Question #3: “While the material on addictions is fascinating and both frightening and helpful, how is it connected to my spiritual life?”
In almost all authentic spiritual traditions, even centuries before Christianity, the individual’s relationship to creatures has had a fundamental role. Creatures need to lead to God. When this role is perverted, the result is idolatry. This distortion starts with attachment which nails the heart to the object of affection. In explaining addiction, May highlights the long tradition on attachment and builds upon it. As an attachment escalates, it grows into addiction. May shows how the body, the mind and one’s feelings all work together to both create and maintain the path from an initial attachment to addiction. We are wired in the direction of addiction.
Some deeper considerations about addictions will be helpful in displaying the connection of addictions to our spiritual life. While defining addiction as any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits freedom and human desire, May stresses it is the action that is truly important in addiction. Desire for alcohol does not define an alcoholic. Regular over-indulgence in drinking does.
Here are five important characteristics of any addiction:
Tolerance: We always want more of the product of the addictive activity. In the end, whatever is the goal of the addictive conduct, it becomes consistently more difficult to achieve. This exposes a deeper but unsatisfied hunger. This is a truly ugly dimension of addiction. There never is enough.
Withdrawal symptoms: There are two. They are stress reaction and backlash reaction. In the stress reaction, the body reacts to the loss of addictive behavior in varying degrees of intensity. In the backlash, the person feels the opposite of the desired goal of the addiction.
Self-deception: The mind is fighting against itself to avoid loss of its “fix.” It creates “mind games” to distort and deceive anything that might deprive it of it of satisfaction. The mind loathes the possibility of the change built-in with withdrawal. The mind is ingenious in creating excuses to maintain full support for the addiction.
Loss of willpower: A fundamental deception or “mind trick” of addiction is focusing attention on willpower. The intention to stop addiction by saying, “I can handle it” is the sure path to preserving the addiction. The movement away from willpower to surrender and openness to grace is one of the great insights of May’s teachings. Willingness, leading to the surrender to grace, and not willfulness with its dependence on willpower, is the path to freedom.
Distortion of attention: Addiction absorbs our attention to distract our mind and heart from love. Attention and love are intimate partners. This is at the heart of the addiction’s destructive powers. It keeps us from the path of love for others and especially for God.
We need to work to identify our addictions. This is not so easy. Many addictions operate in a totally hidden manner. This invisibility can take place over a period of years. Other addictions are astute in creating deceptive mind games to minimize concern. How could being enthused about my team’s quest the championship be harmful? How could working extra to support my family be in conflict with being a responsible parent? Could being concerned about one’s health hinder my spiritual life? These, and a thousand other questions about ordinary activities and attitudes, can lead to uncovering of addictions in our life.
Addictions thrive in anonymity. It is self-knowledge, often driven by deep personal prayer, that unveils their destructive patterns. When a person brings the addiction out in the open, there is a choice: maintain the bondage or seek freedom. It is the question of Elijah to the people in the conflict with the false prophets: “How long will you straddle the issue? If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him?” (I Kings 18:21)
When May states that addiction leads to idolatry, it sounds shocking. The same teaching has been part of our Christian spirituality since the earliest days of the Desert Mothers and Fathers as they entered more deeply into the depth and beauty of the gospel message.
At a personal level, the struggle is to let things, relationships and activities lead us to God. However, we are deeply inclined to twist and distort these items to direct them for our selfish needs. Rather than God as the center, we become the center. This struggle started in the Garden and will go until the end. Addictions are not centered in things or experiences. Addictions are all about the heart. Am I moving out of myself toward God or not?
Another helpful insight of May points out the difference between addiction, which often seems quite good, and areas of authentic commitment in our life. To determine the difference, we need simply ask ourselves, can we quit it? If not, it is an addiction no matter how good it may appear. Freedom is the source of all the good we do. For freedom gives us the capacity for love. Addiction is the enemy of both freedom and love.
One truly difficult part of May’s teaching on addiction is this: the most mundane activities lead to critical choices in our life. Listening to or reading the news, our cell phone, a few drinks, dents in our new car, a little extra work, planning for retirement – they all are possible addictions. They all can lead one on a destructive path. Will we choose the true God or a false god? This is the stuff of the gospel.
Here are just a few quotes from Matthew that challenge us on the topic of addiction and our spiritual life. “To save one’s life, one must lose it.” (Mt 10:39), “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…” (Mt 6:19), “Ask and it will be given to you.” (Mt 7:7), “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Mt 10:37), “Go sell what you have and give it to the poor.” (Mt 19:21).
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