Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

by Gerald G. May

Chemicals like morphine and amphetamines, which create sensations of pleasure and relief from pain along with directly affecting natural neuroreceptors, are the most addictive of all known substances.16

In the case of losing a job or a loved one, great existential systems are deeply affected by withdrawal, even though the direct impact on any given synapse may not be so great. Thus the brief chemical addiction can be seen as a temporary and primarily physical discomfort, but the nonsubstance addiction digs deeply into the ground of the person’s sense of meaning and selfhood.

In prolonged addictions, what may initially have involved a rather simple change in a few million synapses has progressively expanded to affect billions of cells in countless other functional systems. One after another, each system has tried to defend against the initial imbalance, failed, and adapted by establishing a new normality. In turn, it causes an imbalance in the next system, and on the process goes. It is not so difficult to understand how our addictions can come to rule our lives.

Each of our major addictions consists not only of the primary attachment itself; it also includes the involvement of multiple other systems that have been affected by it. To put it quite simply, addictions are never single problems.

Because of multisystem involvement, breaking an addiction usually requires changes in many different areas of life. A person trying to stop smoking will find the struggle much greater after eating, after sex, or at other times that have become associated with cigarettes.

Multisystem involvement is also responsible for temporary experiences of freedom when a person’s environment changes. A compulsive overeater, for example, will struggle in agony with his addiction to food while in his usual environment. But if he goes on a backpacking trip in the mountains, he may feel quite free of the addiction. In the new environment, he is sufficiently removed from other stimuli that have become associated with his addiction, and he can much more easily deal with his primary urge to eat. He may even think he has finally overcome the problem, only to be deeply disappointed when he returns to his usual surroundings and finds all of his associations triggered afresh.

The longer an addiction continues, the more things will become associated with it and the more entrenched it will become. Some behaviors or chemicals that produce a rapid, direct, and powerful effect may result in addiction after only one or two experiences. Others may require many repeated experiences before they become entrenched. But regardless of how an addiction begins, the longer it lasts the more powerful it becomes. Attachments are thus like spreading malignancies, steadily invading and incorporating their surroundings into themselves. To apply the words of Isaiah, addictions are like “greedy dogs, never satisfied,” or as

What happens is not difficult to understand. In responding naturally to a stressful situation, the body increases its production of stress chemicals. The chemicals have their expected effects on the cells that receive them, and things return to normal when the stress passes. But if the stress continues, the receiving cells must cope. They try their feedback mechanisms to achieve a lower level of stress chemicals, and, if this doesn’t work, they habituate and adapt.

It is in the realm of spiritual practice, however, that attachment to stress becomes most obvious. Spending time in quiet, receptive openness is an essential part of prayer, meditation, and most other spiritual practices. In such settings, even mild addiction to stress becomes rapidly and painfully evident. For many modern spiritual pilgrims, the simple matter of taking time for daily prayer can become a battle of will excruciatingly reminiscent of that encountered in chemical addiction. The mind can generate wondrous excuses to do something instead of just being open and present. The struggles that go on between being and doing can be awesome.

There are many things all of us might rather avoid in prayer: we might rather not relinquish our sense of self-mastery; we might rather not hear what God might ask of us; we might rather avoid the self-knowledge that comes to us in quiet. Now, in addition, increasing numbers of us are discovering that we would rather not experience the discomfort of being peaceful.

As we have seen, the process of attachment takes place psychologically as a form of learning. This learning happens through reinforcement and conditioning, and it is accompanied by physical and chemical changes in the brain and elsewhere in the body. Since multiple functional systems are involved, the learning becomes entrenched.

Sadly, the brain never completely forgets what it has learned. Because of the deep and pervasive physical power of strong attachments, their potential exists forever in us, even after we have effectively broken the habit of acting upon them.

Years after a major addiction has been conquered, the smallest association, the tiniest taste, can fire up old cellular patterns once again. One aspect of addiction, then, is permanent. Thus we never completely overcome our attachments.

But throughout our lives, their potential for reactivation continues to exist within us. The brain does not forget. From the standpoint of psychology, this means we can never become so well adjusted that we can stop being vigilant. From a neurological viewpoint, it means the cells of our best-intentioned systems can never eradicate the countless other systems that have been addicted. And from a spiritual perspective, it means that no matter how much grace God has blessed us with, we forever remain dependent upon its continuing flow.

We all come “from freedom” originally, and we are meant for freedom. But addiction holds us back from our rightful destiny; it makes us prisoners of our own impulses and slaves to our own selfish idols. This is our condition, and the Scriptures of the great world religions attest to it.

I am convinced that it is indeed universal and primary, and, moreover, that it is a very specific desire for an actual loving communion, even union, in an absolutely personal relationship with God.3 I think it is this desire that Paul spoke of when he tried to explain the unknown God to the Athenians: “It is God who gives to all people life and breath and all things…. God created us to seek God, with the hope that we might grope after God through the shadows of our ignorance, and find God.”

For me, the energy of our basic desire for God is the human spirit, planted within us and nourished endlessly by the Holy Spirit of God. In this light, the spiritual significance of addiction is not just that we lose freedom through attachment to things, nor even that things so easily become our ultimate concerns. Of much more importance is that we try to fulfill our longing for God through objects of attachment. For example, God wants to be our perfect lover, but instead we seek perfection in human relationships and are disappointed when our lovers cannot love us perfectly.

In this light, the spiritual significance of addiction is not just that we lose freedom through attachment to things, nor even that things so easily become our ultimate concerns. Of much more importance is that we try to fulfill our longing for God through objects of attachment. For example, God wants to be our perfect lover, but instead we seek perfection in human relationships and are disappointed when our lovers cannot love us perfectly. God wants to provide our ultimate security, but we seek our safety in power and possessions and then find we must continually worry about them. We seek satisfaction of our spiritual longing in a host of ways that may have very little to do with God. And, sooner or later, we are disappointed.

We seek satisfaction of our spiritual longing in a host of ways that may have very little to do with God. And, sooner or later, we are disappointed. From a psychoanalytic perspective, one could say we displace our longing for God upon other things; we cathect them instead of God. Behaviorally, we are conditioned to seek objects by the positive and negative re...

Thus the more we become accustomed to seeking spiritual satisfaction through things other than God, the more abnormal and stressful it becomes to look for God directly.

we naturally seek the least threatening ways of trying to satisfy our longing for God, ways that protect our sense of personal power and require the least sacrifice. Even when we know that our hunger is for God alone, we will still be looking for loopholes—ways of having our cake and eating it too, ways of maintaining our attachments to things and people while simultaneously trying to deepen our intimacy with God.

full and freely chosen love for God requires searching and groping. What would happen to our freedom if God, our perfect lover, were to appear before us with such objective clarity that all our doubts disappeared? We would experience a kind of love, to be sure, but it would be love like a reflex.

I think God refuses to be an object for attachment because God desires full love, not addiction. Love born of true freedom, love free from attachment, requires that we search for a deepening awareness of God, just as God freely reaches out to us. In addition, full love for God means we must turn to God over and against other things.

A mature and meaningful love must say something like, “I have experienced other goodnesses, and they are beautiful, but it is You, my true heart’s desire, whom I choose above all.” We have to turn away before we can come home with dignity.

freedom of choice means that our longing for the true God remains submerged within us for months, years, or even decades at a time, while our conscious energies seek satisfaction elsewhere.

Often it is not until this momentum brings us to some point of existential despair, some rock bottom, some impasse, that we become capable of beginning to reclaim our true desire.6

Whenever and however it happens, we look at the attachments that had seemed so important and feel like the idol maker in Isaiah: “What I have in my hand is nothing but a lie!” And we hear, more clearly than ever, God’s call to “make your home in me, as I make mine in you.”7

after years of displacing desire and of adapting to addictions elsewhere, home will not seem normal. Thus we respond to God’s homeward call with a mixture of hope and fear. Something in us knows that this home is where we belong, but in many ways it also feels like alien territory. The journey homeward, the process of homemaking in God, involves withdrawal from addictive behaviors that have become normal for us.

To appreciate it with accuracy, we need to acknowledge both its beauty and its fierceness. It is beautiful because it is a homecoming, because it is a liberation from slavery, and because it enables love. But it is fierce because it entails relinquishment, letting go, risking, and enduring losses that are very real and very painful.

What I cling to most is my use, my idolization of that person or thing.

We will resist this loss as long as we possibly can. When withdrawal does happen, it will hurt. And, after it is over, we will mourn. Only then, when we have completed the grieving over our lost attachment, will we breathe the fresh air of freedom with appreciation and gratitude.

If we allow grace to guide our responses, we will realize what we need to know as we need to know it.

One of the most powerful and potentially frightening realizations is that there is no new normality of freedom to replace the old ones of addiction.

addiction to a religious system, like addiction to anything else, brings slavery, not freedom. The structures of religion are meant to mediate God’s self-revelation through community; they are not meant to be substitute gods.

It is impossible to “adapt” to God or to true freedom and love. We can—and, temporarily, we will—make images of God, freedom, and love and try to form them into new normalities that we can cling to, but these attachments must eventually be lifted as well. Authentic freedom and love will not be captured by attachment. Therefore, the journey homeward does not lead toward new, more sophisticated addictions. If it is truly homeward, it leads toward liberation from addiction altogether. Obviously, it is a lifelong process.

Attachments come to the forefront of my self-consciousness because, whether I like them or not, they have entrenched themselves as significant.

We all define ourselves according to our addictions. If I were to ask you to tell me about yourself, and you replied honestly, you would tell me about your attachments. And if you weren’t honest, even that would be because of your attachments.

Spiritual growth is by no means a steady process. Each time we touch the mystery of what is most real, we flee back into “normality” with some deeper layer of attachment threatened. Often upon return we may experience a backlash, a rebound of self-centeredness and desperate attempts to control things. We may find prayer more difficult at such times, and we are almost certain to invent new representations to take the place of those we have had to relinquish. The choices we make on such occasions become very important. Although they do not by themselves determine any outcomes, they do create the patterns of our freedom and slavery, and these, interwoven with God’s patterns of grace, form our unique tapestries of spiritual growth.

Third, we can try to be present to the mystery in a gentle, open-handed, and cooperative way. This is the contemplative option—not any system of complicated exercises, but the simple and courageous attempt to bear as much as one can of reality just as it is. To be contemplative, then, is not to be a special kind of person. Contemplation is simply trying to face life in a truly undefended and open-eyed way.11

From the outside of things, there is no way to be sure what the one “right” choice might be at any given time, for grace can be present in “wrong” choices as well. From the inside, where we might be more in touch with our true longing for God, the “right” choice is simply the one that springs most directly from that longing and reflects it most authentically. Prayer, Scripture, sacraments, spiritual community, and self-examination can all be sources of guidance as we seek to make such choices. But finally, even here at the heart of our human freedom, we are dependent upon the mercy of God.

In addition to struggling to make the best choices, we also have the problem of trying to follow through on the choices we make. Because we are addicted, our motivations are always mixed and our hearts are never completely pure. It can therefore be only a part of the self that makes a good choice and cooperates with it; much of the rest of the self is bound to fight it. One set of systems in the brain may choose the way of freedom and love, but countless others will immediately react with stress and mental treachery and all the other ways we have seen of trying to preserve our old normalities. Then, of course, it is all too likely we will start to rely on willpower, resolutions, and “I can handle it.”

“Why?” is a theological question. It means we have to try to look at things from God’s standpoint. This is, of course, an ultimately impossible task. But we can do our best, and we are not without resources; we have God’s self-revelation through Scripture and human history.

Then another force enters. The serpent turns temptation into attachment first by claiming that God was not telling the truth: “No! You will not die!” It then goes on with its own enticement, encouraging the humans to deny their dependency on God and to try to be masters of their own destinies. It tells Eve, in essence, that she can handle it: “God knows that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods.” It was after hearing these words that Eve became truly tempted.

The tree is attractive, not simply because of its outward appearance, but also because it offers the possibility of becoming godlike. Who would not be tempted? Yet becoming godlike here means distorting one’s God-given will into an autonomous willfulness that is antagonistic to God. This is the fundamental and most critical distinction between simple human desire and truly corrosive attachment. The wanting, yearning, longing quality of pure desire is natural and God-given. It is not only necessary for life; it also lends a rich open-endedness to existence, a lack of complete satisfaction that is powerfully creative and, in many ways, joyful. But the grasping, clinging, possessive quality of attachment is something very different.

They are honestly confused in their motivations, caught with their fig leaves, and ashamed. They knew they were responsible for their behavior, but they also knew something had interfered with their intentions. Such is the nature of attachment, pitting one part of oneself against another. Is the feeling not familiar? I remember feeling that way as a child: confused, ashamed, guilty, yet wanting to say, “But…”

In response to the humans’ behavior, God says, “I will multiply your pains in childbearing…. With suffering shall you get your food….” God’s response is usually understood as a straightforward punishment, and it certainly reads that way. But along the lines of Buddhism’s Noble Truths, God’s words are also a statement of the way things are: suffering is a fact of life, and it is caused by attachment. God then sends them forth and sets cherubs and a flaming sword “to guard the way to the tree of life.” Throughout the Genesis account, God may appear afraid that humans will “reach out and pick also from the tree of life,” thus gaining sufficient divine qualities to become competitors for God’s power and reign. If this were indeed God’s motivation, it would come from attachment to power and glory, and the actions springing from it would be unjust. The cherubs and flaming sword, and the banishment itself, would serve to protect God against humans. Yet, when read with an appreciation of human addiction, Genesis becomes the story of a free and purely loving Creator who knows that Eve and Adam will not be able to withstand the compulsion to eat from that second tree. Banishment is thus more protection than punishment. The cherubs and the flaming sword are there to protect humanity’s freedom rather than to defend God’s power. In a tender maternal moment before Eve and Adam leave, God makes clothing for them. This is not the action of a frightened God who clings to divinity, but of a...

As the preacher of Ecclesiastes relates, “I denied my eyes nothing that they desired, refused my heart no pleasure…. What futility it all was, what chasing after the wind.” To state it more positively, the law is a way of grace, established to help foster and mark the path to freedom and love. “Turn me from the path of delusion,” the psalmist prays, “grant me the grace of your Law…. Had your Law not been my delight I should have perished in my suffering.”15 There can be no doubt that God is adamant about being God, and there are sure consequences when one denies it. But God’s insistence is grounded in love rather than in selfishness. We have had God’s breath in us since the beginning, and God knows that the fulfillment we long for will come from nothing other than God’s very self. Nothing less than God will satisfy the yearning that God has planted within us.

“Then when you call to me, and come to plead with me, I will listen to you. When you seek me you shall find me, when you seek me with all your heart; I will let you find me….” “Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you;…Should you pass through the sea, I will be with you; or through rivers, they will not swallow you up. Should you walk through fire, the flames will not burn you. For I am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your savior.”16

In the context of addiction, the essence of Jesus’ teachings can be seen as threefold. First, he gave a powerful, unequivocal restatement of the necessity of relinquishing attachments in order to love God and neighbor with a full, unfettered heart. “No one can serve two masters…. You cannot love both God and money.” “Anyone who prefers father or mother…son or daughter to me is not worthy of me.” Second, he both explained and exemplified the nature of a life free from attachments, lived in true liberation and love. “I am gentle and humble of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Third, he established the way toward fulfillment, the Good News.17 Jesus’ existence as the divine incarnation proved that instead of hoarding the qualities of divinity, God wished to share them through a right relationship with humanity. The events of Jesus’ life, leading to his crucifixion, demonstrated the threat he posed to peoples’ addictions and the lengths to which they would go to protect their attachments. In turn, the crucifixion itself demonstrated the extent to which God would go to liberate people from their attachments. Jesus proclaimed that there was no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, and then he proceeded to do just that. Finally, and most important of all to the Christian faith, Christ’s resurrection proclaimed absolute and unquestioned victory over attachment itself, over its consequences, and over its ca...

Jesus’ words about attachment are far too numerous to quote here. They are, however, absolutely relentless and unequivocal. They begin with the two greatest commandments and proceed to the call to love one’s neighbor even unto death; to relinquish possessions, occupation, and even family in order to follow God; to take no thought of the morrow, to have no worries about food, clothing, or even what one is to say or do; to become like little children, to lose oneself in order to find one’s true self; to die in order to be reborn. Jesus addressed addiction in every conceivable aspect of life, including aversion addictions: prejudices, phobias, and the like. He picked a despised Samaritan as the hero of his story about the love of neighbor; he continually affronted the sensitivities of his peers by trafficking with the most abhorred people; he attacked fear as evidencing lack of faith and went so far as to advocate loving one’s enemies.