Attachments can keep us from our deepest desire

When I send my column to my editor, I e-mail it as an attachment. If that’s more than you care to know, hang with me.

Today’s column focuses on attachments – not the computer kind, but the kind we wrestle in the dark night of our souls.

One attachment I can admit to myself is the very act of writing what you are now reading. With this column, I have completed 10 years of sharing my spiritual journey with you.

I hope there will be many more years to come.

I receive much joy and satisfaction from writing the column, as well as from the wide range of reader response. But as I slip into a soul shadow, I become aware my column-writing is not the “end-all-be-all” of my life.

When I stop writing, for whatever reason, I will grieve, but I won’t stop living.

Attachments are sneaky. They can be such a good part of our daily lives.

Routines keep us balanced. Beliefs nourish a sense of meaning in our lives.

Material goods keep us warm and safe and may provide a sense of well-being. Feelings and relationships are essential parts of who we are.

But all of this has a flip side. When we depend on our attachments too much, they seduce us to believe the control we have in our lives depends only on those things, feelings, beliefs or routines that we hold so dearly.

Even our good habits can trip us in broad daylight.

Attachments are a very real part of the “dark night” tradition. Gerald G. May’s book “The Dark Night of the Soul” has been the catalyst for my new learning and for my desire to learn more. I invite you to learn with me.

The dark night, he says, is an “ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions, and empowered to live and love more freely.”

Since the desire to love more completely and freely is part of every human’s spiritual DNA, freedom from attachments is a very good thing. But somewhere along the way, we discover that real freedom is elusive.

Like the apostle Paul did centuries ago, we discover that we do what we don’t want to, and don’t do what we should (Romans 7:15). Our habits have taken control of our lives.

Some of those habits are unhealthy. And even the good habits hold onto us. We aren’t in control of our lives after all.

Have you been making a mental list yet? Your attachment list may even be as long as mine.

But what can we do about them?

First, I suggest you make yourself a round coin of paper or wood. On one side, write “attachment.” On the other side, write “denial.”

Attachments and denial are two sides of the same coin.

Until we can face the fact that we are attached to habits, beliefs, relationships or things, we will mess up the deep-love desire we have for God and God has for us. Our capacity for the deepest love of which we are capable will be severely diminished.

Satisfaction of our own making is all we will seek.

But when we become aware of our attachments, we have other choices. We can choose to live with our attachments until they become compulsions, addictions or idolatrous. They can destroy us.

Or we can let them draw us into the soul shadows of our lives. There, they can remind us that, as May writes, “maybe we’ve been grasping for good things when what we’ve really desired is the Creator of all good things.”

May calls these moments a twilight of the dark night.

Before I had read his description of twilight, I began to talk about soul shadows. Whatever we call those moments, they introduce us to the wonderful power of the dark night.

Then we begin a more conscious journey that will release us from the negative grip of our attachments. The attachments may remain with us, but they will be transformed, even as we are being changed into the people God knows we are at our very center.