The Enslaved Heart

The Worship of False gods

Elijah had an epic battle on Mount Carmel with the false prophets of Jezebel, the patroness of the false god, Baal.  Elijah in the heat of the conflict addressed the people with a classic question good for all ages: “How long will you straddle the issue?  If the Lord is God, follow him, if Baal, follow him.” (1 Kings 18:21)

It seems like an easy choice for us.  However, when the gods of Baal come in the form of money, a more comfortable lifestyle, our prejudices and especially our addictions, big and small, the choice becomes a great deal more clouded.

The human heart easily distorts our relationships with people, things and ideas.  There is a natural pull to the expediency of compulsion.  This relationship then gradually becomes an attachment for us.  This is the foundational distortion. Basically we are binding the human spirit to something or someone other than love.  We are seeking God in the creature.

These habits of attachment make life easier at first but gradually we slide from the freedom of love to the fear of loss.  Many attachments deteriorate into addictions which further cut into our freedom in an escalating degree of compulsion. John of Cross lists some very simple things that can be an attachment on the way to addiction: the habit of being excessively talkative, the way food is prepared, a book or a cell.  Then, of course, there are personal relationships.  In our consumer society people are spending gross amounts of money to enslave us to their products.  The ever expanding horizons of the digital world offer countless new opportunities for addiction.

Addiction is a deeply disruptive process in the spiritual journey.  It is a powerful and compulsive falsehood that stifles human freedom.  It is basically an enslaving commitment often under the guise of an innocent activity.  Addictions run the gauntlet from deeply destructive behaviors such as the abuse of alcohol and drugs to seemingly innocuous activities like following your favorite team or family gossip.   All addictions share one destructive element: reduction of human freedom that is necessary in our search for God.
Every human being has addictions, almost always hidden in  the safety of false consciousness.  Addictions must be addressed to free our heart for God.  The choice is simple according to Elijah: “If the Lord is God, follow him, if Baal, follow him.”

While the choice is simple, the identification of the dominating and freedom robbing addiction is often quite complicated.  It often takes years to expose our idols wrapped up in our ostensibly harmless addiction. The complexity of the twelve step programs are a testimony to this challenge. Faithfulness to deep, personal prayer that leads to self-knowledge holds the key to overcoming addictions.

Addictions distort our most honest and real desire for truth and goodness, the basic hunger for God in our heart.  This is why there is no such thing as a harmless addiction.  All addictions are serious roadblocks on the journey to God.

The human heart is indeed an idol making machine because of the basic reality of our addictions.  The idols, the false gods we create so readily, produce disintegration and fragmentation within the heart, suffering from the loss of freedom.  Often we think of the idols of the Old Testament as foreign and unrelated to our experience.  Yet what the idols expose is a fundamental and universal human experience.

Our search for God is always distorted by a heart torn by addictions.  We continually short-circuit the search with the false gods of our idols that maintain our comfort and self-deception.  This process of deception is rooted in the fierce power of our addictions seeking to maintain control.
The purest acts of faith often come from the darkness of our addictions.  They seem to always be calling us into a risk. Most times this surrender in faith does no bring a sense of serenity and peace but an uncertainty that calls us to a more naked and deeper trust in God.  More often than not when we are moving away from addictions we are closer to Jesus in the Garden than Jesus in the Transfiguration.

We regularly manufacture idols in a quest for security and control.  On this point the Bible is clear from Abraham to Jesus.  A common theme of freedom in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is the journey, the pilgrimage.  Pilgrimage is the Scriptural norm and with it comes a basic insecurity and a call for trust and openness to life.  We are driven by a distorted heart that wants security on our terms, a stable home rather than the challenge of the uncertainty of the journey. We want to settle down with clear fences to define the limits of our reality.  We gladly accept a mortgage to remove any semblance of uncertainty.  To be king or queen of our own mansion goes much deeper than we think.

We long to settle down with the lesser gods who are lesser because we can control them.  Among these lesser gods, our attachments and addictions hold the position of prominence.  The heart struggles constantly with this excessive baggage that hinders the journey.

We enter the relentless battle of choosing good or evil, a false security or openness to God’s call.  Christ’s parable of the weeds and the wheat (Mt 13:24-30) symbolizes this ever raging battle of grace and sin.

When we get out of bed in the morning we usually have a set of relationships and responsibilities that define our world.  The call of the Gospel demands a response of love and generosity in our concrete and specific world of family, work, community and often new expanding possibilities.  However, the pull of the fragmented heart moves us to selfishness, neglect and the narrowing routine of compulsion. The easy and closed world we have created for ourselves in the false security of our addictions protects our control, limits our horizons.  Our mortgage needs to give way to the pilgrimage, to the freedom of the Gospel’s call.

The challenge of the Gospel as seen through the tradition of Carmelite spirituality sets love as the priority.  Love urges us to confront our small, controlled world and lifestyle.   This means being open to others starting with our immediate responsibilities and expanding to the appeal of our neighbor.  This invitation is experienced on a personal level and on a social level. Both dimensions call us to be responsible for our world.  Love pushes us toward the pilgrimage, the mortgage holds us back.
The idols of our time are not just personal loves and possessions, but especially idols of power, prestige, control, exclusiveness and dominance.  These idols lead to neglect in our immediate relationships and often blindness to the poor and their situation in our world and other issues of justice in society.

Our yearning for control resists the Lord’s call to pilgrimage and trust.  We face a fundamental choice just as in the time of Elijah or in today’s message of Jesus: the true God or the god of our control, comfort and convenience, the pilgrimage or the mortgage.  It is almost always a choice of freedom or addiction.