Hope for the Wary Heart

Gerald G. May's new book, The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, $16.95, cloth) has the capacity to rekindle hope in wary hearts—real hope, rooted in honesty and faith, not in retreat from reality or creative conformity. But it takes a certain willingness to read these pages, for May's blended background of psychiatry and spiritual guidance enables him to challenge our deepest insecurities and disillusionment even as he nurtures our courage and dreams.

The Awakened Heart offers a spirituality that calls us to listen more to our hearts and less to our heads, to place more priority on love than on efficiency in our lives. May recognizes the "gentle warfare" between love and efficiency, saying, "The enemy is that which would stifle your love: your fear of being hurt, the addictions that restrict your passion, and the efficiency worship of the world that makes you doubt the value of love."

Addiction in May's lexicon is an expansive term. Building on his last work, Addiction and Grace (Harper, 1988, $9.95, paper), May writes, "Attachment nails the energy of our passion to someone or something, producing a state of addiction." He suggests that asking ourselves "freedom questions" is necessary for discerning how much we've allowed addiction to enter into our loves. "The difference is between attachment binding desire," he writes, "and commitment honoring desire." The "Freedom and Intention" chapter concludes with a very encouraging discussion of prayer—a turning toward the "source of love" in which complete freedom exists.

A FREQUENT COMMENT around Sojourners goes this way: God doesn't call us to be effective but to be faithful. This book indicates that we might add: God doesn't call us to expectation but to hope. Since expectation involves an assumption that something will happen, its emphasis is on accomplishments. Hope emphasizes beginnings and urgings instead, says May, allowing us to "consecrate" all of our actions and relationships as holy, regardless of their results.

When we focus less on what we do and more on who we are in relationship to God, we begin a journey into uncertainty and emptiness. The paradox is that hope and freedom are often found in emptiness; May calls this the "secret hope of emptiness." Of "emptiness, yearning, incompleteness," May says, "It is precisely in these seemingly abhorrent qualities of ourselves—qualities that we spend most of our time trying to fix or deny—that the very thing we most long for can be found: hope for the human spirit, freedom for love."

To these spiritual insights, May adds a tremendous wealth of material on "authentic spiritual practice." Fully half of the book is dedicated to specific ways of deepening our experience of God's love and goodness, including constant or "heart" prayer and contemplative presence.

"We can test any practice of prayer," writes May, "by seeing how it assists us in being more present to other people and to situations as well as being more present to God." This is a spirituality and practice we can live. There's no need for retreat or conformity.