The Tolerance Principle
and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. Ephesians 4:19 NASB
Greediness – Day 5. More is never enough. How many millions does it take to make a millionaire satisfied? Just one more. How many lovers do I need to make sure I am constantly wanted? Just one more. How much power do I need to know I am completely in control? Just a little more. But more is never enough.
Gerald May writes, “Tolerance is the phenomenon of always wanting or needing more of the addictive behavior or the object of attachment in order to feel satisfied. What one has or does is never quite enough. . . The essential dynamic of tolerance, then, is that one becomes used to a certain amount of something, and this accustomedness removes the desired effect and leads to the need for more.”[1]
Paul understood this dynamic. He doesn’t use the word “tolerance.” He uses the Greek pleonexia, the covetousness of addictive desire. The LXX uses the word for unlawful gain, but we should not think that it is limited to money. Unlawful gain is whatever we desire (covet) that extends beyond the borders of the Torah. Torah is life. Pleonexia is the attempt to gather more than life, and as it turns out, what is more than life is death. A derivative of the same root is used to describe the idolater. This kind of greed is lethal.
So why do we want it? May continues.
The longer an addiction continues, the more things will become associated with it and the more entrenched it will become. Some behaviors or chemicals that produce rapid, direct, and powerful effects may result in addiction after only one or two experiences. Others may require many repeated experiences before they become entrenched. But regardless of how an addiction begins, the longer it lasts the more powerful it becomes. Attachments are thus like spreading malignancies, steadily invading and incorporating their surroundings into themselves. To apply the words of Isaiah, addictions are like “greedy dogs, never satisfied,” or as Habakkuk said, “Forever on the move, with an appetite as large as sheol, and as insatiable as death.”[2]
A war you cannot win. But you can admit it and weep. You can admit you began taking comfort in substitutes for the Presence. You can feel the true agony of being outside the Garden. It’s not about the rules, is it? It’s about having to hide. “Who told you that you were naked?” Pleonexia told me. As soon as I realized that this was not enough, I knew I was naked. I have been seeking covering ever since, shedding skin with each new attempt. God help me.
Topical Index: addiction, pleonexia, greediness, Ephesians 4:19, tolerance
[1] Gerald G. May, Addiction & Grace, p. 26.
[2] Ibid., p. 86.
That has to be the most succinct description of addiction I have ever read! I am copying this one to give to others! May I? Thank you so much, Skip!
I have wondered often what it is in us that causes us to seek out addictive behavior, and why we do. I know it is the evil substitute for relationship, as all addictions release endorphins; those neurochemicals that cause us to FEEL like we are connected; part of something larger than ourselves, a feeling that we must have to feel secure. We are herd creatures, like sheep; we feel safest when we are pressed shoulder to shoulder in the very middle of a crowd. That way we won’t be picked off like those poor unfortunates who have made the sad mistake of winging it alone. Addictions make me feel as though I am safely plugged in to the commonwealth when, actually, because I have put Self first, I am not.
So what is the righteous place that lets me know I am in the Safety Zone for real? The place that produces that feeling of connection that is the true Holy of Holies, where the Curtain rips and I am finally There, in that Presence? The place that every addiction seeks to reproduce? I think what we seek is glory. Glory is the right place for us to stay, in fact. The only thing wrong about it is when we seek it in the wrong places and in the wrong ways. Glory lets us know when we are in the Presence of the Shekinah, directly in front of the Mercy Seat, which covers (or, in our case, recovers us to) that Law of relationship. Glory lets us know that we have arrived. I think we want to feel glorious; victorious; we want to swoon in acclamations and vindications and hear “well done”. What we want, more desperately than anything else, is to LOSE OURSELVES (that unbearable weight we have fallen for carrying around when we signed on to the worship of Self), and Glory is where I am in the Presence of something that is Bigger Than Me.
Failing all that, of course, I at least want to not have to realize that I am not there yet! I do not like to feel the feeling of just me, stripped of all that is not me (yet); to feel the weightlessness of the Deep Space I have created around myself in response to the lie that I must worship mySelf and I am Not Safe if I expose myself to relationship with all that is Not Me. It is that feeling of disconnection; that glass bubble that I have built every time I did not invest in trust and vulnerability that keeps me ‘safe’ from hearing, seeing, tasting and touching or smelling for myself to see that others are Good. That leaves me without the satisfaction that my spiritual senses must have. Addictions are the narcotics that I get handed if I show up in the ER of the world with my screamingly painful nerve endings that are raw and exposed because they are not connected to the rest of my Body.
I want to feel the “weight and power; power growing under weight” (Wordsworth) of glory. I want to drop the intolerable weight of Me by feeling the even greater weight of the full import of being connected to the great I AM. In that Presence, and only in that Presence, does Self get squashed in this Sumo wrestling match I have set myself up for when I set out to sin. I want to lose at the Brook Jabbok; I want a Lover on top of me; I want to have my total attention diverted from Me. No earthly addiction, in the end, can give me what only true glory can, but there is only one way that I can get myself into the glory of the Presence, and that is to check mySelf at the door, like the overcoat (or snakeskin!) that it is, because it is only Self that has ever been in the way of that Glory.