better than it learns to ride a bicycle or drive a car, and it remembers them more powerfully. Years after a major addiction has been conquered, the smallest association, the tiniest taste, can fire up old cellular patterns once again.

One aspect of addiction, then, is permanent. Thus we never completely overcome our attachments. Because staying away from addictive behavior is an ongoing business, people in AA call themselves “recovering alcoholics” rather than “recovered alcoholics.” We may control our behavior in response to our addictions, and we may, with grace, be delivered from bondage to them. Then, as time passes, their pull becomes less intense. But throughout our lives, their potential for reactivation contin­ues to exist within us. The brain does not forget. From the standpoint of psychology, this means we can never become so well adjusted that we can stop being vigilant. From a neurolog­ical viewpoint, it means the cells of our best-intentioned sys­tems can never eradicate the countless other systems that have been addicted. And from a spiritual perspective, it means that  no matter how much grace God has blessed us with, we forever remain dependent upon its continuing flow.

 

 

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

Excerpts from Chapter 5.  Spirit: The Theological Nature of Addiction

 

pp. 92-118

Displacement of Spiritual Longing

I began this book with the statement that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. In Thomas Merton’s words, “There is a natural desire for heaven, for the fruition of God, in us.”

Ultimately, our yearning for God is the most important aspect of our humanity, our most precious treasure; it gives our exis­tence meaning and direction. There has been considerable de­bate about whether this “human religious impulse” really is universal, whether it represents a true primary drive, and so on. I am convinced that it is indeed universal and primary, and, moreover, that it is a very specific desire for an actual loving communion, even union, in an absolutely personal relationship with God.

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. For example, God wants to be our perfect lover, but instead we seek perfection in human relationships and are disappointed when our lovers cannot love us perfectly. God wants to provide our ultimate secu­rity, but we seek our safety in power and possessions and then find we must continually worry about them. We seek satisfac­tion of our spiritual longing in a host of ways that may have very little to do with God. And, sooner or later, we are disap­pointed.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, one could say we displace our longing for God upon other things; we cathect them instead of God. Behaviorally, we are conditioned to seek objects by the positive and negative reinforcements of our own private expe­rience and by the messages of parents, peers, and culture. 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. Mediating all the stimuli they receive, the cells of our brains are continually seeking equilibrium, devel­oping patterns of adaptation that constitute what is normal. Thus the more we become accustomed to seeking spiritual sat­isfaction through things other than God, the more abnormal and stressful it becomes to4ook for God directly.

From a more specifically spiritual viewpoint, we naturally seek the least threatening ways of trying to satisfy our longing for God, ways that protect our sense of personal power and require the least sacrifice. Even when we know that our hunger is for God alone, we will still be looking for loopholes—ways of having our cake and eating it too, ways of maintaining our attachments to things and people while simultaneously trying to deepen our intimacy with God. We seek compromise not because we are evil or conniving, but because of the way we are made; we naturally look for the least painful ways of living. From the standpoint of basic human common sense, this is per­fectly reasonable. We look for our ultimate satisfaction in God’s palpable and definable creations instead of looking through them to the hidden, loving face of their Creator.

Perhaps our displacement of desire for God makes sense from God’s perspective as well. After all, it is God who creates us with our propensities for addiction. In fact, it seems to me that God actually encourages such displacements. I shall discuss this more theologically at the end of this chapter, but let me explain some of it now. Most of the time, God remains some­what hidden from us. Why? For one thing, God in immanence is already too close to us, too intimate, too much at one with us to be a clear-cut object, and God in transcendence is too great to be apprehended.

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, painfully, 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.” We have to turn away before we can come home with dignity.

Homecoming

For many of us, freedom of choice means that our longing for the true God remains submerged within us for months, years, or even decades at a time, while our conscious energies seek satisfaction elsewhere. The true longing will resurface periodically, giving us small gracious and discomforting nudges, as if to say, “You know this is not really what you want.” But the momentum of attachment usually carries us on, with a power all its own. Often it is not until this momentum brings us to some point of existential despair, some rock bottom, some impasse, that we become capable of beginning to reclaim our true desire.

Sometimes we hit the impasse during what has been called midlife crisis; more often despair seems to be given through grace in times and circumstances that are completely unpre­dictable. Whenever and however it happens, we look at the attachments that had seemed so important and feel like the idol maker in Isaiah: “What I have in my hand is nothing but a lie!” And we hear, more clearly than ever, God’s call to “make your home in me, as I make mine in you.”

With this realization, we may begin to reclaim our primary desire for God. Like the prodigal, we may choose to come home. But at this point, after years of displacing desire and of adapting to addictions elsewhere, home will not seem normal. Thus we respond to God’s homeward call with a mixture of hope and fear. Something in us knows that this home is where we belong, but in many ways it also feels like alien territory. The journey homeward, the process of homemaking in God, involves withdrawal from addictive behaviors that have become normal for us. In withdrawal, 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. As I said earlier in discussing detachment, this process is easily misunderstood no matter what we call it. 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 very painful.

What we lose in homecoming is not the objects of our attach­ment, nor even our care for them. In fact, our care grows to­ward true love, love that sees and appreciates all things in the world for what they are. What we lose is the attachment itself, the strength of our addictive behavior in relationship to these objects, the way we make gods of them. But we feel no real consolation when we experience the inevitable withdrawal symptoms that accompany letting go our attachments. There is real pain here. If I am a heroin addict in withdrawal, I will not be consoled by knowing that heroin will still exist in the world after I withdraw from it. What I want, and what I am losing, is the use of it. Similarly, if I am withdrawing from addiction to a relationship or possession, it will not ease my sense of loss to know that the person or thing will continue to be present in my life or in my heart. I will not even want to hear that my love will be stronger if I let it go. What I cling to most is my use, my idolization of that person or thing.

The loss of attachment is the loss of something very real; it is physical. We will resist this loss as long as we possibly can. When withdrawal does happen, it will hurt. And, after it is over, we will mourn. Only then, when we have completed the grieving over our lost attachment, will we breathe the fresh air of freedom with appreciation and gratitude.

When we first reclaim our spiritual longing, we usually do not know that the journey homeward will involve such relin­quishment, that the homemaking process will be so painful. Perhaps this is just as well. Not that such knowledge would cause us to choose against God; on the contrary, I think the greater danger is that those who think they understand the process are likely to try to make it happen on their own by engaging in false austerities and love-denying self-deprivations. They will not wait for God’s timing; they will rush ahead of grace. I have seen it happen when ascetic practices have be­come over-institutionalized, and I have engaged in it myself when I thought I could engineer my own salvation. It does not work. Once we begin to experience the authentic homeward process, however, the implications of withdrawal become in­creasingly clear. If we allow grace to guide our responses, we will realize what we need to know as we need to know it.

One of the most powerful and potentially frightening realiza­tions is that there is no new normality of freedom to replace the old ones of addiction. As I have said, there can be no addiction to the true God because God refuses to be an object. God is more with us, more intimate, more steady than anything else in life. God is our ever-present Creator, Sustainer, and Redee­mer. God is the one completely passionate and faithful Lover of our lives. And yet, God is never “normal.”

Massive implications follow for the conduct of the spiritual life. I, for one, would very much like to have a prescribed meth­od of living that would insure my relationship with God and keep my spiritual growth on track. Although I would probably rebel against some aspects of such a system, I would at least feel certain of its limits and demands. I could adapt to it, make it my normality, and feel secure within it. But addiction to a religious system, like addiction to anything else, brings slavery, not freedom. The structures of religion are meant to mediate God’s self-revelation through community; they are not meant to be substitute gods. Doctrines of belief, rules of life, standards of conduct, and reliance on Scripture are all essential aspects of an authentic spiritual life. Sacraments are special means of grace; God acts through them with great power. All these things are vehicles for God’s love, but addiction to them makes them obstacles to the freedom of our own hearts.

It is impossible to “adapt” to God or to true freedom and love. We can—and, temporarily, we will—make images of God, freedom, and love and try to form them into new normalities that we can cling to, but these attachments must eventually be lifted as well. Authentic freedom and love will not be captured by attachment. Therefore, the journey homeward does not lead toward new, more sophisticated addictions. If it is truly home­ward, it leads toward liberation from addiction altogether. Ob­viously, it is a lifelong process.

Self-image

Let us examine one way the homeward journey might appear from the inside, from the standpoint of interior spiritual expe­rience. We must begin with our sense of self. When we were infants, we had a very different sense of self than we do now as adults. Then, before we had words, images, or concepts that we could label as “me,” we had a simple sense of being, a diffuse, undifferentiated awareness in which nothing separated us from what we perceived. When we reexperience that quality of awareness, as we all sometimes do, we might call it unitive. But throughout our life since infancy, our brain cells have been developing countless patterns and sequences that more’ clearly separate, define, and secure our sense of self. Brain cell patterns involve functional systems throughout all parts of the brain: memory, thought, body senses, visual images, every­thing. Thus our self-images, whatever we feel is “me” at a given time, are in fact cellular representations of self.

By the time we become adults, we have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these self-representation systems. Some of them function when we experience ourselves at work, others when we are at play, still others as parents, spouses, and all the other roles and circumstances within which we may pause to notice. Beneath the variety of self-representation systems, we sense something more constant, a vague awareness of “me-ness.” This constancy allows us to feel we are ourselves no matter what particular role we may be playing at a given time.

For the most part, however, we pay no attention to the un­derlying constancy. Instead, we act on the basis of our varied self-representation systems, changing from one to another in accord with our roles and situations. If we are fairly well ad­justed psychologically, our different systems will be generally harmonious and easily interchangeable; we can shift flexibly from one to another. If not, we may have to expend consider­able energy to keep them from warring with one another.

If we look at the makeup of our self-representation systems, it is obvious that they are intimately associated with our addic­tions. The strongest components of any self-representation, the ones that are most important, are the adaptations other systems have made to that particular role. When I sense myself as a writer, for example, my self-representation is associated not only with simple memories and hopes of writing, but more strongly with my attachments to writing: the ego issues of being considered an authority, the desires and fears associated with success and failure, competitiveness, and the like. Attach­ments come to the forefront of my self-consciousness because, whether I like them or not, they have entrenched themselves as significant. I want to see myself as a writer who is simply living out a few of God’s gifts gracefully. But what I really see is my attachments.

I could say similar things about my images of myself as fa­ther, as husband, as man, as spiritual pilgrim and lover of God, or any other self-representational system. We all define our­selves according to our addictions. If I were to ask you to tell me about yourself, and you replied honestly, you would tell me about your attachments. And if you weren’t honest, even that would be because of your attachments.

Ideally, our self-representation systems should function as expedient tools for us. They help us understand our own unique personalities; they differentiate us from one another; they let us know where our own character stops and where someone else’s begins. These self-discriminations are necessary for us to live efficiently, and they can also help us appreciate the wonder of our own being. But not only are our self-repre­sentation systems strongly determined by addiction; they also become objects of attachment themselves. Some self-images we want to cling to; others we abhor. As in any other addiction, when we become addicted to our own self-images, they begin to control us.

For example, I am seduced and enticed by a certain image of myself as a whole, holy, loving man who is well on his way to becoming free from attachments. When this image comes up in my prayer, it causes me to pose and posture; I find myself trying to make my prayer fit my image of how a holy man would pray. I no longer really invite God into my prayer. It becomes an act, a scene I play out on my own stage for my own edification. God is there in spite of this silliness, but, for the time being, I am unaware of that saving fact.

So we become addicted to our own self-images. Our cellular representations of self habituate, adapt, and control us. In the course of homecoming, addictions to self-image also must be lightened; they must be relinquished in the cause of freedom. As I understand it, this is the neurological meaning of “losing oneself to find oneself” and “dying to be reborn.” As with other addictions, we do not readily relinquish our attachments to self-images. In fact, we may cling to them more tenaciously than to any other attachments. Although the process of relinquishment is really only a matter of easing the power that certain cell sys­tems have over our sense of self, it can indeed feel like death.

If we examine our experience with self-representations, how­ever, we may find reassurance in the fact that we already, and very naturally, experience their coming and going, their death and rebirth, countless times each day. We have so many self-representations, and they are almost constantly changing. They dance around in accord with our circumstances; first one comes to prominence in our awareness, then another, then still anoth­er. Viewed from this perspective, it is difficult to believe how desperately we try to cling to them.

Even more surprising and reassuring is the frequency with which our self-representations disappear from awareness en­tirely. In the brain, their disappearances are characterized by pajises in the normally hectic firing of self-defining systems, as if the cells all just happened to take a breath and rest for a while. Our interior experience at such times is one of self-for-getfulness or self-transcendence. For a moment, we are relieved of bondage to who we think we are, and we can simply be. Usually these moments are very brief, because the systems of our brain start to experience withdrawal and quickly reestablish their normal conditioned patterns.

Thus, although pauses in self-definition may happen thou­sands of times a day, they happen so quickly that most of them go unnoticed. Occasionally, however, they are prolonged. At these times, we appreciate their spaciousness and freedom. We experience wonder and awe and a kind of sacred remembrance of what our awareness was like when we were very young. These times of just being remind us of home. We call them “spiritual” or “unitive.”⁹

The Experience of Heart

Such pauses in self-definition are like moments when a cloudy sky breaks clear. If only for an instant, we catch a glimpse of the spaciousness that always exists behind the clouds. There, in that pure and indefinable blueness, we get a sense of what the sky is really like. Similarly, when the clouds of our self-images clear for a moment, we catch glimpses of something that is constant behind our ever-changing represen­tations* of self. This underlying constancy of self does not change with our different roles, nor does it seem to be influ­enced by any particular characteristics. It also seems amazingly elusive, disappearing just as we try to grasp it, hiding when we seek it, appearing again when we least expect it.

We find ourselves becoming a bit anxious if we try to look too closely at our interior constancy, precisely because it is so indefinable. We are apt to want to call it our true self, the “real me.” But to call it “me” never seems quite right, for it fits into none of our other systems of self-representation. It permits of no particular neurological associations, except perhaps with some memory, similarly vague and indefinable, of “home.” We cannot hook it to this or that; we cannot give it an adequate name; we cannot control it. We can avoid awareness of it, but it never bows to our will. Therefore, though it haunts us beau­tifully and calls us sweetly, we do fear it.

If we are given the grace to spend some time with this mys­terious constancy, just gently letting it be what it is, we may find a strange confidence, even security, growing out of it. Here is something solid, some foundation of self that is invulnerable to any other experience, unaffected by anything else that might happen to us. It has something to do with just being aware and alive, for we notice it when we notice our own attention. In fact, we notice it most precisely when our attention has been temporarily captured by an attachment and then returns to some central position of pure awareness. In the return we feel a sense of security; for whenever our attention goes away and ‘ then returns, the presence at the center is still there, unaffected, unchanged, and somehow free.

As nearly as I can tell, our core is what Hebrew and Christian spiritualities have called heart. It is the aspect of oneself that is not only one’s own center but also where one can be in closest, most directly feeling contact with the presence of God. And it is meant to be the center of our will, the nucleus of all choice and action. Further, it is where we realize our essential unity with one another, with all God’s creation. Yet this heart sense does not want to be pinned down even with contemplative con­cepts. The heart does not seem to be quite oneself nor quite God. In the same way that it refuses to associate with any of our conditioned images of self, it does not fit any of our images of God. Thus it remains continually frustrating, and we always find ourselves deeply unknowing in the face of it.

The problem is that this heart sense is so spacious. It seems to have no bounds, no qualities, no form. It is unconditioned and unconditional. It has no objective attributes that we can grasp and relate to other systems. Since we can neither make an adequate cellular representation of it nor incorporate it into our preexisting systems, we cannot adapt to it. Like God, and perhaps in the image of God, our deepest sense of self will never be “normal.” Because our brains are used to dealing with normalities that have boundaries and qualities, the spacious­ness, its beckoning security and confidence notwithstanding, is terrifying.

So we are likely to pull away, perhaps even with vengeance, and thrust our attention back into the world of form and sub­stance where we can define ourselves. Here, though our addic­tions bind and frustrate us, we at least think we know who we are. We are in the world of our normality, the conditioned world to which the cells of our brain have adapted. But we have been touched by this other, deeper sense, and it will touch us again. It has awakened and appetized our spiritual hunger, and part of us will forever want to go back for more. We can occupy ourselves with other things, but there will always be times of rest, moments of pause, and there it will be, beckoning.

Spiritual Growth

Given enough experiences of pauses in self-definition, we may come up with a partial solution. During the experiences themselves, this heart sense is completely ungraspable. But af­terward we do have a memory of the experience, and with this memory we can make an image, a representation. We can give the image a name, just as I have done in this discussion. We can say it is heart, center, true self, experience of closeness to God. We can then associate this cellular representation with our previous images of God and self and begin to build a frame­work of spiritual understanding around it. Our representation, of course, will never be the thing itself, but it does help us reflect upon it, communicate about it, and otherwise dance about its edges.

If we are halfway authentic in our searching, we must take time in silence—in prayer and meditation. Like other normal human spiritual pilgrims, we will spend most prayer time play­ing with our spiritual images and representations. But within the spaces created by our attempts to be quiet, there will always be moments when we find ourselves opening once again into the reality. Then we will be reminded, if grace gives us the cour­age to admit it, that we have been chasing images instead of truth, perhaps even worshiping our representations as if they were idols. After each such reminder, we will come away with yet another memory representation, perhaps more sophisticat­ed than those that went before. By now we may have learned to make such images readily; we may even have made a habit of it. We know there is some deception and distancing in this, but we are simply more comfortable dealing with our images than directly facing the awesome, uncontrollable reality those images represent.

As time goes on, and with grace, the representations we make of spiritual reality will become less and less solid. Their qualities and boundaries will become more vague. As this hap­pens, we will discover that we can exist without clinging to our images so desperately. Our clutching, grasping hands begin to relax. From the standpoint of neurology, relaxing means a greater flexibility of sequences and patterns among cell systems. We have less need to immediately associate all our experiences with preset representations, to make them fit. We are a little more willing to be unknowing and to be surprised. Slightly more often, more of the cells of our brains may simply register a sensation rather than so quickly having to habituate and adapt to it. Psychologically, we are becoming a little more willing to let things be what they are. Spiritually, we are becoming a little less attached. Freedom is happening.

There is a strange sadness in this growing freedom. Our souls may have been scarred by the chains with which our addictions have bound us, but at least they were familiar chains. We were used to them. And as they loosen, we are likely to feel a vague sense of loss. The things to which we were addicted may still be with us, but we no longer give them the ultimate importance we once did. We are like caged animals beginning to experience freedom, and there is something we miss about the cage.

Like the Israelites in the exodus, we know we do not want to go back to imprisonment, and we sense we are moving on to a better existence, but still we must mourn the loss of the life we had known. This is a poignant grief, yet somehow soft and gentle. With time, it will grow into compassion: compassion for the spiritual imprisonment of our sisters and brothers, and compassion for the many parts of ourselves that still remain in the chains of addiction. Grief and compassion are part of spir­itual growth, the homeward pilgrimage from imprisonment to freedom, the homemaking of deepening love.

It is important to note that the spiritual growth process in­volves far more relinquishment than acquisition. In our culture, we are conditioned to expect growth to involve acquisition of new facts and understandings. To put it neurologically, the functional systems of our brains are used to elaborating upon themselves as growth happens. We have, in a way, become at­tached to the very process of expanding our attachments. But spiritual growth is different. It cannot be packaged, pro­grammed, or taught. Although some new facts and represen­tations may help us along the way (such as the ones I share in this book, I hope), the essential process is one of transforma­tion, not education. It is, if anything, an unlearning process in which our old ways are cleansed, liberated, and redeemed. As I have indicated repeatedly, spiritual growth does not establish new normalities through more habituation and adaptation. Instead, it frees us from slavery to conditioning; it leads us in the direction of unconditioned love.

Obviously, we cannot “conduct” spiritual growth. At bottom, it is God’s work. It is grace. But neither is it something we can be quietistic about. The immanence of God involves us of ne­cessity, and the transcendence of God calls forth a response from our free will. In brief, I think our participation is threefold. First, we pray. Our prayer may be formal words or a simple, silent turning toward God, but it acknowledges our source of hope, expresses our true desire, unites us with the rest of hu­manity, and commits our willingness to God. Second, insofar as we can, we attend to the heart sense within us; we try to keep returning to it in whatever ways are possible and staying with it as long as we can rather than immediately retreating into our conditioned systems. Third, we try to live the spiritual reality as best we can. This means taking risks of faith, trying to trust the incomprehensibly loving presence of God whether we feel it or not, and being as loving of ourselves and others as we possibly can.

Our threefold participation of prayer, meditation, and action responds to God’s graceful initiatives in our lives, and it leads toward a deepening trust in God. Developing fitfully, gradually, and often painfully, this fundamental trust in God allows us to become a little less bound to our addictions. Our security then becomes less dependent on the power of our own brain patterns and more dependent on the unexplainable mercy of God. Finally, as trust grows, we become less self-preoccupied, more free to be attentive to the needs of others, truly more loving.

Spiritual growth is by no means a steady process. Each time we touch the mystery of what is most real, we flee back into “normality” with some deeper layer of attachment threatened. Often upon return we may experience a backlash, a rebound of self-centeredness and desperate attempts to control things. We may find prayer more difficult at such times, and we are almost certain to invent new representations to take the place of those we have had to relinquish. The choices we make on such occasions become very important. Although they do not by them­selves determine any outcomes, they do create the patterns of our freedom and slavery, and these, interwoven with God’s pat­terns of grace, form our unique tapestries of spiritual growth.

Three Responses

The choices that are open to us in response to our experi­ences of God’s loving, threatening call may sometimes be excru­ciatingly difficult to execute, but they are quite simple to understand. There are really only three options; we have al­ready touched on them all in our discussion, and most of us have already used them all extensively in our lives. First, we may try to deny or avoid God’s call, repressing our desire and displacing its energy. Much of the time we are successful at this, but the call is bound to break through our defenses and haunt us with gentle nudges or hound us with relentless yearn­ings. Second, we may make images of spiritual reality, cellular representations that enable us to feel a measure of power over it instead of remaining dependent upon it. Third, we can try to be present to the mystery in a gentle, open-handed, and coop­erative way. This is the contemplative option—not any system of complicated exercises, but the simple and courageous attempt to bear as much as one can of reality just as it is. To be contem­plative, then, is not to be a special kind of person. Contempla­tion is simply trying to face life in a truly undefended and open-eyed way.

I am convinced that all people are continually involved in choosing among these three options. Like most other decisions we make in daily life, our responses to God’s call often take place automatically, without any real reflection. They just hap­pen as results of barely conscious processes that we seldom take responsibility for. When we do begin to claim our choices in response to our hunger for God, we have begun an inten­tional spiritual life. Then, of course, we are liable to go over­board in  the opposite  direction,  taking it too much upon ourselves, thinking that the choices we make will absolutely determine our spiritual destiny.

But it is not so simple. Each of the three options has its assets and liabilities, its grace and its dark side. While denial and avoidance are usually only attempts to escape further into the delusion of salvation through attachment, they may, on a tem­porary and expedient basis, provide us with time and energy to secure ourselves in other areas of life and thereby build up \ enough courage to turn around and face reality. The making of representations of God can be used to create an artificial puppet god whom we can manipulate superstitiously, but it can also be a way of communicating symbolically with and about the reality of God. And in spite of how reverently I have described the contemplative way, it too can become distorted into denial of life or escapism by devaluing the cellular representations that our brains require to function naturally.

Thus here again we see the gentle uncertainties that always caress our capacity to choose. From the outside of things, there is no way to be sure what the one “right” choice might be at any given time, for grace can be present in “wrong” choices as well. From the inside, where we might be more in touch with our true longing for God, the “right” choice is simply the one that springs most directly from that longing and reflects it most authentically. Prayer, Scripture, sacraments, spiritual commu­nity, and self-examination can all be sources of guidance as we seek to make such choices. But finally, even here at the heart of our human freedom, we are dependent upon the mercy of God. In addition to struggling to make the best choices, we also have the problem of trying to follow through on the choices we make. Because we are addicted, our motivations are always mixed and our hearts are never completely pure. It can there­fore be only a part of the self that makes a good choice and cooperates with it; much of the rest of the self is bound to fight it. One set of systems in the brain may choose the way of free­dom and love, but countless others will immediately react with stress and mental treachery and all the other ways we have seen of trying to preserve our old normalities. Then, of course, it is all too likely we will start to rely on willpower, resolutions, and “I can handle it.”

It all seems very difficult and entrenched. God creates us with our vulnerabilities/ our propensities for addiction and will­fulness. And then as we grow through life we are tempted and seduced away from our deepest desire, forced to struggle with ourselves, thrust repeatedly back upon our own weakness. One wonders why. I do not know for certain, of course, but I have some thoughts. For me, they come out as the perfect expression of love.

Scripture

“Why?” is a theological question. It means we have to try to look at things from God’s standpoint. This is, of course, an ultimately impossible task. But we can do our best, and we are not without resources; we have God’s self-revelation through Scripture and human history. The traditions of world religions diverge here, with differences so obvious that their similarities become remarkable. Hindu and Buddhist traditions base the why on karma and dependent origination. In contrast, the monotheistic religions trace the ultimate why to God’s creative action. Because it is my faith, I will pursue the question from a Christian perspective, grounded in its Jewish roots, and will begin with a review of addiction in Scripture.

Let us return once again to the Eden story in the second and third chapters of Genesis. Temptation, the possibility of attach­ment, is there at the outset. “God caused to spring from the soil every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden.”

Freedom of human choice is also complete at the beginning, as evidenced by God’s admonition: “You may eat of all the trees in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die.”

God does not forcibly prevent Eve and Adam from taking the fruit but simply commands them not to. For a while, it seems, they have no reason to turn against God. There is no report of them struggling to stay away from the tree. The threat of God’s admonition is sufficient to counteract the enticing nature of the tree. Their motivations are still pure.

Then another force enters. The serpent turns temptation into attachment first by claiming that God was not telling the truth: “No! You will not die!” It then goes on with its own enticement, encouraging the humans to deny their dependency on God and to try to be masters of their own destinies. It tells Eve, in es­sence, that she can handle it: “God knows that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods.” It ‘ was after hearing these words that Eve became truly tempted. Only then did she see “that the tree was good to eat, pleasing ‘ to the eye, and desirable for the knowledge that it could give.”

The tree is attractive, not simply because of its outward ap­pearance, but also because it offers the possibility of becoming godlike. Who would not be tempted? Yet becoming godlike here means distorting one’s God-given will into an autonomous will­fulness that is antagonistic to God. This is the fundamental and most critical distinction between simple human desire and truly corrosive attachment. The wanting, yearning, longing quality of pure desire is natural and God-given. It is not only necessary for life; it also lends a rich open-endedness to existence, a lack of complete satisfaction that is powerfully creative and, in many ways, joyful. But the grasping, clinging, possessive quality of attachment is something very different. It is restrictive, not cre­ative, imperative instead of enjoyable. As William Blake said, rather than binding ourselves to joy, we must kiss it as it flies.

When God confronts Adam and Eve in their disobedience, they immediately go into mind tricks, excuses, and rationaliza­tions: “The man replied, It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit . . .’ The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me . . .'” Their words may sound like simple fast-talk­ing, but, as I have said, I see them with more empathy. To me they are not really trying to con God. They are honestly con­fused in their motivations, caught with their fig leaves, and ashamed. They knew they were responsible for their behavior, but they also knew something had interfered with their inten­tions. Such is the nature of attachment, pitting one part of one­self against another. Is the feeling not familiar? I remember feeling that way as a child: confused, ashamed, guilty, yet want­ing to say, “But. . .” In fact, I remember feeling somewhat that way yesterday. Perhaps we should not condemn Adam and Eve when, in the face of God, they begin to manifest some of the qualities of the addicted personality.

In response to the humans’ behavior, God says, “I will mul­tiply your pains in childbearing. . . . With suffering shall you get your food. . . .” God’s response is usually understood as a straightforward punishment, and it certainly reads that way. But along the lines of Buddhism’s Noble Truths, God’s words are also a statement of the way things are: suffering is a fact of life, and it is caused by attachment. God then sends them forth and sets cherubs and a flaming sword “to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Throughout the Genesis account, God may appear afraid that humans will “reach out and pick also from the tree of life,” thus gaining sufficient divine qualities to become competitors for God’s power and reign. If this were indeed God’s motivation, it would come from attachment to power and glory, and the ac­tions springing from it would be unjust. The cherubs and flam­ing sword, and the banishment itself, would serve to protect God against humans. Yet, when read with an appreciation of human addiction, Genesis becomes the story of a free and pure­ly loving Creator who knows that Eve and Adam will not be able to withstand the compulsion to eat from that second tree.

Banishment is thus more protection than punishment. The cherubs and the flaming sword are there to protect humanity’s freedom rather than to defend God’s power. In a tender mater­nal moment before Eve and Adam leave, God makes clothing for them. This is not the action of a frightened God who clings to divinity, but of a free and loving God who knows that human life cannot be full unless it depends on its Creator for divinity. In the Old Testament stories that follow, the Law, Torah, is established to help guide and protect humanity from the inev­itable consequences of excessive attachment and its empty promises of autonomy. As the preacher of Ecclesiastes relates, “I denied my eyes nothing that they desired, refused my heart no pleasure. . . . What futility it all was, what chasing after the wind.” To state it more positively, the law is a way of grace, established to help foster and mark the path to freedom and love. “Turn me from the path of delusion,” the psalmist prays, “grant me the grace of your Law. . . . Had your Law not been my delight I should have perished in my suffering.”

There can be no doubt that God is adamant about being God, and there are sure consequences when one denies it. But God’s insistence is grounded in love rather than in selfishness. We have had God’s breath in us since the beginning, and God knows that the fulfillment we long for will come from nothing other than God’s very self. Nothing less than God will satisfy the yearning that God has planted within us.

Thus the powerful, monolithic Yahweh of the Old Testament speaks tenderly and with hope: “Then when you call to me, and come to plead with me, I will listen to you. When you seek me you shall find me, when you seek me with all your heart; I will let you find me. . . .” “Do not be afraid, for I have re­deemed you; . . . Should you pass through the sea, I will be with you; or through rivers, they will not swallow you up. Should you walk through fire, the flames will not burn you. For I am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your savior.”

When Jesus appeared on earth, his self-proclaimed reason was to fulfill the Torah. He did not wish to change the Law itself, but he vehemently attacked those who were addicted to its letter instead of really loving its author. In the context of addiction, the essence of Jesus’ teachings can be seen as three­fold. First, he gave a powerful, unequivocal restatement of the necessity of relinquishing attachments in order to love God and neighbor with a full, unfettered heart. “No one can serve two masters. … You cannot love both God and money.” “Anyone who prefers father or mother . . . son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” Second, he both explained and exemplified the nature of a life free from attachments, lived in true liberation and love. “I am gentle and humble of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Third, he established the way toward fulfillment, the Good News.

Jesus’ existence as the divine incarnation proved that instead of hoarding the qualities of divinity, God wished to share them through a right relationship with humanity. The events of Je­sus’ life, leading to his crucifixion, demonstrated the threat he posed to peoples’ addictions and the lengths to which they would go to protect their attachments. In turn, the crucifixion itself demonstrated the extent to which God would go to liber­ate people from their attachments. Jesus proclaimed that there was no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, and then he proceeded to do just that. Finally, and most im­portant of all to the Christian faith, Christ’s resurrection pro­claimed absolute and unquestioned victory over attachment itself, over its consequences, and over its causes.

Jesus’ words about attachment are far too numerous to quote here. They are, however, absolutely relentless and unequivocal. They begin with the two greatest commandments and proceed to the call to love one’s neighbor even unto death; to relinquish possessions, occupation, and even family in order to follow God; to take no thought of the morrow, to have no worries about food, clothing, or even what one is to say or do; to be­come like little children, to lose oneself in order to find one’s true self; to die in order to be reborn. Jesus addressed addiction in every conceivable aspect of life, including aversion addic­tions: prejudices, phobias, and the like. He picked a despised Samaritan as the hero of his story about the love of neighbor; he continually affronted the sensitivities of his peers by traffick­ing with the most abhorred people; he attacked fear as evidencing lack of faith and went so far as to advocate loving one’s | enemies.

The Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount are an unpar­alleled testimony to the glory of freedom from attachment. The |1 blessedness they promise comes not just from heroic battles J with one’s addictions, but from being unwillingly deprived of || their gratification. The poor, the grief-stricken, and the perse­cuted, for example, have had no choice; they suffer and they % need human help, yet, in a way, they may be closer to freedom f because they have less to be attached to. Thus Jesus’ words not J only issue a call to relinquish attachments; they also point out I that we cannot do it alone. Liberation finally must come through grace, not solely through one’s own efforts. Jesus M taught people to pray for grace: “Lead us not into temptation “| and deliver us from evil, for thine is the power. . . .”

Sin, then, is not just ignorance or moral straying, but a kind ;| of bondage or slavery from which one must be delivered into freedom. Freedom is possible through a mysterious, incarna- il tional synthesis of human intention and divine grace. The issue ‘Jj is not simply whether one follows personal attachments or fol₇   ™ lows God. It is instead a question of aligning one’s intention  | with the God within and with us, through love and in grace. To make the alignment possible, Jesus proclaimed a message of’ *|8 radical forgiveness, not only forgiveness of humanity by God, but also forgiveness of one another by people. In this radical forgiveness, it is even possible to be freed of attachment to one’s M own guilt for or justification of the wounds one has inflicted upon others. True love of self, a reverence for the essential goodness of God’s creation, is made possible. Herein lies the -M potential for endless freedom in the service of love. Nothing, not even One’s own sinfulness, has to remain as an obstacle to the two great commandments.

For Christ, the way to abundant grace and forgiveness is through himself, away from all possible objects of attachment. “I am the way”; “Follow me”; “I am the bread of life”; “I will give you the living water”; “Whoever comes to me will never hunger”; “Come unto me all you who labor. . . .” Jesus was the New Adam, the profound love gift of God entering the world to effect a reconciliation of humanity with God, to restore a right relationship to those who were unfree, who had aligned themselves away from God, who had been crippled in their love. He came for the sinners who had missed the mark of responding to God’s love. To put it bluntly, God became incar­nate to save the addicted, and that includes all of us.

Addiction and Evil

In the first chapter of this book I called addiction the absolute enemy of human freedom, and in many other places I have used words like imprisonment, slavery, and deliverance in order to describe actual human experiences of addiction. It is no acci­dent that these words are also used extensively in Scripture to describe subjugation to evil. I have also related addiction to sin. And where I have said Christ is victorious over addiction, tra­ditional Christianity would say Christ is victorious over Satan. It is now time to examine the relationship between addiction and evil. It is not a pleasant topic, and its conclusions are like fire.¹⁸

To explore how evil relates to the human experience of ad­diction, we must look at the concept of temptation. The Bible includes a wide variety of interpretations of temptation. In much of the New Testament, it is seen as the primary activity of the devil, a seduction. At other times, temptation is viewed as an evil force in and of itself. Elsewhere, it is simply viewed as part of the human condition. Finally, in the Letter of James, it is even seen as something to be grateful for. Some of these writings reflect the Old Testament idea that temptation comes from God as a test, while others, notably James, refute this idea strongly.¹⁹

In spite of the variety of views as to the source and purpose of temptation, biblical sources show a clear consistency as to its nature: it is the starting point of addiction. Whether we see it simply as our biological capacity to become attached, or as a seduction by dark external forces, or both, temptation is always the first step, the preliminary opportunity, for addiction. Once attachment is fully entrenched,  our motivations become so mixed that freedom to choose is seriously compromised. But in the stage of temptation, where only the potential for attachment exists, our yes or no can make all the difference.

The biblical words for temptation, masah in Hebrew and peir-astnos in Greek, are also variously translated as “trial,” “prov­ing,” and “test.” Whether test means examination or exercise, most modern people are not at all attracted to the notion of being tested by God. Neither am I, and neither, apparently, was the author of the Letter of James. The letter says, “When you have been tempted, never say ‘God sent the temptation.'” The whole idea of testing brings back the concept of a fearful, self-protective, and now even ignorant God who must put us to the test to find out whether we are faithful.

But let us look a little more deeply. If we are truly meant to have a free capacity to choose for or against God, if that is really the perfection of God’s creative love for us, then the choices we make must be responses to invitations, not to coercions, manip­ulations, or orders. God, in love, protects our freedom by call­ing to us, not demanding of us. God’s invitations may be dramatic and strong, or still and small, but anything more than invitation will not protect our freedom and potential for love. God will not be a puppet master over humanity.

Moreover, as I have said, God remains somewhat hidden in our lives, not only because of intimate immanence and awe­some transcendence, but also because of a loving refusal to be­come another object of attachment. It would not be freedom to stand face to face with certainty before the God of creation and say yes to “Follow me.” Who would say no? Further, this “Fol­low me” is only a natural consequence of God’s more primary request, “Love me.” How could true, flowing love be born un­less we freely choose the Lover, just as the Lover has first cho­sen us?

I have also said that truly free choices for love must be made over and against something else. There is no authentic freedom if we are consistently drawn to one clearly preferable option; again, who would choose otherwise? The excruciating reality is that truly free, loving choices cannot be easy. In fact, one might timorously propose that the most free and loving choices are those that call forth the relinquishing of what one holds most dear. It is another meaning of the cross. The joy and beauty of freedom and love must be bought with pain. We might wish that God had created things otherwise, so that an easier life could be possible, but a careful look at our own history will prove such a wish empty. It is precisely where we have chosen, most painfully and with greatest personal risk, to say yes to love and freedom that we have found the most richness and joy. Indeed, it is not easy, but we would grow to hate it if it were.

Thus, ironically, we must have attachments if we are to be free. We have to turn away before we can come home with dignity. Just as God invites us toward love, we must be pulled away. Just as we crave freedom, we must be seduced into slav­ery. It is here, perhaps, that temptation begins to make a little sense in the light of love. It is still not an attractive concept; I do not think it was ever meant to be. Our temptations are trials, certainly. And each of our addictions proves how we have re­sponded—not simply from our conscious will, but from the to­tality of our being. In a sense, then, temptations are trials and tests of who we are as complete human beings. But they are trials and tests for our own growth, not for God to find out how good we are. God knows that we are good; it is for us to dis­cover that goodness. As we have seen, the tests of attachment, by bringing us to our knees in humility, may show us the way of goodness and allow us to choose that goodness with our whole being.

We might jump to the conclusion that evil, by providing us with temptation and attachment, is really working as God’s agent. But it is not so simple. Christian tradition holds no doubt that evil actually and vehemently means to work against, not for, God. Evil is irrevocably at cross-purposes with love, life, freedom, and creation. According to the same tradition, Satan was created free in God’s love just as was humanity, and in all of creation Satan most willfully and maliciously chose against God. But the tradition further maintains that Satan has been vanquished; the power of evil is invincibly restrained by grace. Evil continues to work against God, but with no chance of ul­timate success. Moreover, there is no power and no condition that God’s grace cannot penetrate with love. God can indeed, then, work through the power of evil. Perhaps this is what happens in the phenomenal deliverances that sometimes occur in the most severe addictions, and even more frequently in the many opportunities attachment provides for authentic surren­der to God. Grace shines radiantly through addiction.

Finally, in both Old Testament and New, temptation is fre­quently addressed in the context of God’s care and protection. The trials and temptations come, but grace is with us in them, capable of pouring love’s vibrant energy through them. Deuter­onomy recalls the trials of the wilderness:

God humbled you, and made you feel hunger. God also fed you with food that neither you nor your ancestors had ever known, to make you understand that human beings live not on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. The clothes on your back did not wear out and your feet were not swollen, all those forty years.

Grace is much more than a static possibility of love. It is an outpouring, a boundless burning offering of God’s self to us, suffering with us, overflowing with tenderness. Grace is God’s passion. The New Testament closes with these words:

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come!” Let everyone who listens answer, “Come!” Then let all who are thirsty come: All who want it may have the water of life, and have it free.

 

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

Excerpts from Chapter 6.  Grace: The Qualities of Mercy

 

I speak of grace with some fear and uncertainty; of all the things I have written about, I can do least justice to this. All I can do is share some of my images, my own “cellular represen­tations” of the mystery that is grace. I hope that my images will touch some of your own and perhaps help them become sim­pler rather than more complicated, more flexible rather than more frozen. – p. 119

 

I am convinced that our brain cells do, in fact habituate to the constant reality of God’s love.  We may want to notice divine love, but we ignore it like we ignore our own breathing, in favor of the things that have captured us. – p. 123

 

We cannot notice God’s loving presence because it is too numinous, too elusively mystical to be perceived. There are also occasions when we cannot appreciate grace because we really do not want to. If God has not lived up to our expectations of how a true lover should act, for example, we may stifle our awareness be­cause of anger or because we want to protect ourselves from being hurt again. And sometimes, as I have indicated, God actively hides grace from us. But of all the possible explanations for our lack of awareness of grace, there is no possibility of God being indifferent, or falling in love with someone else instead of us, or pouting because of some insult, or being otherwise elsewhere attached.

The immanent God in us becomes wounded with us, suffers, struggles, hopes, and creates with us, shares every drop of our anger and sadness and joy. The reality of God is so intimate as to be experientially inseparable from our own hearts. But that very same God is at once transcendent, the creating, sustaining, and redeeming Power over and above all things. We should not be dismayed that God’s being surpasses understanding, for it is precisely through this mystery that God incarnate can both lovingly share our condition and powerfully deliver us from it. It is through this mystery that grace remains absolute, perma­nent, and victorious. – p. 124

 

Undergirding God’s mysterious love for us as individuals is the even more wondrous way grace comes to us in community … The soul and God are in love like planet and sun, but the family of humanity is perfused by an intergalactic radiance of grace, a power so immense and dy­namic, a Word spoken and so cosmically expanded that time and form, space and substance become simultaneously mean­ingless and filled with burning glory. At intersections of paths through space that only God can chart, we are drawn together in systems of shared histories, we form covenants, and we be­come traditions, churches, communities of faith. Here our ener­gies coalesce, and grace pours through the spaciousness of our communal solitude, through our intimacy and interdepen­dence, and, with exponential brilliance, through the sacramen­tal gatherings of true community. Countless attempts have been made to express the wonder of this mystery. – p. 124-125

 

We all have trouble accepting the radical giftedness of God’s grace, no matter what our childhood experience.  God’s grace is simply not part of our conditioning.  Nor can we make it so, though we are sure to try.  All our attempts to control the flow of grace will be frustrated because, like God, grace will not become an object for attachment. – p. 126

 

We can search for grace in both obvious and hidden places.  The hidden places include times of turmoil and failure, encounters with people we dislike, daily drudgery, boredom, and of course, our addictions … Living into grace requires an active life in accord with the facts of grace, even when we do not sense them directly.  The facts of grace are simple: grace always exists, it is always available, it is always good, and it is always victorious.  For me, living into grace means trying to act on the basis of these facts.  I do not do well at it.  If I try to live in accord with grace then I will be relinquishing the gods I have made of my attachments.  Grace threatens all my normalities. – p. 126-127

 

The purest acts of faith always feel like risks.  Instead of leading to absolute quietude and serenity, true spiritual growth is characterized by increasingly deep risk taking.  Growth in faith means willingness to trust God more and more, not only in those areas of our lives where we are most successful, but also, and most significantly, at those levels where we are most vulnerable, wounded, and weak. – p. 128

We learn from experience that God is good because we have risked that God is good.  But because real risking in faith can occur only in those areas of life where we feel most impoverished and vulnerable, it never becomes something we are really comfortable with. For each layer of trust that builds up, another, more challenging risk is offered. True faith choices therefore always feel like risks; they just go on, involving deeper and deeper levels of our being. Each choice remains difficult; what really becomes conditioned in this pro­cess is simply our willingness and readiness to take the risks of faith. They never stop feeling like risks.

Faith and Addiction

The measure of faith, then, is the degree to which one is really willing to risk the truth of grace. Our past experiences can give us courage to trust in God. Trust can be comforting and consoling in all of life. But faith never rests for long in comfort and consolation. As we grow in trust, we find ourselves challenged to risk more and more of who we are to God’s love. For each flower of faith that grows into the fruit of trust, anoth­er bud of faith appears, opening into yet another challenge. For this reason, authentic faith can never become an attachment.

We can form images of faith, just as we make images of God or of grace, that will allow us to escape the feeling of risk. Faith images can and do become objects of attachment. When we substitute images of faith for the real thing, as we all often do, we engage in superstition. I want to believe that if I do a certain thing, God will respond in a certain way. So I choose to believe it, and I choose to act on it. But if things do not work out the way I expect, I deny or rationalize the results so that I can continue to cling to my belief. When we become addicted to such comfortable, self-serving images of faith, we are likely to defend and promote them with a desperate aggressiveness. We are threatened by people who believe differently, and we are compelled to convert them, or to isolate ourselves from them, or, as a last resort, to silence them. From one perspective, this is what happened to the man Jesus. He threatened powerful people’s addictions to frozen images of faith. They tried to ig­nore him, but his power had captured too many people’s atten­tion. They sought to convert him, but instead he made them painfully aware of their own hypocrisy. In the end they tried to silence him, and that was when God spoke with the loudest voice of all. Similar things happen, I think, whenever images of faith that are objects of attachment come up against true faith.

It is through faith, then, that we can most directly influence the flow of our encounters with grace. Faith is the human com­ponent of that mysterious interweaving of divine grace and hu­man intention that can vanquish the power of attachment. Because of their intimate interweaving, we can say that faith is empowered by grace and built on trust, yet simultaneously faith is the most truly independent and unconditioned action avail­able to human free will. The precious intimacy of human will and divine grace simply cannot be appreciated if one approach­es it with an either/or mind. True faith choices, those that re­flect the purest human freedom, are made in the heart; they are unique products of both what is most human about us and what is most divine about God.

Our language, built as it is on hard subject/object and either/ or distinctions, can never do justice to this reality. Yet we all have some experience of it. It is what accounts for the very best decisions we have made in life, the choices that we simply know are right and yet that somehow cannot be logically justified. Sometimes we call such choices “intuitive” because they often seem to be given to our consciousness from a level deep within us that is not purely rational. But the word intuitive is also mis­leading because in popular usage it simply means a hunch, an impulse that comes from somewhere other than our logical mind. In this sense, we are exposed to a wide variety of intu­itions coming from many sources within ourselves, the majority of which are far removed from the spiritual truth of our heart. Thus one can never justify choices on the basis that they come from intuition. It may be that what comes from the spiritual heart does seem intuitive, but all that seems intuitive does not necessarily come from the heart.

In truth, authentic faith choices can never be justified on any basis. We may try to articulate and examine them, and it is wise to test them against the rational and the known, but we cannot justify them. We can never adequately explain why we make such choices. This is another reason they feel so risky. We are completely responsible for them, as for all the choices we make, but true faith choices can never be rationalized; nothing can stand as their excuse. A good example can be found in the accounts of Jesus being challenged by religious authorities. He had said who he was, and he had proclaimed his teachings unequivocally. But when the chief priests and elders asked him by what authority he acted, he responded only by asking them the same kind of question. “If you answer this question, I will tell you my authority for acting like this. John’s baptism, what was its origin, heavenly or human?” He had put them in the same bind in which they had tried to trap him, and they could not respond. When phrased in either/or terms, such questions are always unanswerable.

Similarly, we cannot pin down where true faith comes from. We can truthfully say it comes from God, for God empowers our faith. But we can just as truthfully say it comes from our­selves, for it represents absolute human freedom. Or we can say, as I have tried to do, that it comes from a mysterious co-inherence of grace and will. This may be closer to the truth, but it is just as far away from any possibility of justification.

We all experience heart level choices from time to time. It is in the realm of our most severe addictions, however, that we experience them most clearly and profoundly. We have all had the experience of struggling to break a habit, failing repeatedly, and then at some point meeting with success. What was this success, and how did it happen? We can say it was willpower, but what suddenly empowered our will? We can say it was finding the right strategy, but what enabled that discovery? Did we do it on our own, or did grace break through and deliver us, or was it some mysterious cooperation of will and grace that we could never have engineered?

I cannot further describe how these grace-full choices hap­pen. I can only say that while God is intimately with us in them through our own hearts and those of people around us, we are also very much on our own. Our usual props and handholds are absent, and we are, therefore, very vulnerable. In this vul­nerability we are also more dependent upon and open to grace than at any other time. – p. 129-133

 

Struggle with attachment can be seen as warfare with an insidious enemy, or it can be seen as a romance in which the soul seeks the beloved one for whom it thirsts. Partly, this is simply a matter of attitude. In another sense, however, the transformation of desert into garden is made pos­sible only by God’s grace raining upon the areas of our lives that are truly wastelands.

The desert is the arena of life where we strug­gle with addiction, in agonizing warfare or in faith-filled hope, and often in both. It may be freely chosen, as part of a willing and intentional process of spiritual homemaking. In this case, the desert might be a real physical wilderness that one chooses to enter, as did the desert fathers and mothers of the first centu­ries of Christianity. Or this chosen desert may exist entirely within one’s soul, as it has for countless spiritual pilgrims in their individual and corporate ascetic practices. Or one may be led into a desert that is not of one’s own choosing, as in the exile of Israel or the countless deprivations of addiction that are thrust upon us in the course of normal life.

External or interior, chosen or not, the desert is characterized by a soul suffering from withdrawal symptoms, a mind and body deprived of false securities and therefore left to explore the mystical terrain of personal willpower and divine grace. At its mildest, the desert is a laboratory where one learns some­thing about addiction and grace. In more fullness, it is a testing ground where faith and love are tried by fire. And with grace, the desert can become a furnace of real repentance and purifi­cation where pride, complacency, and even some of the power of attachment itself can be burned away, and where the rain of God’s love can bring conversion, bring life to the seeds of freedom. . . .

The Desert Experience of Jesus

The New Testament accounts of Jesus’ forty days of tempta­tion in the wilderness are an intentional parallel to the He­brews’ forty years of exodus. Jesus is led into the desert by the Holy Spirit. There, while hungry and vulnerable, he is tempted by Satan. He responds to Satan’s temptations out of his own freedom and faith, and he is protected by angels. Satan is then defeated, temporarily, and Jesus comes forth for his ministry.  The three temptations Satan offers Jesus consist of the precise themes I have presented as consequences of attachment. First, Satan suggests that Jesus satisfy his hunger by turning stones into bread. This invitation is remarkably similar to the one the serpent gave to Eve: to play god by using autonomous personal power, and to seek satisfaction through something other than God. Failing at this, Satan next tempts Jesus to manipulate God’s power for the sake of his own self-indulgence, by jump­ing off the temple parapet. Here the invitation is to test rather than trust God, to use God superstitiously, as a puppet. Failing once more, Satan proposes the last temptation: he offers Jesus the entire world if he will make Satan his god. This is, of course, the ultimate invitation to idolatry.

Throughout these temptations, Satan was hoping Jesus would fall prey to attachment: attachment to meeting his own needs, attachment to his own power, or attachment to the ma­terial riches of the world. Like the serpent in Eden, Satan was trying to lure Jesus into the “I can handle it” trap. It was the very real possibility of such attachment that made Satan’s invi­tations absolute threats. Given the power of who Jesus was, perhaps he really was able to “handle it.” He really could have turned the stones into bread. He really could have proven his identity by jumping from the parapet. And he could indeed have ruled the world had he so chosen. But instead of giving in to the massive power of temptations to attachment, Jesus stood firm in his own freedom and in his faith and in grace.

It is easy to ascribe Jesus’ success in the desert to who he was: the chosen one, God incarnate. Seeing him in such mag­nificence makes it difficult for us to identify with him. But if we think of Jesus as truly human, as a real man who was truly vulnerable to attachment, then the way he responded to Satan’s temptations reveals some things that are critically important. In my opinion, Jesus’ actions in the wilderness reveal the way through all our deserts, the way home.

First, Jesus stood firm. He met the adversary, faced the temp­tation, and did not run away or rationalize. He met the chal­lenge as it was. Second, he acted with strength: he claimed and used his free will with dignity. Third, and most important for our culture, he did not use his freedom willfully. None of his re­sponses to Satan was his own autonomous creation. Instead, he relied upon the Law: his words to Satan were quotations from Scripture, from the Torah. Herein lies the practical key to the mystery of human and divine will, the essence of dealing with addiction.

Addiction cannot be defeated by the human will acting on its own, nor by the human will opting out and turning everything over to divine will. Instead, the power of grace flows most fully when human will chooses to act in harmony with divine will. In prac­tical terms, this means staying in a situation, being willing to confront it as it is, remaining responsible for the choices one makes in response to it, but at the same time turning to God’s grace, protection, and guidance as the ground for one’s choices and behavior. It is the difference between testing God by avoid­ing one’s own responsibilities and trusting God as one acts re­sponsibly. Responsible human freedom thus becomes authentic spiritual surrender, and authentic spiritual surrender is nothing other than responsible human freedom. Here, in the condition of humble dignity, the power of addiction can be overcome. – p. 136-139

 

 

 

 

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

Excerpts from Chapter 7. Empowerment: Grace and Will in Overcoming Addiction

pp. 146-161

“If you really do think you can handle it, then go ahead and try.” Most of us, most of the time, accept this challenge without even thinking about it. We begin our strug­gles with addiction by trying to handle them ourselves.

Reformation of Addictive Behavior

… If my primary desire, as best I know it, is simply to change a troublesome addictive behavior, I will hardly be interested in giving my life to God in order to do so. Why should I embark on a spiritual journey that threatens the foundations of all my normalities when the only thing I want is to quit smoking or to stop harassing my spouse or to lose a few pounds? To bring complicated spiritual matters into my struggle can distract me from my primary resolve. I might even use spiritual considera­tions to avoid quitting the behavior. Such a tactic is certainly possible. I have said before that the only way to break an ad­diction’s power is to stop engaging in the behavior. Anything more complicated is likely to turn into a mind trick.

Every sincere battle with addiction begins with an attempt to change addictive behavior. Literally, we try to reform our behav­ior, substituting constructive actions for destructive ones. In the process, we will have opportunities to notice the spiritual sig­nificance of our struggles; we will be invited toward something deeper. If we say yes to that invitation, it means we are willing, at least to some extent, for God to transform our desire. But we are not obliged to say yes. Any struggle to reform addictive behavior will surely lead us into a desert, but we are never required to participate in turning that desert into a spiritual garden. It is entirely possible to traverse the outskirts of that desert and emerge with some degree of control over our addic­tive behavior. I myself stopped smoking this way several times. Most of my friends diet this way, and I know many who have changed phobias, habits of depression, sexual preoccupations, and the like.

Reformation of behavior usually involves substituting one ad­diction for another, adapting to a new, possibly less destructive normality. Sometimes substitution is intentional, sometimes un­conscious. An overeater adapts to jogging and yoga; a smoker adapts to chewing gum or eating; a television addict becomes dependent upon guided meditations; an aggressive person becomes accustomed to ingratiating behavior; an alcoholic be­comes addicted to AA. Many substitutions are used intentional­ly as temporary aids in making the transition from one normality to another. They are meant to lessen withdrawal symptoms by making the behavioral change as small as possi­ble. If I can gradually shift small segments of my old normality, the addicted systems of my brain will undergo less stress than if I make a sudden radical change. This way of fighting addic­tion is like weaning; it is an attempt to make the transition to independence as painless as possible. Sometimes it works; often it does not.

In addition to minimizing withdrawal symptoms, the substi­tution of one normality for another allows us to avoid the open, empty feeling that comes when an addictive behavior is cur­tailed. Although this emptiness is really freedom, it is so un­conditioned that it feels strange, sometimes even horrible. If we were willing for a deeper transformation of desire, we would have to try to make friends with the spaciousness; we would need to appreciate it as openness to God.

Because openness to God is threatening, and because our desire is more to overcome an addiction than to claim our deep­er desire for God, we fill the space with something else. In so doing, we assent to continued slavery under a new master who, we hope, will be kinder. Two risks accompany our choice. First, if the new normality is indeed kinder, it will almost surely seem insufficient. Something in us will continue to remember the old addiction and the greater satisfaction it gave. I was able to quit smoking for two years by means of reformation, but during that entire time nothing quite took the place of cigarettes; I always wanted one. Eventually I caved in and began to smoke again.

Second, there is no guarantee that our new master will be kinder than the old. It might turn out to be worse. Some alco­holics have encountered serious trouble by substituting tran­quilizers and sedatives for alcohol. One friend of mine had a heart attack in an overzealous attempt to substitute exercise for food. Another person became psychotic after trying to substi­tute extreme spiritual practices for her habitual avoidance of problems. Still another, trying to control his anger, substituted a calmness that was achieved by massive repression. His anger broke forth in episodes of physical violence. Eventually he be­came alcoholic.

Examples like this make it clear that we should be very care­ful in choosing substitute addictions. Sadly, however, most of these substitutions are made without any reflection whatsoever. The person’s only concern is to stop the original addictive be­havior; selection of substitutions is left to chance. Chance, in this case, is the haphazard adjustments of deprived cell sys­tems. They will find a new normality, but who is to say whether this normality will be better? Even with careful, conscious re­flection, the choice of substitute addictions is not easy. No mat­ter how carefully we make the transition from one normality to another, we will experience withdrawal symptoms and mind tricks. Our private judgment in such things is always impaired. For this reason, if for no other, we should not try to change a major addiction by ourselves. Even if we do not admit needing the empowerment of grace, we should at least admit needing the gracious counsel of other people.

Under the best of circumstances, with good judgment, real dedication, constructive counsel from others, and with grace acknowledged or hidden, substitution of addictions can “work.” The old behavior can be reformed, and the new normality can be a better one. The underlying processes of attachment re­main, requiring continued vigilance, but it really can “work.” I say “work” because reformation requires effort. But I put the word in quotes because the relationship between effort and suc­cess in overcoming addictive behavior is not one of simple cause and effect; the intervening variable is grace.

When reformation “works,” it is well worth it. It may even be life saving. But because it applies only to behavior and does not address the underlying processes of attachment, old addic­tive behavior will tend to resurface at a later date. Even so, we will have had the experience of the struggle, and we will have learned something about ourselves. If our sense of failure does not become a complete mind trick, we may even remember what we have learned. This will stand us in good stead for future struggles; it will allow us to step further into the next desert. We will be that much closer to making friends with spaciousness, to recognizing God’s inevitable homeward call, the invitation to the transformation of our desire.

Consecration and the Transformation of Desire

Every struggle with addiction, no matter how small, and no matter what our spiritual interest may be, will include at least brief encounters with spaciousness. Through the spaciousness will come some homeward call, some invitation to transforma­tion. If we answer yes, even with the tiniest and most timid voice, our struggle becomes consecrated. Consecration means dedication to God. It occurs when we claim our deepest desire for God, beneath, above, and beyond all other things.

Everything we do involves some kind of dedication. When we simply try to reform a troublesome addiction, our struggle is dedicated to minimizing the pain that addiction causes us and others. But in consecration we dedicate our struggle to something more; consecration is our assent to God’s transform­ing grace, our commitment homeward.

In the beginning, we will not understand the full meaning of consecration. Perhaps, in this life, we never will. Nor will we comprehend the ups and downs, the joys and agonies of the journey that must follow. And certainly we will be unable to grasp the overarching cosmic meaning of our small assent, the joy it gives to God, the deepening love it will bring to humanity, the universal covenant it has enriched. We may not have any idea that consecration means encounter with spaciousness, that an unconditioned reality awaits our conditioned mind. But our yes comes from some taste, some bare recollection of all these things. We know it has something to do with home. There is love in it and hope. We feel a small breeze of freedom. And in the tiny space our hearts can say yes.

Through grace, with our assent, our desire begins to be trans­formed. Energies that once were dedicated simply to relieving ourselves from pain now become dedicated to a larger good­ness, more aligned with the true treasure of our hearts. Where we were once interested only in conquering a specific addiction, we are now claiming a deeper longing, and we are concerned with becoming more free from attachments in general, for the sake of love. What had begun as an expedient attempt to reform a behavior has now become a process of transforming a life.

If I let my mind run free with this idea, I find myself asking an absurd question. “If I do say yes to God, if I do consecrate myself, will that help me overcome my addictions?” The ques­tion cannot be answered because it contains an impossible con­tradiction. If I am primarily dedicated to overcoming addiction, I cannot really be consecrated to God. I raise it, however, be­cause it is a very human question. After all, I have said that consecration opens the door to transformation of desire, and transformation does affect our underlying attachments. To make the question seem reasonable, all I have to do is forget that the whole process involves my faithful participation in a mystery that only God can comprehend. We always have to try, it seems, for more mastery than mystery, more manipulation than participation. In me, the question comes from that old “have my cake and eat it” mentality. Here I am wondering if I can get over my addictions by surrendering myself to God. Before, when I was describing my resistances to asceticism, I was wondering if I could surrender myself to God without hav­ing to give up my addictions.

In the light of consecration, both of these notions become absurd. Consecration cuts through self-deception; it often re­veals more than we wish to know about our motivations. It illuminates the difference between true spiritual searching and expedient, ego-centered enterprises that masquerade in spiritu­al garb. In modern Western society, many activities are called spiritual because they involve meditation or other ascetic prac­tices taken from spiritual traditions, or because they address psychological and physical issues in particularly profound and integrative ways. But whether they really are spiritual depends upon the dedication of the participant.

Someone may teach me a meditation technique or a method of prayer that will help ease some of the symptoms of my stress addiction. That this technique comes from a spiritual tradition and involves spiritual images does not make it spiritual for me. It becomes truly spiritual only when my effort is consecrated to love and not just dedicated to lowering my blood pressure or the acidity of my stomach. Authentic asceticism is not a collec­tion of practices or insights. It is a condition of the heart. With the willing consecration of the heart, any activity, however mundane, can become ascetic. Without consecration, no activi­ty, however spiritual it may appear, is truly ascetic.

This is not to say, however, that the easing of distress is a bad thing. When I first sensed a difference between true and false asceticism, I made distinctions far too arbitrarily. I was impatient with the confused thinking that calls everything that feels good “spiritual.” I grimaced when health professionals asked about using meditation or prayer as “therapeutic ad­juncts.” I squirmed when a friend said, “I fasted during Lent, and it was a wonderful experience. I lost five pounds.” I even found myself rebelling when someone told me how prayer had helped him overcome depression. I wanted to say, “Now, when your depression is gone, where is your prayer?”

But my impatience was caused by my own addiction to pre­cision. Now I’m not quite so attached to making either/or dis­tinctions. Grace, mediated by a fair amount of humiliation, has lightened me up a bit. There is nothing inherently wrong with meditating to lower blood pressure, losing a few pounds during Lent, or using prayer as a technique. In fact, such things can be very right. Grace can call us through all such things, and it is impossible to predict when we will be enabled to say yes. Even if we have never before paused to sense the deeper long­ing of our hearts, each struggle is an opportunity for growth, a moment where grace can flow. And each real experience of growth brings us closer to seeing who we are, to claiming our desire, to saying yes, to consecration.

In some cases, modern “spiritual” enterprises that pander primarily to ego satisfaction are much more healthy than some old religious ascetic practices that became institutionalized and devoid of any affirmation of goodness. If distortion must oc­cur—and apparently it must—then it is better that the distor­tions at least encourage life and creation instead of repression and denial.

Deliverance

Grace, thank God, can break through to us regardless of our intent. God graciously awaits our assent and our participation in transformation, but God does not wait to give us good things. No matter what our primary dedication may be at any given time, God’s love can burst through upon us, miraculous­ly. In my experience, these special miracles happen with un­common frequency in the course of addictions. Without any evident reason, the weight of an addiction is lifted. “I was walk­ing to the grocery store one day,” said one alcoholic man, “and there, on the sidewalk, I discovered equanimity.” He had suf­fered from alcoholism for many years, and that particular day had seemed no different from any other. Yet in a simple, won­drous moment, his life was transformed. He hasn’t had a drink since. He did not describe his experience in religious terms. All he knew was that nothing he had learned, and nothing he had done, had made it happen.

This is the spiritual experience I learned about from recover­ing addicts, the unique phenomenon that sparked my profes­sional/personal journey into psychology and spirituality. I can only call it deliverance. There is no physical, psychological, or social explanation for such sudden empowerments. People who have experienced them call them miraculous. In many cases these people have struggled with their addictions for years. Then suddenly, with no warning, the power of the addiction is broken. To me, deliverance is like any other miraculous physi­cal, emotional, or social healing. It is an example of “supernat­ural” or “extraordinary” grace, an obvious intervention by the hand of God in which physical structure and function are changed and growth toward wholeness is enabled. In the case of addiction, healing takes the form of empowerment that en­ables people to modify addictive behavior.

I am choosing my words carefully here. Deliverance enables a person to make a change in his or her behavior; in my experi­ence deliverance does not remove the addiction and its under­lying attachments. Something obviously happens to the sys­tems of the brain when deliverance occurs; either the addicted systems are weakened or the ones seeking freedom are strengthened or both. But there is still a role for continued per­sonal responsibility. Considerable intention and vigilance are still necessary. I have witnessed many healings of substance and nonsubstance addictions and of many other disorders. In none of these miraculous empowerments were people freed from having to remain intentional about avoiding a return to their old addictive behaviors. The real miracle was that avoid­ance became possible; the person could actually do it. Deliver­ance does not remove a person’s responsibility; it does empow­er the person to exercise responsibility simply, gently, and effectively.

In a way, this is how grace seems to work with us in all areas of life. The special flowerings of grace that we call deliverance and miracles seem so extraordinary only because of the way we look at them. The natural grace that God continually offers us in the normal circumstances of our lives is really just as mirac­ulous. It stands ready to transform and empower us in the most ordinary situations. Miracles are nothing other than God’s or­dinary truth seen with surprised eyes.

Our very being in this world, our existence as individuals and communities, is miraculous. It is miraculous that God creates us with bodies and brains that are capable of adapting to vir­tually any conditions, and that God preserves within us an in­vincible freedom of choice. It is no more miraculous that God can thaw the most frozen of our adaptations and massively, instantaneously, empower our freedom of choice. A particular eruption of grace strikes into a person’s life like a lightning bolt of loving energy; the power of God’s goodness shines in victory over a particular human enslavement or misfortune. The enemy is weakened; the person is empowered.

I believe that grace’s empowerment is present in all true heal­ings, in deliverances of all kinds, and in any movement toward wholeness and love and freedom, however great or small. It is present in physical and psychological healing, in social and po­litical reconciliation, in cultural and scientific breakthrough, in spiritual deliverance from evil, in religious repentance and con­version, and in the ongoing process of spiritual growth. It is present wherever love really grows. In every such situation, grace enables us to make necessary initial changes and to con­tinue, over time, to nurture those changes in creative, constructive ways.

God does not flash into our lives to work a piece of magic upon us and then disappear. To do so would eradicate human dignity; it would prevent our participation. Instead, God’s grace is always present intimately within us, inviting and empowering us toward more full, more free exercise of will and responsibility. The more open and spacious our will and responsibility become, the more God and person commune in creative splendor.

We are never simply visited with a healing or deliverance, which we can then safely forget. Grace is not a pill we are given or a method applied to us so that we can simply go on about our business. Grace always invites us forward. Every liberation requires continued attention, every healing demands continued care, every deliverance demands follow-up and every conver­sion requires faithful deepening. If we do not respond to these ongoing calls, if we deny our empowerments for continued growth in freedom and responsibility, our healings may well be stillborn. Then, as in Jesus’ words about evil spirits returning to a house swept clean, our last condition may turn out to be worse than our first.”

Gentle Victories

I have repeatedly emphasized the role of human will in deliv­erance because it is all too easy to see deliverance as entirely God’s business. Similarly, I have emphasized the role of grace in asceticism and reformation because we can be tempted to see them as depending entirely on human effort. I can say with certainty that every authentic movement toward freedom in­volves both grace and will, but it is impossible to describe just how grace and will interact. If we were to look only at God’s transcendence, we could develop an explanation based on God’s actions and our responses. Similarly, if we concentrated only on God’s immanence, we could develop a psychological explanation based on our journey toward individuation and discovery of the True Self. But God is both immanent and transcendent, so any either/or explanation is bound to be insufficient. We are left with mystery. Here we find another meaning of consecration: the willingness to participate in mystery through faith instead of through comprehension.

Because I cannot explain the co-inherence of grace and will, I must turn away from objective discussion and tell some stories instead. I have chosen to relate the experiences of three people who have overcome addiction. These people were not particularly interested in spiritual growth; they simply wanted to be free of their addictions. Their stories reveal the mysterious and gentle ways in which reformation and deliverance interact. All three are success stories because of one fact: the people did not fill up the space left by their addictions. How and why they were empowered to live within this spaciousness remain a mystery.

Here is one Dr. May’s stories:

Another middle-aged man, a lawyer, became addicted to a particular sexual relationship. He had long been attracted to a coworker/ and, as they worked closely together on an extended project, they fell in love. He kept it all secret from his wife, and he hated the deceit of it, but his lover made him feel “like I was really alive and free for the first time in years.” At first it did not seem like an addiction at all, though he could hardly think of anything but her. It was, at first, a real romance. He met his lover once a week; he brought her gifts; she listened to the yearnings of his heart. As time went on, however, he began to feel compelled by the relationship. He craved his weekly fix of self-esteem and sexual release, but he felt depressed after each encounter. There were times when he didn’t even want to go but somehow felt he had to. His lover sensed this, and their relationship became turbulent. Countless times they resolved to end the affair, only to wind up back in each other’s arms. They sincerely tried to stay apart, but they failed. He prayed for forgiveness and release, but nothing seemed to happen. He became increasingly fearful that his wife would find out or that his lover would become vengeful. He saw a therapist, and he shared his secret with a trusted friend. Neither could help him change his behavior, but they did help him realize that he was more compelled than in love. As time passed his work suf­fered. He and his lover talked for hours, trying to find a reso­lution. Then one day he said to her, “This is the last time I’ll be here.” “I know,” she answered. It was. Afterward, he said, “I just didn’t go see her again, that’s all. It was hard; I would think of her and wonder about her and remember the times we’d had. But I also knew I was worth more than that, and so was she. I just didn’t go back.” …

Invitation

These three stories portray the mysterious way specific addic­tions are overcome. Each account includes honest attempts at reformation. Each moves beyond willpower. And each contains at least a degree of deliverance. Somehow, for these three peo­ple, it “worked.” In each case, the addictive behavior was changed, and there was no substitution. These people are still prone to addiction, as are we all, and they have learned to be especially vigilant where their particular addictions are con­cerned. But they have indeed been liberated. …

The lawyer has found himself attracted to many other women in the years since his affair, but he deals with his attractions quickly and simply. “I start to think about what it would be like with a certain woman, and then I recognize the pattern. I don’t fight the fantasy off; I don’t try to put it out of my mind. I just don’t indulge in it, and it goes away. For a while, I thought I could enjoy the fantasies without acting on them. But it was not sufficient to do that. So I simply notice them and let them pass of their own accord. It’s like getting rid of an alley cat. You don’t have to kick it; just don’t feed it.” He says he enjoys the company of women more than ever “now that they are people, not objects.” …

All three people know that they are vulnerable. They could easily fall back into their old addictive behaviors. At times, when they think about it, they feel as if they are walking on a narrow ledge. It would be so easy to fall off. Yet, paradoxically, they rarely find it difficult to remain centered. Somehow they have learned that they can’t stay centered by fighting; they stay centered by simply not leaning over the edge.

Even though the three people do not describe their stories in religious terms, the stories reflect a delicate spiritual quality. It has something to do with the simplicity of their intent, the di­rect vulnerability with which they notice their own minds, and the open present-centeredness they somehow maintain. The qualities come, I am certain, from the fact that these people did not substitute addictions. They encountered spaciousness. And, to a degree, they have made friends with it. … The three reflect a transparency, a gentle yet dignified openness to what is real. They are, as I have defined it, contemplative. They have faced life in a truly undefended and open-eyed way.

A contemplative quality can be found in anyone who has encountered emptiness and chosen not to run away. A sense of balance within spaciousness remains within such people, like a window between infinity and the world of everyday experience. They are not only wiser and humbler because of their addic­tions; they are also more available. Through their spaciousness, they are continually invited homeward. They have, in fact, al­ready begun the homeward journey.

Assent

In a way, such people already have said yes. They may not have thought about it consciously, but something in their hearts was willing to confront the emptiness and to stay with it. Some thing deep inside them chose not to run away. In each of the three stories, the person chose the way of liberation in a mo­ment of empowerment and continues to choose that way. None of the choices was forced; each person could have returned to the old addictive behavior or substituted another. They still could do this, at any time. That is why they must remain vigi­lant. But they did choose the way of liberation, and they chose it freely.

To me, it is striking that their choices were so gentle, so plain. With everything I have said about the struggles of the desert, about resistances to asceticism, and about the power of conse­cration, one would expect such choices to be very dramatic. The yes that the heart speaks to God, we might assume, would be preceded by great intellectual considerations and emotional up­heavals and followed by enthusiastic celebration. Yet, in these stories, the yes was so quiet and so simple that it was barely noticed. Could it be that the heart speaks to God sometimes in ways that escape detection by our cellular representations? Is it possible that the heart can begin an act of consecration while the mind is still wondering what it’s all about?

By the grace of God, the answer is yes. Of all the spiritual literature I have read, my favorite quotation is a simple one that was written by a very simple person. Brother Lawrence, a sev­enteenth-century Carmelite friar, worked in the kitchen of his monastery and wrote a few words about practicing the pres­ence of God. Among those words are these: “People would be surprised if they knew what the soul said to God sometimes.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Addiction and Grace by Gerald May

Chapter 8: Homecoming: Discernment and the Consecrated Life

pp. 162-181 (entire chapter)

Everyone moved by the Spirit is a child of God. The spirit you received is not the spirit of slaves bringing fear into your lives again; it is the spirit of children, and it makes us cry out, “Abba, Father; Amma, Mother.”  — Paul’s Letter to the Romans

Consecration is the bridge between reformation and transfor­mation, the integrating choice that assents to God’s homeward call. It is impossible to say when consecration actually begins. Those of us who consider ourselves spiritual pilgrims have tried repeatedly to consecrate ourselves on our own terms, and we have failed. But then, often when we have least expected it, we have heard a gentle invitation, and we have claimed a consecra­tion that has already happened in our hearts.

I am sure Brother Lawrence was right; some kind of dialogue with God does go on in our hearts, beyond all our images. I know my own conscious claimings always seem to take place somewhat after the fact. My mind plays catch up with my heart. I may like to think I am autonomously charting my own course, but I keep discovering that my little ship has been an­swering to deeper, hidden currents all along.

What happens at this deeper level is the most important thing; how we name or understand it is secondary. Because of this, all people, regardless of their intellectual ability, are capa­ble of authentic consecration and transformation. The mentally retarded, schizophrenic, and brain-damaged members of the human family are no less qualified for spiritual growth. In some cases, they are even more blessed. A friend of mine once described a mentally retarded person who came to her for spiritu­al direction. She said, “There is room in his inn.”

Discernment

Those of us with greater intellectual abilities have the capac­ity for more precise understanding, but our mind tricks are also more inventive, and we more readily fill the holy spaces of our lives with thoughts. There is need for care in how we use our intellects. As we try to claim our consecration, we are faced with serious questions: How do we live out our consecration? How can we participate in harmony with God’s transformation of our desire? In the vast arena of our experience, how can we tell the inspirations of love from the temptations of attachment? How can we align our intentions with God’s deeper currents? These questions lead us to the territory of spiritual discern­ment.

Volumes have been written about discernment, and, as a top­ic for discussion, it can become almost hopelessly complicated. The intellect ties itself in knots trying to comprehend how it can seek the will of God who is wholly other from us and intimately united with us at the same time. Ultimately, however, discern­ment becomes a way of life, and then it is not so complicated. Discernment means living life prayerfully—bringing oneself to God as honestly and completely as possible, seeking God’s guidance as openly as possible, and then, in faith, responding as fully as possible. A life lived this way, trying to bring all one’s faculties into harmony with God’s transforming grace, is consecration in practice.

I have some things to say about this kind of life, some prac­tical suggestions to make. Once again, however, it is an area I enter with trepidation. There are three reasons for this.

First, in spite of all I have said about the mysterious intimacy of will and grace, I am afraid you will take my suggestions as a “how to” approach. If you are addicted to control as I am, you will want to take specifics and turn them into methods. If you do, the spaciousness will be filled and the mystery will disappear.

Second, in spite of all I have said about God’s unconditional love, I am afraid that my comments will engender feelings of success and failure, that they will encourage a preoccupation with “doing it right.” Those of us who have substantial reli­gious backgrounds are likely to be addicted to legalism; we look at, all spiritual matters through lenses of Tightness and wrong-ness. When this is all we see, grace is eclipsed.

Third, in spite of all the confessions I have made of my own attachments and idolatries, I am concerned that I will sound holier than thou when I make suggestions about living a con­secrated life. I do try to live a consecrated life, but as I review the comments I am about to make, I despair of ever living them fully. Let it suffice to say that the suggestions I make are as much for myself as for anyone else.

From all the observations and insights we have covered, I have drawn together five qualities that for me characterize a life lived with consecrated intent. They are characteristics of dis­cernment, things we can do and attitudes we can nurture to help us embrace God’s loving activity and join more fully the mystical courtship that is already happening. They are, if you will, guideposts through the desert. They are not the way home, but they do point in that direction. These qualities are honesty, dignity, community, responsibility, and simplicity.

I will discuss these qualities in the context of addiction be­cause I am convinced that the journey homeward is one of in­creasing freedom from attachment. What applies to specific addictions applies to life, and vice versa. You will probably find little that is new in these qualities; we have already touched on them in many ways. Members of AA and other “anonymous” groups will find them very consonant with their own twelve steps. Spiritual traditions have been teaching them for millen­nia, and the behavioral sciences are slowly rediscovering them.

But I hope these qualities will draw the facts and observations we have explored into a more meaningful whole and point to­ward actions and attitudes that will be helpful. I also hope they will reveal the nature of consecration more clearly. Most of all, I hope they will not interfere with the precious appreciation of that process that is going on right now in your own heart.

Honesty

Honesty means acceptance. We must begin by accepting the fact of our addictedness. To accept this is not to affirm it, but to admit it, to acknowledge that it really exists. In religious language, this kind of acceptance is confession. In the context of a specific addiction, acceptance means acknowledging that a problem exists. In the context of consecration, it means recog­nizing that our attachments are our idols, that they eclipse God.

Acceptance also implies a certain lack of hysteria. We are bound to feel guilty when we recognize how attached we are. If we do not overcomplicate it, this is a good, solid guilt. It marks the beginning of repentance, the turning back toward our true heart’s desire. But to indulge in self-flagellation or end­less apologizing is nearly always a ploy. If we keep on fawning about our guilt before our images of God and our own super­egos, we may never get around to stopping the behavior we felt guilty about in the first place. The simple prayer that Jesus taught cuts through all this: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temp­tation, and deliver us from evil.” It is a matter of recognizing where attachment has made us idolatrous and unloving, ad­mitting it, and, with God’s help, trying to avoid repeating those behaviors.²

With confession and repentance, the battle is waged and mind tricks begin in earnest. Honesty becomes more difficult and, simultaneously, more important. Now honesty involves steadiness. It is a willingness to continue to face the truth of who we are, regardless of how threatening or unpleasant our perceptions may be. It means hanging in there with ourselves and with God, learning our mind tricks by experiencing how they defeat us, recognizing our avoidances, acknowledging our lapses, learning completely that we cannot handle it ourselves. This steady self-confrontation requires strength and courage. We cannot use failure as an excuse to quit trying. We cannot fake surrenders or contrive rock bottoms. All we can do is just stay there, trying to be at least partially as faithful and present to ourselves as God is.

Meditation and quiet, open prayer can help. In one sense, quiet prayer is really nothing other than the practice of faithful attentiveness. I am not speaking here of meditation that in­volves guided imagery or scriptural reflections, but of a more contemplative practice in which one just sits still and stays awake with God. This kind of meditation is extremely difficult, especially in the midst of battles with addiction, because it gives us nothing special to do, no fancy ways to entertain our­selves or to escape from the simple truth of the moment.

Attentive meditation can be a true ascetic practice. It is like fasting for the mind. One only sits there, inclined toward God, noticing the thoughts and sensations that come and go, adding nothing to them, subtracting nothing from them. The mind is allowed to be what it is, but it is seen. When properly practiced and truly graced, this kind of meditation—to the extent that we can bear it—can be very powerful in exposing and vaporizing mind tricks.

Since the sole purpose of mind tricks is to perpetuate attach­ment, they will always try to compromise our consecration. Ul­timately, consecration means death to attachment; it allows no equivocation; it seeks only the fulfillment of the two great com­mandments. Consecration takes our struggles out of the pri­vate, self-centered realm of our own minds and expands them into communal and even cosmic significance. Therefore the ad­dicted systems of our brains will do everything in their power to weaken our sense of consecration. Although they can never completely destroy our basic desire for God, mind tricks can confuse it, distort it, and even make us forget it entirely.

Let me give an example. A few years ago, I became aware of how I habitually use a biting, sarcastic humor to criticize other people. At times I have humiliated people this way. It took me a long time to admit my humor was destructive, but 1 finally did, and I tried to stop it. But I couldn’t stop; I realized it was an addiction. I reflected upon it, journaled about it, and prayed about it. I talked it over with friends. I realized how unloving it was and how selfish, and I saw how it eclipsed my attentive­ness to God. I truly felt that God was inviting me to relinquish that behavior, and I truly wanted to relinquish it. To the best of my knowledge, my intent was consecrated.

In trying to stop this behavior, I encountered all the struggles one might expect. I experienced withdrawal symptoms; I felt ill at ease when I didn’t do it, and sometimes my anger came out in more direct and harsh ways. I had trouble facing the empti­ness left by the removal of this behavior: “If I’m not going to crack a joke at this point, what am I going to do?” I decided, almost unconsciously, that when I felt like being sarcastic in a meeting or a conversation, I would pray instead. On the sur­face, it felt like a nice choice, and it might indeed have been. But my prayer was not a simple, honest turning to God. It did not seek God’s help in facing the emptiness left by my addic­tion. Instead, the prayer itself became a substitute addiction. I could tell when this happened, because the prayer was not sin­cere; it was not heartfelt; it was routinized and automatic. At the point of prayer, my consecration was distorted. Although I was using a spiritual method, I had made it into my own pri­vate technique, a technique that eclipsed both God and others. All I saw was myself against the addiction; grace was no longer in my vision.

Then one day, in a meeting where I had been doing the whole routine, we had a period of silence. As I sat there, truly in prayer for once, I saw it. I felt the impulse to say something cynical as it arose. I watched my mind go into its little image of prayer. I felt the constrictedness it brought, the loss of spa­ciousness. I relaxed, opened, and the “prayer” had vaporized. After that, things were simpler. I’m still addicted to that sarcas­tic humor. But I caught one mind trick, and I am a little more willing to stay with the spaciousness that is left when I don’t engage in the behavior. And my consecration, I think, is a little more clear.

The old desert father Abba Poeman is noted for saying, “Vig­ilance, self-knowledge, and discernment: these are the true guides of the soul.” Meditation is just one way of facilitating honest self-observation. Daily reflection and journaling are oth­ers. Discussion with other people is also critically important. However it comes to us, self-observation is necessary for an honest discernment of our position in relationship to God and attachment.

For example, I do mean it when I pray, “Thy will be done.” But at any given time, in relation to a particular attachment, there are limits as to how much of God’s will I really want done. Although my cosmic intent is sincerely for God’s will, I am not so free when it comes to the small specifics of my life. It is helpful to be as honest as possible, to be able to say, “Thy will be done, but I do want to keep this thing. . . .” There is nothing to be ashamed of in this prayer; it is a matter of bringing our­selves, just as we are, to God, just as God is.

I not only try to pray honestly about my addictions and ac­knowledge my lack of desire to be free, but I also try to turn to God while I am engaging in addictive behaviors. Some of my addictive behaviors are not at all the kind of things one would associate with prayer, so turning to God is difficult. I use this difficulty as a kind of diagnostic aid from time to time: if I find it very hard to bring myself to pray, to honestly turn to God in the midst of a particular activity, it is likely that activity is idola­trous. In most such cases, even if I can turn to God, I cannot honestly pray to be freed from the behavior; I really do not want to give it up. At the very least, however, I can wordlessly turn to God as if to say, “See? This is who I am.”

I don’t like doing this, and I don’t do it very often. I resist this kind of prayer because prayer involves listening, and I might not like what I hear. What if I sense God saying, “It is time, now, for this, to go?” The challenge of honesty then be­comes, “Are you willing to say no to God? Can you stand up and say, T do love you, but I am not ready to let this go’?”

In fact, we have unconsciously been saying no to God in countless areas of our lives all along. Honesty simply asks if we are willing to acknowledge some of this. Can we stop hiding our secret desires and start claiming them openly before God, who, of course, already knows them anyway? Many of the great Old Testament figures had such courage; they argued, refused, and wrestled with God. They stood up for themselves with dignity. It might be called chutzpa, but these people were hon­est, and God certainly seemed to respect them for it. Jesus stood with dignity also; he was willing for God’s will, but he was able to express his own desires.

Honesty before God requires the most fundamental risk of faith we can take: the risk that God is good, that God does love us unconditionally. It is in taking this risk that we rediscover our dignity. To bring the truth of ourselves, just as we are, to God, just as God is, is the most dignified thing we can do in this life.

Dignity

Honesty risks that God is good. Dignity risks that we our­selves are good. Dignity is acting as if we believe the facts of our creation are true: that we are indeed created in God’s image, that we are created out of love, that we are good because God created us, and that we have the goodness of God within us. Dignity is risking that, as the popular saying goes, “God don’t make junk.”

Like honesty, dignity is a choice, a risk of faith. All too often, we think our dignity must depend upon our self-images. Then, when our self-images are lousy, we become depressed.  Or when our self-images are good, we become proud or even gran­diose. I have said before that we become addicted to our self-images, our cellular representations of self. In fact, I think every self-image represents some degree of addiction. Self-images have their rightful place in our lives, to be sure. They help us conceptualize and communicate about ourselves. But nearly al­ways we use those images to fill the spacious mystery of who we really are. If we do not like one of the images, we will try to break our addiction to it, but we are very sure to substitute another. The space left by any relinquished object of attachment can be threatening, but when it comes to our sense of our­selves, we are terrified. Perhaps in the journey toward freedom, this is the last addiction to go.

When we are especially attached to a bad self-image and its associated thoughts and feelings, we call ourselves depressed. We all know what this kind of depression is like. It is different from major psychiatric depressions, which stifle life energy. An addictive depression has an energy all its own; it feeds on itself and on our attempts to overcome it, just as any addiction does. And even though it feels awful, we cling to it because it gives us a solid sense of who we are. We become accustomed to it, addicted to being depressed. For most of us the attachment is a transient one that follows certain blows to our egos; we wind up kicking ourselves out of it before it goes on too long. Others go into therapy and try to find a somewhat better self-image to substitute. But some of us make a lifelong habit of it; it’s how we really feel about ourselves, way down deep.

In the larger spiritual journey, significant attachment to any self-image can be a serious compromise to consecration. Overly grandiose self-images lead us to feel we have no need for any­thing beyond our own egos. When this attitude creeps into the spiritual life, it leads to sorcery and charlatanism. Depressive self-images say, “You are no good; therefore your consecration means nothing.” It is important to recognize self-commentaries for the mind tricks that they are. They have nothing to do with our real dignity, and their only purpose is to keep our attachment to self-image alive by compromising our consecration. There is no truth in them.

To build our sense of dignity on the foundation of any self-images is to establish an extremely shaky structure for our­selves. We need to remember that our self-images are nothing more than the particular activities of cell systems. Cell systems are always addicted to a variety of things; their validity is never perfect, and often they are completely distorted. Thus how we view ourselves at any given time may have very little to do with how we really are. There is no way we can make an image of our true nature. In the true image of God, we ourselves are incomprehensible.

Earlier, I said that spiritual growth is movement toward in­creasing fulfillment of the two great commandments—deepen­ing love for God, others, and self. Dignity is the way God begins the process of spiritual growth in us. Dignity always says we are worth far more than we can ever give ourselves credit for, that we are meant for greater things than those we ever could aspire to, and that we are more loved and more in need of love than we can ever know. Choosing dignity, then, is not selecting another self-image. It is choosing an open-endedness in which we know all our images will be insufficient. Choosing dignity is choosing spaciousness. It is an act of faith.

From a practical standpoint, choosing dignity means being vigilant about how we respond to failure in the course of our homeward journey. What happens when our addictions get the best of us, when our resolutions fail, when we see how inade­quate we are, when we forget how to pray, when we lose sight of the entire process? Each of these encounters will be an op­portunity for further mind tricks based on self-image. If we do not notice the tricks, we will indulge them. But if we catch the tricks early, we can simply say no. We can pick ourselves up from whatever fall we have taken and go on.

As I have said so many times before, we cannot do this alone. Left by ourselves, we simply do not have the strength either to be honest with ourselves or to claim our dignity. We must have help. Whether we like it or not, a large part of that help must come through other people.

Community

Much as we might want to avoid the humiliation of involving other people in our struggles with attachment, it becomes im­perative to do so. We cannot trust our own judgments and perceptions where addiction is concerned; the mind tricks are too great. It only makes sense to recruit some independent and unbiased help.

The exact form of help will be determined in part by the nature of our attachments. Major destructive addictions de­mand assistance from professionals. More interior idolatries re­quire spiritual companionship and accountability. Sometimes we just need a friend to help keep us honest. The act of seeking help might be very dramatic, as in turning oneself in to the police to put an end to repeated illegal activities. It might be joining AA or Overeaters Anonymous. It might be talking one’s situation over with a pastor, counselor, or spiritual director. It might be asking one’s spouse or family to help monitor a par­ticular behavior. Whatever the form, involvement of other peo­ple is an essential component of a consecrated life. There is no authentic way around it.

It is not easy to bring others into one’s struggle with attach­ment. The thing that makes it most difficult is the very thing that makes it most helpful: it destroys the interior secrecy upon which our mind tricks thrive. Attachment makes us fool our­selves, and it makes us feel like fools in the eyes of others. Yet others’ eyes are essential, for our own eyes see only what they want. We might wish it were easier, but being seen by others is part of the desert experience. There would have been no desert fathers or mothers if pilgrims had no need for compan­ionship and guidance. The journey we take, if it is to be au­thentic, cannot be a private thing between ourselves and God; God is as much in our companion pilgrims as in our own souls. We are called not only to love God above all else, but to love our companions as our very selves. Regardless of how distaste­ful it may be, part of this love must involve letting them see us as we are and allowing God to love us through them.

But God’s grace through community involves something far greater than other people’s support and perspective. The power of grace is nowhere as brilliant nor as mystical as in communi­ties of faith. Its power includes not just love that comes from people and through people, but love that pours forth among people, as if through the very spaces between one person and the next. Just to be in such an atmosphere is to be bathed in healing power.

Loving power does not just happen in any random gathering. Power exists in all groups of people, but that power may or may not be gracious. Mobs have power. Armies have power. Political groups have power. Churches have power. Families have pow­er. Like individuals, these and all other groups have addictions. They have mixed motivations. They become codependent to­gether. They are subject to mind tricks, pride, and willfulness. They will often think they can handle it, and their attempts to do so can be far more destructive than those of individuals.

But like individuals, groups can become consecrated. With grace, they can become dedicated to their shared heart’s desire for God, committed to the holy spaciousness through which grace shines most brilliantly. They can admit their collective temptation to fill the space with some object of attachment, to make an idol of a cause or of a charismatic leader or of a frozen image of God. When the members of a group consecrate them­selves to God above these and all other idolatries, even above the idolatry of their own togetherness, they become a commu­nity of faith. Consecration does not make the community per­fect, any more than our own consecrations make us perfect as individuals. But it claims the community’s desire for perfection and, more important, its willingness to be transformed.

One of the powers of the faith community is its capacity to provide a lasting steadiness through all the waverings of its individual members. When I cannot pray, the prayer of count­less others goes on. Where I am complacent, others are strug­gling. Where I am in conflict, others are at peace. Most important, when I cannot act in loving ways, there are those in my communities who can.

For some, an even greater power comes through sacramental rites of the faith community. Sacraments such as baptism and communion represent a corporate acknowledgment and reaffir­mation of the community’s consecration. They are also nodal points in the life of that community through which the power of grace may flow with unique splendor. Many people, includ­ing myself, have histories of conflict with religious institutions that make such participation difficult at times. For others, par­ticipation in sacraments has become so routine that it may seem to have lost its meaning. But these attitudes are secondary. Re­gardless of how we feel about sacraments, there can be power in them, power that is good.

Life with and in faith communities is difficult. But our strug­gles with attachment are always more difficult, and we only compound our difficulties if we deny ourselves these unique openings for grace.

Responsibility

We are part of larger systems whether we want to be or not, and if our journey is consecrated we must recognize our re­sponsibility for participating in the lovingness of those systems. At its simplest level, responsibility means respecting ourselves and those around us. In the nature of systems, all our addictive behaviors affect other people. Some behaviors really hurt oth­ers. We have a responsibility to try to identify and restrain those behaviors. In practical terms, we must listen to what other peo­ple are telling us, notice what effects we are having on them, and be willing to try to change.

Responsibility requires taking action: we need to seek grace, reach out for it, and act in accord with it. If we respond authentically to God’s love, we will seek nothing less than fulfill­ment of the great commandments. We will do all that is in our power to love God with all our strength. We will act with kind­ness towards others, seeking the image of God that lives within them. And we will be as gentle and compassionate with our­selves as we possibly can. We will try to forgive others, and we will try to forgive ourselves.

Responsibility is the real living out of consecration. Our hearts have said yes to God, our minds have claimed the assent, and now our actions must reflect consecration to the best of our ability. So we live prayerfully, attempting to turn to God at all times for guidance and being willing at all times to follow that guidance as completely as we possibly can. Here, finally, is the proper place of willpower in the spiritual life. We bring our intention, our effort, our strength, and all else that we can mus­ter to the cause of love.

We cannot, of course, be “successful.” We will most certainly fail where we try to do it autonomously. There is no way to engineer our own salvation, to get ourselves into God’s power, because we are already there. We cannot fashion love with our own hands, because it has already been given. In a consecrated life, autonomous responsibility becomes a contradiction in terms. But neither can we sit on our hands, waiting with ab­solute passivity for God to work miracles upon us. Passive re­sponsibility is also a contradiction in terms.

We are neither gods nor puppets. Nor do we exist at some point on a line between these extremes. Instead, we exist in a dimension that is different from all such images. God is in us, we are in God, we are in one another, and we are very much ourselves. We are mysterious and so, therefore, is our respon­sibility.

For me, living with mystery means that discernment must begin in holy spaciousness, with unknowing, and with an at­titude of abject willingness. I do not, of course, mean that I do this all the time. More often than not, I forget. But when I have my wits about me, I try to bring all my images of self, God, and world into God’s spaciousness first, and there allow them to be opened and transfigured in whatever ways God might desire. Then, with whatever sense of guidance I have been giv­en, and whatever insights I have gained, I try to do my best. As I go about living, I try not to leave the spaciousness behind. God is always present to me; I try, as I can, to be always present to God.

Often I do not sense any clear guidance from God, no matter how carefully I try to open myself to it. And even when I do sense it, I can never be certain that I am not deluding myself. Because of my attachments, I can be sure none of my conclu­sions will be perfectly pure. Yet, in the very act of sincerely seeking God’s guidance, in the simple and sometimes pitiful attempts I make to turn to God, I do know that God responds. In addition, I have a head on my shoulders; I know, to some extent, what kinds of actions are loving and what are not. Fur­ther, I have Scripture and faith tradition and community to help me in the process of discernment. Once again, we are called to faithfulness, not success. We can do only what we can do.

Doing what we can do means having the courage to act in accord with our best judgments, even though we know those judgments are not perfect. If we refused to act until we were completely sure of God’s will, we would be committing our­selves to one or another disaster. We would either avoid re­sponsibility by doing nothing at all or abuse responsibility by convincing ourselves that we know God’s will. Authentic re­sponsibility means acting with our best prayerful judgment, acting without complete sureness, acting in faith, but acting.

Action can be very difficult in any aspect of life, but with our major attachments it can be abysmal. The mind tricks of addic­tion make it excruciatingly difficult to come to any clarity about how to act. Then, when we are brought to our knees and clarity of responsible action does come, it is even more awful. It is just too simple, and we have seen it too many times before. It sits before our eyes like an ugly billboard proclaiming the two most offensive words we know: QUIT IT.

Simplicity

When it comes to dealing with addictive behavior, we might hope the final answer would be more complicated. After all, we are in the last pages of an entire book about addiction; there must be something more than those two words. No, in the context of what we can do to break addiction, all the other words simply prove that there is nothing else. It all comes down to quitting it, not engaging in the next addictive behavior, not indulging in the next temptation.

If a person is addicted to powerful chemicals that have dan­gerous potentials for backlash, medically supervised tapering is required. Decreasing use may prolong the quitting process for a few days or weeks, but it is still just quitting.

No matter how we might want to amplify and elaborate it, stopping addictive behavior boils down to this: don’t do it, re­fuse to do it, and keep refusing to do it. It is so simple, and it seems so impossible. Yet it was very possible for the three peo­ple whose stories I told in the last chapter. They had no fancy techniques for overcoming addiction. They had no intricate sub­stitutions; for them there was no substitution at all. Neither did they have any complicated psychological or theological under­standing to help them in their struggle. They had tried all these things before, to no avail.

When these people were empowered to overcome their ad­dictions, they did so with simplicity. They simply did not en­tertain the next temptation. They saw that temptation coming but neither fought it off nor turned away from it toward some­thing else. Simply, briefly, they chose not to hop on board with it. What did they do instead? Nothing. They let their spacious­ness be.

This fundamental simplicity is a consistent sign among peo­ple who have overcome addictions. It is also a sign of authentic spiritual growth. Years ago, while doing research for another book, I came across a quotation from Jan Hus, a fourteenth-century religious reformer in Czechoslovakia.  As Hus was being burned at the stake for heresy, his last words were, “Oh blessed simplicity.” I mentioned this during a conversation with a recovering alcoholic. He immediately pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. On the card were the letters K.l.S.S. “This is something I got from AA,” he said. “It means Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

In addiction, as in all of life, we overcomplicate things in order to avoid facing their truth. The systems of our brains are intelligent, and they love to go crazy with their intellectual abil­ities. We can use our time thinking about the intricacies of our addictions instead of quitting them. We can fill all the potential spaces God gives us with thoughts. We can think about praying instead of praying. This does not mean we should stifle our intellects, but when we find our minds trying to pick their way through Gordian knots of thought, it would be wise to take a breath and see if we might just be avoiding some simple truth— the simple next thing we need to do, or the next temptation we should simply avoid. Ideally, the quality of simplicity will undergird and flow through all that we do. The simplicity of ad­diction is not to do the next addictive behavior. The simplicity of the spiritual life is living with love.

Loving Our Longing

And that, I am afraid, is about it. You may have noticed that I did not include surrender as part of a consecrated struggle with addiction. This is because we cannot do our own surren­ders. To try to turn it over to God prematurely would only be another mind trick, a way of trying to escape responsibility, testing rather than trusting. But indeed God is in it with us all along, and wherever our choices are enabled to remain simple and our intent remains solid, empowerment comes through grace. There is little else we can do except to keep on trying, and looking for God’s invitations and seeking simplicity.

One attitude, however, can make a fundamental difference in how we approach our attachments and our lives. It can prepare us for an embrace with God. I have alluded to it before as I have stressed the importance of claiming our longing for God, of consecrating our desire, and of being willing to tolerate spaciousness. To state it directly, we must come to love our longing.

Any authentic struggle with attachment must involve depri­vation. We have to go hungry and unsatisfied; we have to ache for something. It hurts. Withdrawal symptoms are real, and, one way or another, they will be experienced. If we can both accept and expect this pain, we will be much better prepared to face struggles with specific attachments. We might even come to see it as birth pain, heralding the process of our delivery from slavery to freedom. If we expect comfort or anesthesia, however, we will feel more distressed when the pain of depri­vation comes; we will feel like something is wrong. We will become confused and far more vulnerable to self-deception.

The implications of accepting pain are significant in dealing with specific addictions, but they become massive in terms of our basic attitude toward life. In our society, we have come to believe that discomfort always means something is wrong. We are conditioned to believe that feelings of distress, pain, deprivation, yearning, and longing mean something is wrong with the way we are living our lives. Conversely, we are con­vinced that a rightly lived life must give us serenity, comple­tion, and fulfillment. Comfort means “right” and distress means “wrong.” The influence of such convictions is stifling to the human spirit. Individually and collectively, we must some­how recover the truth. The truth is, we were never meant to be completely satisfied.

If God indeed creates us in love, of love, and for love, then we are meant for a life of joy and freedom, not endless suffering and pain. But if God also creates us with an inborn longing for God, then human life is also meant to contain yearning, incom­pleteness, and lack of fulfillment. To live as a child of God is to live with love and hope and growth, but it is also to live with longing, with aching for a fullness of love that is never quite within our grasp. As attachments lighten and idols fall, we will enjoy increasing freedom. But at the same time our hearts will feel an even greater, purer, deeper ache. This particular pain is one that never leaves us.

Authentic spiritual wholeness, by its very nature, is open-ended. It is always in the process of becoming, always incom­plete. Thus we ourselves must also be always incomplete. If it were otherwise, we could never exercise our God-given right to participate in ongoing creation. The course of our lives is pre­cisely as Saint Augustine indicated: our hearts will never rest, nor are they meant to rest, until they rest in God. This precious restlessness is mediated by and manifested through our physi­cal being, through the combined minute strugglings of the cells of our brains and bodies as they seek harmony and balance in their endless adjustment to circumstances.

Our fundamental dis-ease, then, is at once a precise neuro­logical phenomenon and a most precious gift from God. It is not a sign of something wrong, but of something more pro­foundly right than we could ever dream of. It is no problem to be solved, no pathology to be treated, no disease to be cured. It is our true treasure, the most precious thing we have. It is God’s song of love in our soul.

Moreover, it is not simply a song sung to us from a faraway God in heaven; it is simultaneously the expression of Christ-with-and-Spirit-in us, sharing our suffering and restlessness, creating and empowering and living in and through the very cells that make us up, preserving our freedom with endless intimate love in everything we do and are. And, always, leaving us unsatisfied, calling. To claim our rightful place in destiny, we must not only accept and claim the sweetly painful incom­pleteness within ourselves, but also affirm it with all our hearts. Somehow we must come to fall in love with it.

I have quoted Paul on this before, but let us listen once again:

The Holy Spirit and our spirit together bear witness that we are chil­dren of God. And if we are children we are heirs as well: heirs of God and coheirs with Christ, sharing his sufferings so as to share his glory. What we experience in this life can never be compared to the unrevealed splendor that is waiting for us. The whole creation, which was made unfulfilled by God, is waiting with eager longing, hoping to be freed. From the beginning till now all creation has been groaning in one great act of giving birth; and we too, who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait to be set free.

The specific struggles we undergo with our addictions are re­flections of a blessed pain. To be deprived of a simple object of attachment is to taste the deep, holy deprivation of our souls. To struggle to transcend any idol is to touch the sacred hunger God has given us. In such a light, what we have called asceti­cism is no longer a way of dealing with attachment, but an act of love. It is a willing, wanting, aching venture into the desert of our nature, loving the emptiness of that desert because of the sure knowledge that God’s rain will fall and the certainty that we are both heirs and co-creators of the wonder that is now and of the Eden that is yet to be.

# (End of book)

Two of the many good footnotes:

Chapter 4, Note #9:  Ancient Eastern medical traditions, such as acupuncture, are based on cor­recting imbalances of energy within bodily systems. In the West, homeo­pathic medicine and many new holistic approaches to healing are also centered in reestablishing equilibrium within and among such systems. In traditional Western medicine, the work of such people as Claude Bernard, who coined the term internal milieu, and of Hans Selye, who initiated our modern understanding of stress, has established a similar understanding of the central importance of balance and equilibrium in all bodily systems.

 Chapter 5, Note #12: The distinction I have made here between the image making and the con­templative way might rightfully remind some readers of the classical kataphatic and apophatic styles of spiritual practice. When applied with grace, images can become symbols and even icons (symbols that act as windows into divine mystery) rather than idols that substitute for that mystery. Spir­itual practices that rely heavily on such cellular representations of the divine are known as kataphatic. Most traditional practices are of this sort.  Practices that seek more directly to face reality as it is and thus bypass as many cellular representations as possible are apophatic or, as I have defined it, contemplative. It is important to note that my distinctions here apply only to the practices or means of approaching spiritual experience. The nature of the experience itself seems to me to be beyond such distinctions.