A few more thoughts from Dr. Gerald May*:
We cannot do our own surrenders. To try to turn it over to God prematurely would only be another mind trick, a way of trying to escape responsibility, testing rather than trusting. But indeed God is in it with us all along, and wherever our choices are enabled to remain simple and our intent remains solid, empowerment comes through grace. There is little else we can do except to keep on trying, and looking for God’s invitations and seeking simplicity . . . we must come to love our longing.
The implications of accepting pain are significant in dealing with specific addictions, but they become massive in terms of our basic attitude toward life. In our society, we have come to believe that discomfort always means something is wrong . . . the truth is, we were never meant to be completely satisfied.
If God indeed creates us in love, of love, and for love, then we are meant for a life of joy and freedom, not endless suffering and pain. But if God also creates us with an inborn longing for God, then human life is also meant to contain yearning, incompleteness, and lack of fulfillment. To live as a child of God is to live with love and hope and growth, but it is also to live with longing, with aching for a fullness of love that is never quite within our grasp.
Authentic spiritual wholeness, by its very nature, is open-ended. It is always in the process of becoming, always incomplete.
Our fundamental dis-ease, 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. (Addiction and Grace, 178-180)
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