“We are created for love and freedom, addiction hinders us, and grace is necessary for salvation. 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 despite our intentions and errors. At such times, when grace is so clearly given unrequested, 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. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.
It is most important to remember, however, that it is not the objects of our addictions that are to blame for filling up our hands and hearts; it is our clinging to these objects, grasping for them, becoming obsessed with them. In the words of John of the Cross, “It is not the things of this world that either occupy the soul or cause it harm, since they enter it not, but rather the will and desire for them. “This will and desire, this clinging and grasping is attachment.”
My reflection:
The major point in May’s book is that grace plays a key role in the healing of addiction. In this short selection, he starts to describe grace. It is the loving presence of God calling us to wholeness. Our role is to offer an openness and acceptance to the call to new life.
When we are open and free, grace works to draw us into a new freedom that melts away the addiction. When we are not free, we ultimately are enslaved by the addiction.
May knows well there is much more involved in stopping the addiction. His point is clear. In the end, without grace there is no answer to our problems. Teresa of Avila would agree wholeheartedly with May’s emphasis on grace. Her language was different but the reality of a loving God seeking us and calling us to life is central to her message.
Teresa saw prayer as essential to this loving encounter with God’s call in grace. She had great insight to the obstacles to prayer. She insisted that there must be order in our life to pray effectively over the long haul. May would describe this as eliminating the addiction to create freedom for God’s love.
Teresa saw three virtues working with prayer for this freedom in the struggle against addictions. The three virtues are humility, detachment and charity. They lead us to a search for acceptance of all aspects of our life. This is the beginning of withdrawal from the trap of ambiguity in our life that torments the human experience. May’s insight shows the power of addiction to distort and blind us as one obvious source of this ambiguity.
The three virtues of humility, detachment and charity encourage the openness and acceptance of life. We are pulled away from the lies of selfishness, the misuse of God’s creatures and hostility to our sisters and brothers.
Teresa’s program of the three virtues gives focus to our effort to work and cooperate with grace. God is calling us to freedom. Humility lets us accept reality on God’s terms. Detachment lets us use all God’s creatures in the proper way to lead us to God. Finally, charity guides us in God’s way of love for our sisters and brothers. This love is the essential condition for movement towards the center where God awaits.
May’s insight on grace and addiction makes the battle of good and evil more specific and concrete. Theresa’s insight on the three virtues gives us something to work with in our life as we face the perennial battle of sin and grace, addiction and freedom.
Reflection Two:
“We all swim in an ocean of divine love and mercy. But we have to become aware of it. This can happen only when we let go of all that we cling to and abandon ourselves joyfully to that love and mercy. And the last thing we have to let go of is the self that clings. When at last we are able to do this, there is then nothing of us. There is only God and we are in him.
“Letting go” is never easy, and we can never be quite sure that we have done it for good. The temptation to take up again what we have let go, to return to our “clinging,” can linger as an all too present allurement, especially when we are dealing with strong “attachment” or “addictions.” …
“One thing should be made very clear: “letting go” is by no means a merely negative experience. It is a wholesome way of overcoming the rigidity of fixed patterns of behavior over which we seem to have little control. It brings a spirit of freedom and spontaneity into our lives. If an airplane is overloaded with excess baggage, it may not be able to get off the ground. Sometimes it may be necessary to get rid of that baggage in order that the plane may be free to fly. We too may have to get rid of excess baggage in order to fly – that is, to lift ourselves up above our superficial selves to find our true selves in God.
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Silence on Fire, William Shannon: pp. 86-87.
Gerald May, in his classic, Addiction and Grace, offers us great and valuable insights on the obstacles within us on our Pilgrimage to God. He shows that all of us suffer from addictions that rob our freedom and block our quest for God. The following “bit of wisdom” is a selection for his text with some reflections.
