Addicted to Jesus: The Only Fix That Frees
Why wanting more not less is the answer
It seems to me that… as Christians, Jesus must be our addiction. Is he?
— Sr. Ruth Burrows1
Sister Ruth Burrows’ question lands with a kind of holy provocation. It jolts us because it holds up an uncomfortable mirror to our lives. The word addiction typically evokes pathology and loss of control. Yet what Burrows is naming is something far deeper — the truth that every human being is ordered toward attachment, that we all live by what captivates our hearts. The question is not whether we are addicted, but to what — or to whom.
Modern psychology and neuroscience confirm what Scripture and the Christian tradition have always intuited: the human person is, by nature, a creature of habit, desire, and imitation.
We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. — St Claire of Assisi
The neural architecture of our minds literally conforms to what we love. Repetition carves pathways; attention sculpts identity. We become what we behold. Sin, in this light, is not primarily a breaking of rules but a distortion of desire — an addiction of the soul. It is love turned inward, seeking satisfaction in things that cannot finally satisfy.
You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. — James K.A. Smith2
We often think of addiction as a pathology—a dark corner of human experience reserved for those who’ve fallen too far. But Augustine, and more recently James K. A. Smith in You Are What You Love, drawing deeply on Augustine, suggest something far more unsettling and universal: addiction is not the exception to being human—it is its pattern. The only question is not whether we are addicted, but to what—or to whom.
Re-alignment: An Augustinian recovery manual
Augustine said the human heart is restless until it rests in God. Smith picks up that thread for our current secular age, reminding us that we are not primarily thinkers but lovers. Desire moves us long before doctrine defines us. The habits and practices we give ourselves to—what Smith calls “liturgies”—form our loves and aim our lives toward some vision of the good.
That restlessness—the deep ache for meaning, belonging, and joy—sits at the heart of every human addiction. Whether through substances, possessions, approval, or distraction, the pattern is the same: our longing for the infinite misplaced within the finite.
Our addictions are not merely chemical or psychological; they are indeed liturgical. Each repeated act—scrolling, clicking, sipping, shopping, hustling—trains the heart’s attention and affection. What feels like freedom becomes our formation.
We don’t just have habits; our habits have us.
And the tragedy of addiction is that it takes a legitimate longing—for connection, peace, transcendence, love—and bends it inward, away from its true end. Augustine named this curvature of the soul incurvatus in se—love turned in on itself.
Neuroscience now confirms what Augustine intuited: the brain wires itself through repetition. What we do with our bodies and attention rewires what feels natural. In that sense, Smith’s theology of worship becomes an Augustinian recovery manual. Christian liturgy - worship - is divine rehab—a counter-formation that retrains our desires through grace-saturated repetition. Prayer, confession, Eucharist, silence, Lectio, prophecy, scripture, song—each is a practice of holy re-addiction, re-aiming our restless cravings toward the only one who can bear their weight. Jesus Christ.
The freedom Jesus offers isn’t the shutdown of desire—it’s its re-direction, its a remix. Freedom isn’t escape; it’s re-alignment. Christ doesn’t call us to go numb but to go deep—to crave what is holy, to hunger for what heals. True freedom is not detachment but devotion: a love that knows where to gravitate. In Him, our stories are rebooted; the soundtrack of our souls are retuned. To follow Jesus is to imagine, retell, and relive the greatest love story ever told—the divine romance where meaning, adventure, and purpose all find their rhythm in God.
To lose ourselves in love, and there, to find ourselves again.
So the question is never whether we are addicted, but whether our addiction leads us deeper into life or further into illusion. The task of discipleship—and recovery alike—is to be re-formed by grace, until our loves are reordered and our cravings find rest and order in God.
Stoking the Fire: Inflamed by Love
Christianity does not meet our predicament with moralism or stoic restraint. The Gospel does not propose the suppression of desire, but its reorientation. Saint Ignatius of Loyola spoke of the soul as inflamed by love — drawn by the Creator toward its true fulfilment in Him. The point of spiritual discipline is not to extinguish our passions, but to order them properly — to direct their fire toward the One who can bear its heat.
Our contemporary culture often offers a counterfeit salvation. Currently in vogue are Stoicism, mindfulness, and detachment, which promise peace by managing desire and reducing its intensity. But Christianity dares to do something riskier. It insists that desire is not the problem — rather, it is disordered desire. The answer is not less passion, but rightly ordered passion; not the cooling of the heart, but its purification in divine love.
And what have we become in our Age of Anxiety? Restless, medicated, endlessly distracted. Our culture of ceaseless motion and nervous energy has become the perfect ecosystem for addiction. Anxiety is the air we breathe — the low, constant hum beneath our striving — and it fuels our compulsions. Yet if we notice closely, anxiety can become the spark to ignite a deeper awakening — a yearning for the One who holds our being itself in love.
Where anxiety makes us fear being used up and disspiated in existential dread, the white fire of God’s love consumes us in order to transmute us. In the presence of the One who is Being itself, our anxiety is not suppressed but sanctified — dissolved into the radiant peace of loving participation with Christ. What once burned as restlessness becomes the holy fire of transformation, where our being is eternally remade in God’s own life.
This is what God’s love does to us. It reveals the truth: that we were made for a greater dependence, a deeper trust, a more beautiful addiction.
When our addictions are named and brought into the light, grace can begin its work. Beneath every false attachment lies a genuine hunger — for intimacy, for security, for transcendence. These are not to be denied, but redeemed. The Christian path is the conversion of desire, not its denial. It is the process by which Christ becomes the organising principle of the heart, the centre around which all loves find their proper orbit.
True Addiction: The Demands of Love
To be “addicted” to Christ, in the way Burrows describes, is to allow Him to occupy the deepest circuitry of our attachments — to become the focus of our craving, the end of our seeking. It is to let the fire of divine charity burn where our lesser passions once raged. Again, as Saint Ignatius would say, it is to live enflamed with love for the Creator and Lord, so that every affection, every impulse, finds its completion in Him.
This is not the pathology of religious scrupulosity, nor the neurotic need to please God. It is holiness in its most luminous and glorious form: the transfiguration of love. For when Christ becomes our consuming desire, the false gods lose their grip. Our compulsions fade not by willpower but by displacement — overwhelmed by a greater affection.
Isaac Watts, in words that have outlived their century, distilled the very heart of Christian faith:
When I survey the wondrous Cross,
love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.
What kind of love could so confidently command the whole of our being — not by threats or divine decree, but by the sheer gravity of its beauty? For every love we harbour already exerts its own dominion over us: our desires are not neutral; they bend the soul toward what it adores. Yet this Love, disclosed in the crucified God, undoes all our false adorations. It does not compete with them, but transfigures them — consuming the counterfeit in the white fire of the most and really Real.
The love that meets us in Christ is unlike any other. It does not seize; it invites. It asks not for submission, but for surrender — the kind that frees rather than binds. In gazing upon the Cross, we begin to see that divine love does not compete with our lesser loves; it purifies them, placing them in their proper order.
To discover this, Love is to awaken to the truth that we were made for nothing less. And to love Him in return is to find, at last, that in losing ourselves, we are found.
That is the addiction Ruth Burrows speaks of — not the slavery of compulsion, but the freedom of love. The soul, inflamed by divine love, finds itself at last rightly attached — and finally, truly free.
Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus. London: A & C Black, 1978.
Smith, James K. A. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016.