Addiction and Grace Quotes

“Many of the old understandings to which I had been addicted were stripped away, leaving a desertlike spaciousness where my customary props and securities no longer existed. Grace was able to flow into this emptiness, and something new was able to grow. Fresh understandings took root, and the insights that emerged were clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“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.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it. ARISTOTLE”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“it is the discovery of the depths of weakness, the power of grace, and the price of both. Moreover, what takes place in the desert is not simply difficult travel and adventurous learning; it is repentance and conversion, the transformation of mixed motivations into purified desire, the greening of desert into garden through the living water of grace.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Hope can sometimes be an elusive thing, and occasionally it must come to us with pain. But it is there, irrevocably. Like freedom, hope is a child of grace, and grace cannot be stopped. I refer once more to Saint Paul, a man who, I am convinced, understood addiction: “Hope will not be denied, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“But they are trials and tests for our own growth, not for God to find out how good we are. God knows that we are good; it is for us to discover that goodness. As we have seen, the tests of attachment, by bringing us to our knees in humility, may show us the way of goodness and allow us to choose that goodness with our whole being. We”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate. Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not; the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want—that is what I do.”2 In writing these words, Paul was talking about sin. Theologically, sin is what turns us away from love—away from love for ourselves, away from love for one another, and away from love for God. When I look at this problem psychologically, I see two forces that are responsible: repression and addiction. We all suffer from both repression and addiction. Of the two, repression is by far the milder one. Repression”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“I think the greater danger is that those who think they understand the process [of overcoming our attachments] are likely to try to make it happen on their own by engaging in false austerities and love-denying self-deprivations. They will not wait for God's timing; they will rush ahead of grace. I have seen it happen when ascetic practices have become overinstitutionalized, and I have engaged in it myself when I thought I could engineer my own salvation. It does not work.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Exploring the Psychology of Addiction, the Power of Spirituality, and the Path to Freedom Through Contemplative Practices

“A sense of balance within spaciousness remains within such people, like a window between infinity and the world of everyday experience. They are not only wiser and humbler because of their addictions; they are also more available. Through their spaciousness, they are continually invited homeward.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“adds a strong imperative to act upon what has happened, a continuing invitation in which the one who is healed is meant to participate. Jesus instructs the healed one to go forth with some special intent, made possible by the healing.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Grace empowers us to choose rightly in what seem to be the most choiceless of situations, but it does not, and will not, determine that choice.8 For”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“The facts of grace are simple: grace always exists, it is always available, it is always good, and it is always victorious. For me, living into grace means trying to act on the basis of these facts. I do not do well at it. My”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“In the great spiritual traditions of the world, attachments are seen as any concerns that usurp our desire for love, anything that becomes more important to us than God. Paul Tillich said that whatever we are ultimately concerned with is God for us. At any given moment, that with which we are most concerned is most likely to be something other than the true God. No matter how religious we may think we are, our addictions are always capable of usurping our concern for God.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“The bare edge of freedom is insured and preserved inside us by God, and no matter what forces oppress us from without or within, it is indestructible.19”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“When my supply of success at this egotistic autonomy ran out, I became depressed. And with the depression, by means of grace, came a chance for spiritual openness. I”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Grace is the most powerful force in the universe. It can transcend repression, addiction, and every other internal or external power that seeks to oppress the freedom of the human heart. Grace is where our hope lies. Journey”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“While repression stifles desire, addiction attaches desire, bonds and enslaves the energy of desire to certain specific behaviors, things, or people. These objects of attachment then become preoccupations and obsessions; they come to rule our lives. The”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Adapting to change, then, means going through the stress of withdrawal from the old normality and finding relief when a new normality is established.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“responsibility means respecting ourselves and those around us. In the nature of systems, all our addictive behaviors affect other people.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“when rightly practiced, asceticism is the human component of the mysterious incarnate intimacy of human intention and divine grace which holds the only real hope of victory over attachment. Like”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“For God has comforted Zion, and will take pity on all her waste places; Turning her wilderness into an Eden, her desert into the garden of God. Joy and gladness will be found in her, and thanksgiving, and the sounds of singing.”12”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Thus God calls us, invites us, and even commands us, but God does not control our response. We alone bear responsibility for the choices we make.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Grace is the most powerful force in the universe. It can transcend repression, addiction, and every other internal or external power that seeks to oppress the freedom of the human heart. Grace is where our hope lies.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Addiction is not something we can simply take care of by applying the proper remedy, for it is in the very nature of addiction to feed on our attempts to master it.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“said”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Prayer, meditation, and simple times of quiet relaxation are either discontinued or filled with activities that will occupy attention.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Remember, then, that true addictions are compulsive habitual behaviors that eclipse our concern for God and compromise our freedom, and that they must be characterized by tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, loss of willpower, and distortion of attention.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that we do the same with our deepest longings for God. God does not always come to us in the pleasant ways we might expect, and so we repress our desire for God. When”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“The course of our lives is precisely as Saint Augustine indicated: our hearts will never rest, nor are they meant to rest, until they rest in God. This precious restlessness is mediated by and manifested through our physical being, through the combined minute strugglings of the cells of our brains and bodies as they seek harmony and balance in their endless adjustment to circumstances. Our fundamental disease, then, is at once a precise neurological phenomenon and a most precious gift from God. It is not a sign of something wrong, but of something more profoundly right than we could ever dream of. It is no problem to be solved, no pathology to be treated, no disease to be cured. It is our true treasure, the most precious thing we have. It is God’s song of love in our soul. Moreover,”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“They saw that temptation coming but neither fought it off nor turned away from it toward something else. Simply, briefly, they chose not to hop on board with it. What did they do instead? Nothing. They let their spaciousness be. This”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions