v. addiction

Ultimately, our yearning for God is the most important aspect of our humanity, our most precious treasure; it gives our existence meaning and direction. 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.’…

From a psychoanalytic perspective, one could say we displace our longing for God upon other things. Behaviorally, we are conditioned to seek objects by the positive and negative reinforcements of our own private experience and by the messages of parents, peers, and culture. Even the briefest look at television and magazine advertising reveals how strongly our culture reinforces attachment to things other than God, and what high value it gives to willful self-determination and mastery. Mediating all the stimuli they receive, the cells of our brains are continually seeking equilibrium, developing patterns of adaptation that constitute what is normal. 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.

From a more specifically spiritual viewpoint, we naturally seek the least threatening ways of trying to satisfy our longing for God, ways that protect oour 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. We seek compromise not because we are evil or conniving, but because of the way we are made; we naturally look for the least painful ways of living. From the standpoint of basic human common sense, this is perfectly reasonable. We look for our ultimate satisfaction in God’s palpable and definable creations instead of looking through them to the hidden, loving face of their Creator.

Full love for God means we must turn to God over and against other things. If our choice of God is to be made with integrity, we must first have felt other attractions and chosen, painfully, not to made them our gods. A mature and meaningful love, then, must say something like, ‘I have experienced other goodnesses, and they are beautiful, but it is You, my heart’s true desire, whom I choose above all.'”

– Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace