Please forgive our headline photo. In recent days a newspaper photographer caught Pope Benedict having a quiet drag. I've already drawn attention to that story in our forum last night suggesting that Benedict might yet become the patron saint of we addicts to nicotine (See: "Smokers get a patron saint" Post 13241). It is a picture that I have a strong feeling will get everyone's attention for the topic at hand in this lead commentary today. Vince Exley sent it in to us. He's been reading Gerald G May's book "Addiction and Grace" and Vince has given us this edited extract. While we do not receive any benefit from Harper Collins, the publishers of Gerald May's book, we hope the stretching of the laws of copyright, if that is indeed what we are doing, might induce a few people to go purchase Gerald May's book, or borrow it from their local library — both actions which would provide some compensation for Dr May. …Editor

The inborn desire for God — a longing for love…

After 20 years of listening to the yearnings of people's hearts, I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and our precious treasure. It gives us meaning. Some of us have repressed this desire, burying it beneath so many other interests that we are completely unaware of it. Or we may experience it in different ways — as a longing for wholeness, completion, or fulfilment. Regardless of how we describe it, it is a longing for love. It is a hunger to love, to be loved, and to move closer to the Source of love. This yearning is the essence of the human spirit; it is the origin of our highest hopes and most noble dreams.

Modern theology describes this desire as God given. In an outpouring of love, God creates us and plants the seeds of this desire within us. Then, throughout our lives, God nourishes this desire, drawing us toward fulfilment of the two great commandments: "Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself". If we could claim our longing for love as the true treasure of our hearts, we would, with God's grace, be able to live these commandments.

But something gets in the way. Not only are we unable to fulfil the commandments; we often ignore our desire to do so. The longing at the centre of our hearts repeatedly disappears from our awareness, and its energy is ursurped by forces that are not at all loving. Our desire is captured, and we give ourselves over to things that, in our deepest honesty, we really do not want.

When I look at the problem psychologically, I see two forces that are responsible: repression and addiction. We all suffer from both repression and addiction. Of the two, repression is by far the milder one.

Repression…

We frequently repress our desire for love because love makes us vulnerable to being hurt. This happens after someone spurns our love; we stifle our desire, and it may take a long time before we are ready to love again. It is a normal human response; we repress our longings when they hurt us too much. God does not always come to us in the pleasant ways we might expect, and so we repress our desire for God.

When we repress a desire, we try to keep it out of our awareness. We try to keep our focus on other things — safer things. But something that has been repressed does not go away.

Addiction…

While repression stifles desire, addiction attaches desire, bonds and enslaves the energy of desire to certain specific behaviours, things, or people. These objects of attachment then become preoccupations and obsessions; they come to rule our lives. Addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity's desire for God.

The psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being. The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things.

Addiction and Freedom…

God creates us out of love. This love draws us towards itself by means of our deepest desires. This love also wants us to have free will, we are intended to make free choices. It is both our birthright and our authentic destiny to participate fully in this creative loving, and freedom of will is essential for our participation to occur.

But our freedom is not complete. Working against it is the powerful force of addiction. Psychologically, addiction uses up desire. It is like a psychic malignancy, sucking our life energy into specific obsessions and compulsions, leaving less and less energy available for other people and other pursuits. The objects of our addiction become our false gods.

Attachment and Detachment…

Addiction is a state of compulsion, obsession or preoccupation that enslaves a person's will and desire.

Attachment is the process that enslaves desire and creates the state of addiction.

Detachment is the word used in spiritual traditions to describe freedom of desire. Not freedom from desire, but freedom of desire. Of all the concepts we are discussing detachment is the most widely misunderstood, it has come to be associated with coldness, austerity, and lack of passion. Detachment promotes the opposite, seeking a liberation of desire, an enhancement of passion, the freedom to love with all one's being, and the willingness to bear the pain such love can bring.

Grace…

Gerald G May MD

Because of our addictions, we simply cannot — on our own — keep the great commandments. Most of us have tried, again and again, and failed. Some of us have even recognised that these commandments are really our deepest desires, but still we fail. I think our failure is necessary, for it is in failure and helplessness that we can honestly and completely turn to grace. Grace is our only hope for dealing with addiction, the only power that can truly vanquish its destructiveness.

Grace has its counterparts in all the great religions. For Christians, grace is the dynamic outpouring of God's loving nature that flows into and through creation in an endless self-offering of healing love, illumination, and reconciliation. It is a gift that we are free to ignore, reject, ask for, or simply accept. And it is a gift that is often given in spite of our intentions and errors. At such times, when grace is so clearly given unrequited, uninvited, even undeserved, there can be no authentic response but gratitude and awe.

It is possible to approach grace as if it were just another thing to be addicted to, something we could collect or hoard. But this kind of grasping can capture only an image of grace. Grace itself, cannot be possessed; it is eternally free, and like the Spirit that gives it, it blows where it will. We can seek it and try to be open to it, but we cannot control it.

Similarly, grace seeks us but will not control us. Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us where grace might flow.

Hope…

It appears then, that we are in a predicament. We are dependant upon grace for liberation from our addictions, but those very addictions impair our receptivity to grace. But God creates and cares for us in such a way that our addictions can never completely vanquish our freedom. Addictions may oppress our desire, erode our wills, confound our motivations, and contaminate our judgment, but its bondage is never absolute. Although we cannot rid ourselves of attachment through our own autonomous efforts, and our addictions can indeed deaden our responses to grace, there is always some level at which we can choose, freely, to turn to God or to turn away from God, to seek grace or avoid it, to be willing for our attachments to be lightened or to hold onto them.

We do not like admitting defeat, and we will struggle valiantly, even foolishly, to prove that we can master our destinies. God, in whose image we are made, instils in us the capacity for relentless tenacity, an assertiveness that complements our yearning hunger for God. But most of us overdo it; our spirit of assertiveness quickly becomes a spirit of pride. We will never really turn to God in loving openness as long as we are handling things well enough ourselves. Addiction can be, and often is, the thing that brings us to our knees.

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[Index of Commentaries by Vince Exley]