The following three facts set the scene for our struggle.
- God loves us and calls us to love and freedom.
- Addictions frustrate our response.
- We need the help of God’s grace to overcome addiction and to respond generously to God’s call.
The process to move toward freedom is commonly called the spiritual life. It helps us put things back in order by addressing the consequences of our personal, communal and societal brokenness.
In the Carmelite tradition, this spiritual journey is rooted in this basic truth: God loves us first and loves us as we are. God is calling us to be one with God in love. This happens by personal purification and transformation. The teachings and programs of all the Carmelite saints, particularly John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, offer constant enlightenment and direction on this road to freedom, a freedom to love. This involves the transformation of desire, a re-focusing our mind and heart to move from ourselves as the center to God as the center.
May’s truly profound insight of how we withdraw from addiction is intimately related to these Carmelite teachings. May says there is a gentle binding of the person’s will and God’s grace in the withdrawal from addiction. This calls for both determination and openness plus a mysterious mixture of dependency and resolution. Any effort that seeks to control the action of surrender to God’s grace is a sure formula for the continuing dominance of the addiction.
When there is true withdrawal from an addiction, a deep void develops in our heart. May describes this as a sacred spaciousness. This is a new and difficult experience. The normalcy of the recent past, captivated by the addiction, has a tremendous lure to return to the good old days. We must understand the spaciousness is the call of God to a new freedom, to a new and better life. There is a great temptation to fill the new openness with another addiction. The smoker ends smoking but now eats to excess. The drinker stops drinking but now gets hooked on AA meetings. Others fill the void in a thousand different ways. True withdrawal needs to embrace the emptiness that is the call of God to new life and new freedom to love both God and our neighbor. We need to trust that God knows better. We must find our new home in the sacred spaciousness.
The movement to God, our homecoming, involves the transformation of our desires. Withdrawing from the addiction liberates us to love God with an expanding freedom driven by grace. This new detachment is a transformation of our desire. The longing for God emerges from its hidden home in our heart to become the new power and light that guides us on our way home to God.
Along the way, it slowly becomes clear that the price of personal sacrifice and relinquishment continues to escalate. This is the clear but mostly neglected message of the Gospels. The newly acquired sacred space facilitates are openness and generosity in letting God’s spirit guide us.
This new spiritual growth draws us into a three-fold program of prayer, meditation and action in response to God’s call in grace. This is a movement away from our controlling approach to reality which May calls willfulness. It is an openness to God’s love, a willingness that embraces the deep mystery in life that is God. This is a long journey from our self-centered world into the great and truly intimidating spaciousness of God’s love. We are losing the anchor of our addictions and are being called forth to a totally and uprooting new reality. We must learn to lose our life in order to save it on the pilgrimage to God.
In all of this complicated process that is our spiritual journey, we finally face three options:
- We try to avoid God’s call. In the end, and maybe a long time before the end, we are facing both our own mortality and God as The Hound of Heaven. God will win out.
- We attempt to “spiritualize” our struggle which basically is a program of self-management and denial wrapped in evasion of God’s call. It is the way of compromise dressed up in a sophisticated package. It puts us in control.
- We try to be available to God’s call. This will always demand a readiness and self-possession to travel a new road. This way will feature a bumpy path with more sacrifice and less control but eventually true freedom.
Most of us fluctuate with some regularity between the three options. One often becomes more dominant in our life. Prayer, Scriptures, sacraments, spiritual community and self-examination all help in the struggle. It must be a movement of surrender of our control and the acceptance of God’s mercy and compassion. This leads to the most powerful words against any and all addictions: I QUIT!
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