Angels and Drunks

When we choose things, rather than choosing God, it is ultimately our own wills that we are worshiping. (Harbaugh, A 12 Step Approach to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, p.15).

I am a little surprised at how true I find that statement, given the fact that my concept of "God" (if I can really be said to have one) is far closer to the Spinoza/Einstein/Hawking/Kaufman concept of the totality of natural law than to the more orthodox pre-existing, self-conscious, intervening Creator. When I use the word I am pointing to something much closer to creativity than to a creator.
That said, I find St. Ignatius's emphasis on seeing God in all things to be very important. If we are to have perspective we have to look past individual objects to the underlying reality. We have to look at the river rather than the flotsam, both in our metaphysics or theology and in our ethics.

To grasp at things (wealth, beautiful objects...) or social goods (respect, admiration...) rather than the underlying reality constitutes idolatry - worshiping the shadows rather than the source. Ultimately, as Harbaugh says above, it comes down to self-idolatry, worshiping our own wills, our own grasping attempts to control the world. Just as in the story of Lucifer and the angels that followed him, we choose our wills over the core reality of the great flow of being and thereby fall into pride. And, just as Lucifer and his followers we fall into our own Hell -- something every alcoholic is very familiar with.

So angels and drunks turn out to have a lot in common. Drunks often want to be like angels, having "glimpses of the Absolute and a heightened feeling of identification with the cosmos" (As Bill Sees It #323). As with the angels, this lust for transcendent experience leads in addicts to pride and a great fall from grace: from ease to dis-ease. (Harbaugh, A 12 Step Approach to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, p.16)

Somehow the following quote from Thomas Merton seems appropriate.

Where is silence? Where is solitude? Where is love?

Ultimately, these cannot be found anywhere except in the ground of our own being.

There in the silent depths, there is no more distinction between the I and the Not-I.

There is perfect peace, because we are grounded in infinite creative and redemptive Love.

(Thomas Merton. Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart, editors

Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 1979: 20)