Search
Is Detachment a Necessary Component of Deepening Your Spirituality?
-
January 6, 2022At a recent meeting, Monsignor mentioned that the spiritual life always moves in the direction of detachment. I’ve been thinking about his statement.
Monsignor’s candid assessment of spirituality resonated with me. As I reflected on his words and spent time assessing my life, I concluded that I can get very attached to tasks and endeavors that affect my spiritual health in a negative way. I am the type of person that can get wrapped up in a task. While I am in the process of getting things done I often gravitate in a direction that causes me to lose my center. Sometimes the first thing that seems to suffer is my spiritual disciplines.
I am not one that believes in coincidences. God was trying to say something to me and to us.
Deacon Don emphasized the same theme a few months ago in one of his homilies when he petitioned us to “live in balance”.
The theme of detachment can be found everywhere in our spiritual tradition. In the writings of St John of the Cross, detachment from all the appetites of body, mind, and soul in order to attain a deepening spirituality is practically the governing idea. The implication is that in Christ, we can live without anything in this world and to know that in our bones, is to be detached, spiritually free.
St Augustine addressed our errant desires when he said “You have made us for yourself O Lord, and our our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Since humanity’s DNA is wired for God, we will be continually dissatisfied with anything less than God. Our attempt to find fulfillment more often than not finds us at odds with our faith. The great spiritual masters understood that a pursuit in detachment is actually a journey to freedom.
It is one thing to understand these facets of spirituality intellectually and an entirely different thing to live them.
Perhaps the best way to translate these notions of attachment into our modern vernacular is by using the word addiction. When we attach our wills to something less than God, we automatically become addicted, and this is the case precisely because the lack of satisfaction that we necessarily experience leads to an obsessive return, a compulsive desire to things that ultimately never satisfy us. I must need more money, if that sexual encounter didn’t satisfy the longing in my heart, I must need another, more thrilling, experience.
Listen to the language of our world and you will hear the language of addiction. Our sports figures win the championship and quickly become enamored with winning another one. As fans, we quickly forget past successes and demand even more championships. On and on we go. Oddly the world sees the pursuit of possessions, money, sex (the list could go on and on), as a means of freedom, but it is just the opposite. Detachment is actually the true place of freedom and peace.
Bishop Barron calls this human compulsion a concupiscence desire. An insatiable thirst that ultimately leads to bondage.
Jesus describes and addresses detachment and addiction in the Sermon on the Mount with the evocative word “blessed”. Jesus started his sermon with the words “Blessed are the poor”.
How can we reconcile those words which seem to glorify poverty? Perhaps we can rephrase those words into 21st century English in this way, “Blessed are you if you are not addicted to material possessions.”
Possessions create a rush of excitement and the pursuit and accumulation of possessions is one of the most common endeavors by our world. It is like a drug, once it wears off more must be acquired. Like all addictions, an enslavement begins to take hold until a person is unknowingly held captive.
The same could be said for those that constantly seek to feel good or who endlessly seek the approval of others. These things enslave us as surely as more overt tendencies do. Humanity dashes from one experience to another in an attempt to ward off anything that is less than “feeling happy”. Jesus addressed this in the 2nd beatitude when he said Blessed are you that mourn. We could render that in our 21st century English as, “Blessed are you if you are not addicted to good feelings.”
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you on account of the Son of Man could be read as, “How Blessed are you if you are not addicted to the approval of others”. Status, and fame are among the most powerful of the false gods who lure us.
I must ask myself, “How often are my subtle periods of restlessness or lack of peace, a result of being too attached and not detached? Where are the shackles of slavery in my life?”
The longer I live and the more I examine my spirituality, I see great meaning in the constant theme of slavery, bondage and of redemption. I am beginning to see, more clearly, the great threat attachment poses and why Jesus often addressed it. Freedom, we are told, is found in experience, money, power, and perhaps privilege. Humanity searches for freedom and peace in a variety of places but most result in bondage from which the only cure is God setting us free. Until that occurs our shackles remain firmly in place. We all need a savior to redeem us. Only God can set us free.
Monsignor’s assessment in the first paragraph is quite correct. We must continually move towards detachment if we want to find happiness.