For example, I am seduced and enticed by a certain image of myself as a whole, holy, loving man who is well on his way to becoming free from attachments. When this image comes up in my prayer, it causes me to pose and posture; I find myself trying to make my prayer fit my image of how a holy man would pray.

Our prayer may be formal words or a simple, silent turning toward God, but it acknowledges our source of hope, expresses our true desire, unites us with the rest of humanity, and commits our willingness to God.

Our threefold participation of prayer, meditation, and action responds to God’s graceful initiatives in our lives, and it leads toward a deepening trust in God.

detachment to describe the opposite process, the liberation of desire.

Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and object of our deepest true desire. It is, as one modern spiritual writer has called it, a “counterfeit of religious presence.”

Spiritually, addiction is a deep-seated form of idolatry. The objects of our addictions become our false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love.

The core tenets of Buddhism are the Four Noble Truths: (1) suffering is a fact of life; (2) suffering is caused by attachment; (3) liberation from suffering and the reinstitution of human freedom can happen only through detachment; and (4) human effort toward detachment must involve all aspects of one’s life in a deeply spiritual way.

Attachment, then, is the process that enslaves desire and creates the state of addiction.

false repositories for our hope,