124 Healing Love & Sacred Attachments: Between Trauma and Transformation (with Michael John Cusick)

What do you do when the gap between what you believe and what you experience feels insurmountable? Where do you turn when trauma leaves you feeling lost, ashamed, and exhausted, spinning spiritually, but still longing for a relationship with God?

In this episode of the Attaching to God podcast, Geoff Holsclaw talks with Michael John Cusick about themes from his new book, discussing the disconnect between belief and experience, particularly in the presence of trauma.

Michael John Cusick is the CEO and founder of Restoring the Soul, an intensive counseling ministry in Denver. He is a licensed professional counselor, spiritual director, and former assistant professor of counseling at Colorado Christian University.  Along with other books, he has recently published Sacred Attachments: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. 

Dive deeper in our new book, Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection, and learn about our trainings and other resources at embodiedfaith.life.

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Transcript

Introduction and Topic Overview

What do you do when the gap between what you believe and what you experience feels insurmountable? Where do you turn when trauma leaves you feeling lost, ashamed, exhausted, and spinning spiritually, but you still really long for a relationship with God? That's what we're talking about today. This is the Attaching to God podcast produced by Embodied Faith.

And today we have our guest Michael John Cusick, the CEO and founder of Restoring the Soul. Which is in an intensive counseling ministry out there in Denver. We love Denver. He is a licensed professional counselor, spiritual director, and former assistant professor of counseling at Colorado Christian University.

My son has a friend that's there. He's slept in those dorms at one point. But Michael's here talking to [00:01:00] us about his new book, sacred Attachments, escaping Spiritual Exhaustion, and Trusting in Divine Love. Michael, thank you so much for being on with us today. 

Oh good. I definitely have questions about embodiment and feel free to riff on that. We recently renamed the podcast attaching to God before it was just called Embodied Faith to focus on those aspects. But could you tell us a little bit about yourself and then the Restoring the Soul Ministry that you're a part of, and then we'll jump into some of the stories and backstory of the book. 

I love asking this question. How did you get into your work as like a counselor, as a therapist? What, was this a lifelong kind of goal or did you fall into it, differently or? 

Okay. 

Discussing Neurodivergence and Autism

Oh wow. Okay. Now my brain is like going, we on a podcast yesterday. You were a guest on a Neurodivergence marriage podcast about people with A-D-H-D-A-S-D and other non-typical relational skills. And there was a lot of talk about, typically the. Not [00:02:00] Asperger's as much, which now is no longer a thing.

How did you feel about that, by the way, when the manual took it out? But yeah, actually I wanna hear that. So if listeners don't know, Asperger's was taken out. You, why don't you explain how that transition. You probably know it better than I do. 

Yeah, for sure. And maybe this goes into it, but they were, we were talking about how some forms of autism are very much left brain and they don't have the social emotional skills. But that does not seem to be your case in that you actually maybe 'cause your childhood had upbringing or your attachment strategies made you hyper aware and vigilant about all things social emotional.

Is that right?

Okay. 

Yeah. Thank you for that little detour that I love that. So back to the reason why we're here. So you wrote a book it's not your first book and, after you get past maybe your first one or two books, you're you really have to have the reason, that and you have this thing that you wanna say.

And you talk about spiritual exhaustion and you talk about this gap between, what you believe and what you experience what you believe and what you know, or the two kind of. Uses of No, I know. Something abstractly or I know something [00:03:00] concretely. Could you just fill out why that felt like one of those burning kind of questions that you just needed to talk through and help lead people through? 

Yes. Thank you. 

Yeah. 

Yeah, that's, I love that. I've felt the same way that, that, that language is really getting lost and overused. It's really become this part of the culture war, which is super unfortunate. You, I love this 'cause I'm, we're all nerdy here. What's mixing science and nature?

The Concept of Delta in Faith

You use this this image of the Greek letter delta to mean two different things. Could you fill out that, that picture of, the gap of faith and how you're thinking of us inhabiting this delta. 

Yeah.

Yeah. 

Oh, that's so much. That's, thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of us have a similar experience then of having that gap. Christian kind of foundation of knowledge, Bible versus doctrine. And then others of us have that extra handicap of being on the platform, being professors, pastors, the Christian therapist who's supposed to solve all the [00:04:00] problems, who's not supposed to have the double life or struggle with faith.

And so thank you for sharing that. What. You talk about like the different causes of the, of this gap between what you know and what you experience. Could you just go through and fill out some of those you mentioned like sometimes something's missing or something's unwelcome, and then we have these kind of unhealthy things that are added to us.

Could you walk us through a couple of those? 

Building Secure Attachment with God

So how do you and you talked about this kind of throughout the book, but how do you then we start building secure attachment then when we have, things that are missing lacks when we have these kind of traumas. And then those things turn into festering wounds within us.

The trauma could be a long time ago, but now we have this unhealthy, toxic system that we live in. How do we start moving toward that secure attachment then with God and with others? 

Yeah. 

Embodied Faith and Spiritual Practices

We love talking about embodied faith, so can you just zero in on that a little bit? Why is the body, or why is taking embodiment seriously so important for a life of faith as well as learning how to give and receive [00:05:00] love? 

And I wanna highlight just, of course you said that story in four minutes, but that's a lifetime. Of work, the lifetime of pursuing God, becoming aware of yourself and your body, your inner motivations the kind of, the twists and turns of your own heart. So I know sometimes people are like, I just wanna learn how to attach to God.

And it's it's not a self-help book, right? It's not four, four quick steps. Now certainly there are four things maybe we can name, but you have to do them for several years before there's like a rule. Deep change. And that's why partly why I love the emphasis on embodiment is our bodies grow and develop slowly and they change positively or negatively slowly, right?

It takes a lot of effort. This is why a lot of that ancient kind of monastics, the asceticism gets a bad rap for being antibody, but. That word just means like exercise or training, right? So it's things that you do repeatedly to train and get a result. And the result they were pursuing was to be more aware of and full of God's love so that they can share God's love with others.

Now, maybe we feel [00:06:00] like it got a little off, and certainly there's a conversation there, but the goal is our goal. How do we receive God's love? Are we training so that we can receive God's love? And in what way are we. Taking our body and our minds and our faith so that we can be transformed. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

Okay. 

Yeah. 

Huh. 

That's beautiful. I love that. I've been reading Psalms quite a bit as part of my, good evangelical devotional time. And what you mentioned, this is the well-known one, was sometimes we pray the wrong prayer. Prayer. What came to mind was I. David in Psalm 51, created me a clean heart or a new heart and that create word is the same word that goes all the way back to Genesis one, one, which is God created the heavens and the earth, right?

So it's this new heart that can receive and dwell in God's love. And then that last thing that you just said reminded me of Psalm 63 8, which is for me, this is like a key attachment verse, and it just says, my soul clings to you and your right hand upholds me. It's this mutual like clinging [00:07:00] God is but really it's we clinging to God because God is already clinging to us.

And we're responding to him reaching to us and coming to us. And so can we live out of that spot? I. 

Yeah. 

Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe we should work on that together. We'll get the attachment Bible out. That's a great idea. Sometimes I'm already thinking like of the Salter and doing attachment that way, but for sure. Let's just add, I know we're going a little bit over, but could you just talk then?

I don't know if you have any more tattoos now, but you end the book because we were just talking about how do we make this practical? How do we make it embodied? What are some of the steps? You took two very concrete steps to help you live into, practice what you preach, live into what you've been writing about. Can you, could you tell us a little bit about these tattoos that you got? 

Right.

Is that a little tease? Do you have another book you're working on?

Can't wait.

Oh good. Oh, I love that.

Oh, good. 

Oh, I love that. Not just to keep going, but that the spiritual tradition the [00:08:00] spiritual information tradition has often used the language of detaching or indifference from things, and they don't usually use attachment in a positive way. Usually it's like they could talk about earth earthly attachments or inordinate or improper or adulterous attachments.

I see what you're saying there is, how do you detach from the world so you can attach to God, which then gives you the whole world back, but in the form of stillness and love and, oh, I love that. We should do this again. where can people connect with you and keep in touch with the work you're doing?

Excellent. Excellent. I'll be sure to give those in the show notes. Thank you so much for being a part of things and sharing your heart, and sharing the hard life lessons on how you've overcome that gap in your life. Geoff, I'm happy to be here. 

Personal Stories and Professional Journey

This is the first podcast I've been on for the book that's actually about embodiment and attachments. So I'm eager to have a conversation with you and it'll be great.

Sure. I've been a licensed professional counselor in Colorado 31 years, which seems hard to believe. For the last 25 years I've been doing almost exclusively intensive counseling where people come to Colorado for three hours a day [00:09:00] for two weeks. Generally about 50% of those folks have some kind of trauma or acute pain in their lives relationally or within themselves.

And then the others are. Pastors, Christian leaders and others that are just looking to really stay ahead of the curve in terms of their brokenness and wanting more with God. And we love it. It's a transformational process that's both allowed me to continue to do my own work 'cause it requires of me but also help me to always be thinking about how people change.

Yeah somewhere. I have a bio written online. I couldn't find it to save my life, but it says Michael Cusick attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at age five by age nine. His family had moved to a drug rehab program and he was living in a trailer park. I became a psychotherapist.

Go figure. But true story. I'm the youngest of five Irish Catholic kids who grew up in an alcoholic family. And in my home there was sexual abuse and dysfunction from alcohol. My dad got sober when I was in second grade. And every other kind of [00:10:00] abuse, that could be there a lot of, wounds of absence or emotional neglect in particular from my mom.

And with that background, I think especially as the youngest, I became highly attuned to others. I'm an Enneagram two with a three wing, and I have that radar that everybody knows that twos have to be able to pick up on people's needs and. Interestingly seven years ago I was diagnosed on the autism spectrum with what used to be Asperger's, and I discovered that my superpower is actually empathy and being able to tune into people in sometimes what feels like an uncanny way.

So when people think of a SD or Asperger's, they think of almost the absence of empathy and feeling. But just like with a DHD, sometimes there can be a hyperfocus or a hyper ability with that. So with all that counseling and therapy just became a natural thing.

 Yeah. As a professor, you'd probably appreciate this. I used to teach psychopathology diagnosis and treatment, and I would do a whole several units on the history of the DSM. [00:11:00] And just because it's taken out doesn't mean it no longer exists when they change the name of something. So if they change the diagnosis, Alzheimer's.

To, Bob Smith or Wing Ding and just, arbitrarily chose a word for it. It wouldn't mean that it wouldn't exist. And I actually like the word Asperger's. I know that there's Nazi associations with it because Dr. Asperger was, a physician during Hitler's reign. My problem is that the a SD continuum now is so wide that it almost comes to mean nothing.

Where on the one end you have people that are nonverbal and, rocking back and forth in institutions literally. And then on the other hand you have Elon Musk and myself and Dan Aykroyd and probably Bruce Springsteen and Darrell Hannah has come out and said that she's on the spectrum. So I think it's a helpful category, especially for people that are higher functioning.

Yes.

I can sur get locked into left brain and for a while I thought I was in Enneagram five, but I am right brain dominant. A DHD in five years, A DHD will be on the spectrum. 'Cause [00:12:00] it's already included in neurodiversity. And I wouldn't be surprised if that phrase became part of the DSM as well.

But yeah, that's a really important point is that autism is not necessarily left brain. It's really about dominance. And it, it's a little less typical for people like myself to have a high degree of empathy. But I have a daughter who's on the spectrum. And she's one of the most empathic people I've met.

And if you get to know people with autism, especially as you go into the more disabled, level two and level three, it's not unlike people with Down Syndrome who they're like little jesuses and your heart just lights up around them. And there's a unconditional unguarded sense of being able to see people and love people.

One of the, one of the stereotypes that we have to get past.

 Yeah. First of all, Geoff, everything I've ever written or taught always comes outta my own life. I'm always preaching to myself, not unlike you and your wife. Your wife say Sid, right? [00:13:00] And you guys just wrote a new book. Congratulations on that. So it, it's come outta my own life and. Not just my own life, but I have a 27-year-old son who went to Christian school and, grew up going to church and everything and had a really bad experience in his teens with Christianity and has some wounds there.

And has lived in the Pacific Northwest for the last several years and no longer identifies as a follower of Jesus. And I wrote the book with him in mind. So not necessarily. For 20 somethings or even millennials, but for people who are either walking away from faith and church or people that are internally struggling and have not named that yet.

And I intentionally did not use the word or phrase in the book deconstruction. 'cause I think that word is no longer helpful. It's become a buzzword. But really without using that word I wanted to name the brokenness in this process of this gap between what we believe and experience or between what we are promised and [00:14:00] what we actually live out.

And how to move forward in that path. So if you will, it's a book on reconstruction, and that's what I think all the attachment writers, we could name the handful of them, the people that are on your summit. The people that are really the identified voices we're all talking about, how do you reconstruct?

How do you put together a faith that has substance to it that's real, that's authentic, that's experiential, and that actually makes a difference in your life today, versus giving you an assurance that when you die, you know where you're gonna go. 'cause I don't think that Jesus ever intended the Christian faith to primarily be a life insurance policy.

He intended it to be a way of living that leads to transformation and overflow so that we bring the kingdom of God in our life based on a secure attachment to God and others.

 Yeah. So Delta is is the phrase that I've come up with. To help people have a word for this gap between what they believe and what they experience. [00:15:00] And as you already said the Greek letter for Delta is a triangle and it's used in math and science and engineering to define the distance between the goal and the outcome.

So if engineers build a bridge and it's crooked. There's a delta there, and they need to close that gap in order to make it level. Same would be true in launching a rocket ship or even in doing medicine. And then there's another kind of delta. The first delta describes the gap, but the second delta describes how we close that gap and move forward.

And that's the delta of a river, like the delta of the Mississippi. So where fresh water or where brackish water joins together with salt water. And in that coming together, two different realities become something brand new. And that's the Jesus way. Jesus always invites us to hold contradicting realities that were, as Francis Schaeffer said, we're glorious ruins.

So there's this glorious side of us and there's this broken side of us. There's this messiness in our lives, and there's this masterpiece of who we are made in God's [00:16:00] image. As we hold that tension together, telling the truth about the reality of our lives, there's something new that emerges, and that's the way of the kingdom.

So I think the picture of the. Of two different kinds of water coming together is not only a beautiful image, but it also ties into the fact that Psalm 46, for example, and there's, a dozen different passages that my mind could go to right now, but there is a stream. There, there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.

And one of the images in scripture for the life of God within us is that there's a river within, there's streams of living water that can flow from us. But part of my personal reality, 'cause I tell this story in my previous book, surfing for God as well as in this book that I was an alcoholic I was a sex addict.

Three years into my marriage my double life was exposed and that really brought to a very sharp point. The idea that there were two very different realities in my life. One was who I was on the outside [00:17:00] and what I believed and proclaimed to believe. And then on the inside, and after 14 years, when that day happened, when my life was exposed, I had to come to terms with the fact that I had never experienced the love of God, at least not in a conscious way, but I could quote Bible verses and lead Bible studies and proclaim the gospel, but I'd never experienced the love of God.

And I was like the person in U2 song that I still haven't found what I'm looking for. And you can't say that in church. I've been a Christian 14 years, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for. It's what do you mean you have Jesus? Yes, but I don't have the life of Jesus that's living and flowing inside of me.

And so really back to your question about why did I write the book my whole professional life? I think I've helped some people along the way, but it's really been a search to have greater and greater clarity about how I become whole in my own life, and therefore how I become holy.

 Yeah the first thing I would say is that everybody, at some point, if you're awake and alive, every [00:18:00] human being is going to say, there's something more that I'm longing for. If we have grief in our lives, if we have a child that has a chronic illness, if we're struggling with a broken relationship, something, and I'm using air quotes normal inside of this experience of life on this planet.

Things are broken. We are not home. And so in that longing. Jesus said that he came to bring life to the full and abundance, and I love Peterson's paraphrase in the message that, that abundant life is spilling and brimming over like a cup. And then of course, David uses that imagery in Psalm 23 that our cup overflows that in the absence of that cup overflowing, but feeling like our cup is actually empty.

There's this longing. And what we do with that longing, with that restlessness, with that ache inside of us, that is our spirituality, that is our faith. We can believe all day long and recite all kinds of creeds. But what we do with that restlessness, that's actually our journey of faith, and that's the place where we encounter God.

So [00:19:00] as you said, I broken into two categories. Generally there's something unwelcome and that is. Pain abuse, whether it's abuse from our past, that's trauma. But more and more frequently I'm working with people that are identifying and putting words to spiritual abuse from pastors that are controlling misogynistic, too focused on doctrinal precision and not on Christian living. Places where people have been constricted in the church, closed off, not given opportunity because of their gender 'cause of their race, because of their ethnicity. So something has happened in a person's life outside of the church or in the church that they're just saying, I don't know if I want to go forward in my own life.

Shortly before my life blew up in 1994 when my sexual addiction was discovered, I prayed a prayer to God and I felt like it was so un-Christian, and I felt like God was so mad at me for praying this prayer. But I said, God, if this is what being [00:20:00] a follower is, if this is what being a Christian is, then I'm not sure I wanna be a Christian.

And I thought like I was renouncing my faith and choosing hell over heaven. And yet I, I sensed that God was actually really happy with that prayer because that was my heart. And it was actually at that moment where something began to change because I was willing, unconsciously, I was willing to allow everything to be dismantled.

And what I learned was that a lot of things needed to be dismantled. And that's why I do have a problem with people that are opposed to reconstruction. People just need more doctrine and they just need to study harder or they need to, go to Africa and have a third world experience. I.

And in reality, of course, we need to tend to our hearts, and that deconstruction is an opportunity and things do need to be dismantled so that they can rebuild on the foundation of love with a secure attachment, not on a foundation of the left brain, having all the information. My old mentor Larry Crab, [00:21:00] used to say that heaven's not going to be a Bible study.

It's gonna be eternity of deep relationships with significant conversations and an unfolding of that brings love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, all those good things. So if heaven and eternity is that kind of relationality, then our goal for healing, for sanctification, for transformation and becoming whole people is relational first, foremost.

And at the end.

 there's people like you and Sid and myself and so many others. I could name names like Kurt Thompson, Aldi Caler, Jim Wilder, folks that are prophetic in the sense that they're naming something. The prophetic today is about naming. What people can't name for themselves. And for 14 years I didn't have words for what was inside of me.

I just knew that I was a shameful, horrible, disgusting addict that needed to, on the outside, try really hard to be really good for God. And [00:22:00] hopefully my behavior would be a key that turned the lock that opened the door to this abundant life that I hadn't yet experienced. And naming things for people I actually went through your podcast.

Comments and I saw a number of comments of people going, thank you. Thank you for helping me to understand blank. And one was from like a 70-year-old, I think it was a woman who said, based on your podcast, I've learned this and this and this, and that is naming something so that the gospel.

The fact that love has us can get deep inside of us into these wounds. 

The Importance of Truth and Paying Attention

And so that's the first thing when Jesus said in John eight that the truth will set us free. If I had a Bible here in front of me, and I usually do. But I don't, I would hold up the Bible and say, we all know that this is the truth, right?

The word of God. Then the truth will says, free. So I tried to get more and more of that inside of me and it didn't work. It didn't get me to a place of freedom or wholeness. So there's actually another kind of truth, and I speak about truth as a coin with two sides. [00:23:00] The other side of that coin is my truth, my story.

That deeply matters to God. My wounds the places of shortcoming in what I needed in terms of being seen, sooth, safe, secure. And so the truth that we can tell about ourselves then bumps up against the truth of God and the fact that love has us, that we are securely attached to him. And.

Healing can happen, I'd say truth telling or recognition. The second big thing is paying attention. Paying attention to what's inside of us, paying attention to our embodied self to begin to sense what's happening in our body. The soul is, used to be in arguments when I was a professor and about, are you a tripartite or a bipartite?

And I guess I'm a quad titis, maybe a penta apart in that the soul is five circles and I'd start with body, mind, emotions and will I. That's one classic way of looking at it, but it's very [00:24:00] Hebrew. The Greek idea of the soul is just the mind, the emotions in the will. But the Hebrew idea of soul is that embodied self, the Hebrew self, the nefesh, which isn't just a vapor part of us that kind of floats up to heaven when we die, but it's the embodied self.

And then around those four circles, I would put a circle called the relational self. And all five parts of those are our soul, and we have to begin to attend to that. Some people come to therapy or set up an appointment with a spiritual director or listen to your attached to God summit because there's relational pain and relational issues.

Then people go, I've got pains in my body. Or they might be a man that I frequently see that says, my wife says that I'm completely disconnected from my emotions and my body and I work 80 hours a week. They've gotta begin to pay attention to their body, then their thoughts and then their emotions, and then their will is their behavior.

Some people come because they have a behavior that's out of control, so we have to touch [00:25:00] on all of those and begin to pay attention. Dallas Willard said that the first great act of love, I. Is paying attention and sometimes paying attention to ourselves is the first great act of love. That can be a sign of loving ourselves.

It can be a sign of loving God, but there's no way into change and transformation that's substantial, as you well know, without taking that inside look and paying attention to all those different aspects of the soul.

 first of all, again I hope I'm not being patronizing today, but thank you for what you're doing. I wrote in the book. There is no spirituality apart from embodied spirituality. Otherwise, it's just an intellectual exercise. And because of secular prophetic people like Bessel VanDerKolk and many of the people that followed in his trail, or Stephen Porges, who proceeded him, their people, that with their science and their research, they're looking at a human soul without naming it as such.

And they're saying, how does this [00:26:00] function? And so much of what they're learning. Expands our understanding of scripture and opens up all of these categories. And everybody listening to your program, I'd be surprised if they haven't heard the book title. The body keeps the score and so often I'll hear people say, yeah, I bought that book.

I haven't read it yet. It's been on my shelf for two years. But that title is really great because it helps us to realize that if you. In your body, can't feel love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, then all the prayer in the world or memorizing verses about that is not going to get you there.

But as we attend to our embodied self, it's almost like that becomes the doorway. Into what is already inside of us. So I believe the beautiful thing about understanding embodied spirituality, which is the essence of spirituality. It's not that we have to go and get more of Jesus. It's not that we have to go and get more of God, like we're on a buried treasure hunt and we have this [00:27:00] map called the Bible.

It's that as we turn inward and as we're still being attentive. Trusting God and that love has us. We discover as second Peter says, that everything we need for life and godliness is already inside of us. There's this imperishable seed there that being attentive and recognizing what it's not, we actually begin to cultivate it and along with the spirit of God and loving relationships that seed burgeon and we discover ourselves being.

Joyful kind words like, holy come about. Like, where did that come from? I call them V eight moments, spiritually speaking, where years ago there was this commercial, people would pop themselves on their head and go, wow, I could have had a V eight where, why didn't I think of that? And it's this popping yourself on the head moment.

Like I was just in traffic yesterday and it was bumper to bumper and I was 30 minutes late for my doctor appointment and I was calm. How did that happen? [00:28:00] That is change that for me. I would say it only took about 22 years of therapy and 15 years of centering prayer and lots of time and 12 step groups and things like that, where suddenly there's this tipping point or this accumulation where love happens.

We all know the bumper sticker, SHIT happens, but if we pay attention to our inner world, love happens.

 I would say the first thing is to. Ask God to help. Us reimagine a different kind of faith. One of my goals with Sacred Attachment wasn't just helping people that were spiritually exhausted, but people that don't have language. I hope to give people a new language, actually an old language where I borrowed from a lot of, I.

Contemplative spirituality and historical Christianity and old new language. And also a lens. A lens by which to see. And I've got my glasses here, you're wearing glasses. But if we pick up the wrong glasses, [00:29:00] everything's gonna be fuzzy. And I think a lot of people have been given the wrong glasses for years.

Geoff, I prayed. God, help me to be a better Christian, or God help me to obey you more. And I don't think there's anything wrong with being a quote, better Christian, whatever that means, or obedience. But it's the wrong prayer, it's the wrong focus. Instead, God make me whole. God, take the broken parts of me and somehow arrange them and help me to collaborate with you so that these different parts would be put together into something like the Kintsugi vase that's on the cover of my book, where the broken pieces of pottery are intentionally shattered, and then the artist.

Carefully places them back together and fills in the cracks with gold or other precious minerals. When they asked me what I wanted for a book cover, and I love the people at IVP, I said, I don't care. I just want there to be a Kintsugi theme. And they did a beautiful job with that. Kurt Thompson did a whole episode with me on the cover of my book, which was a little bit [00:30:00] unexpected, but he did a Vizio Davina of walking through how it spoke to him.

So I would say. Say, God, I want my whole heart back. Jesus if your first sermon was that you came to bring good news to the poor, and that wasn't just people that were economically oppressed and had no money, it was the spiritually impoverished, it was the Matthew five verse two, the poor in spirit that Jesus says, we're blessed.

Why are we blessed? Because it's in that space of our poverty where we can actually find the love of God and the attachment to God when we've got no game and we've got nothing else. So I, I would say to shift our focus, and I tell this story in the book as well. And this was going to be a whole introduction to a chapter, but it's just a minor point, but there was a time about 10 years ago.

Shortly after I had written Surfing for God and I have a chapter in Surfing for God on centering prayer as a way to overcome addiction. And I almost didn't include that chapter in the book because some people had [00:31:00] told me that's a little woo and out there, and 10 years ago in, in certain circles it, it was, but I was doing a lot of centering prayer.

And I was very comfortable with it, and I felt very loved by God. And I was in a space where instead of me feeling like I was loving God and doing something that he was, impressed by, I felt loved by God. And then suddenly, even though I kept sitting every morning for 20 minutes, it just dried up and it was like nothing was there.

And I started having all of these thoughts of, if nothing's there and I'm not impressing God, then how could he love me? And I, I said to God one morning. I feel like I'm losing my faith. I feel like everything underneath me is just being washed away in a flood and I heard a still small voice that said, what would be so bad about that?

I. And a listener might go, oh God was saying clearly, Michael, I'm not impressed, or clearly you're not earning my trust or my love, so I'm done with you. So what would be a bad about that? But what that [00:32:00] voice was saying to me is, Michael, this faith is not yours. It's a gift.

I just want you to, in this space of fearing that you're going to lose your faith to let me love you. For the rest of your life. If you never spoke, if you never prayed, if you never read your Bible, I'm the one that has you. You don't have me. And I sense that if I tried to run as far and fast as I could from God that he had me.

I'd love to hear the stories of, on one level, I love to hear them of famous Christians who have walked away from their faith, and I just smile and I'm like I'll see you in heaven. Because there's the sense of which this work that God began in you long ago, your sense of belief.

If you call yourself a Hindu or a Buddhist, or a Muslim or an atheist. Love has you. And when we see Jesus in that moment, whether when we die or when he comes back, people that long for truth, goodness, beauty, love, [00:33:00] attachment, they will fall down and say, yes, you are what I've been looking for all my life.

 Yes.

I love that. I love that. 

Final Thoughts and Future Projects

Hey Geoff, let me throw out an idea. My prayer is that I just turned 60 and before I die, hopefully that's at least a couple decades from now, I wanna see an attachment bible. There's the 12 Step Bible and the Promise Keeper Bible and the A CC Bible and every other version.

And for a, a Theologic, a theologian. Who has an attachment lens to go through and just to have commentary and side notes and footnotes all about how the Bible is all about attachment. 'cause Andy Colbert said to me one day walking outta my office as we were having lunch. He said, Michael, all theology is attachment.

And I couldn't agree more with that that if Jesus ended his life. His last sermon on the night before he died, and he said, guys, after I washed your feet, after we had the meal together, let me give you my final summary. And he takes them [00:34:00] outside and he goes, I'm the vine. You're the branch. It couldn't be more clear than that.

I am the womb. In the umbilical cord and you are the child that is held and nurtured and have everything you need. And of course we know that we have to find that space and that place within and between others that are safe enough and able to offer us that sense of being seen soth safe and secure.

Let's do it.

 Absolutely. Six years ago before my son moved from Colorado to, go live his life after his college time. He said, dad, you always said that you're gonna get a tattoo with me before I, leave home for good. So I was like, okay, I don't wanna go back on that promise. And my son think, I think he has now 25 tattoos and he's got some piercings and a nose ring and he he looks like a little hippie and just an amazing man.

So we went. And until I walked in the door, I had no idea what I was going to have tattooed. I knew it wasn't gonna be a picture, but I thought okay, what do I wanna put on the body for the rest of [00:35:00] my life? And what I decided was on my right hand, I'm right-handed. So the right represents my strength and my ability to grasp things like Adam and Eve grasping in the Garden of Eden.

And so just above my wrist on my forearm are the words. Be still from Psalm 46, 10. Be still Michael. Chill, relax. You. You don't have to earn this. You don't have to work so hard and trust me that out of being still, that there will be an overflow and that your life will be fruitful. And then on my left hand, which is my vulnerability, and therefore it represents shame and weakness and limitation, I wrote the words, be loved.

And I actually wrote them Be Loved is in this old typewriter font, like it's from a 18 hundreds newspaper. And it's kinda Hey, newsflash Michael, be loved. You're loved. And on the right side, the Be Still is in a Celtic font, which goes back to my ancestral roots in Ireland. And to me, that's not just the [00:36:00] gospel.

But it's also just a daily reminder to me that is how I am to live out my faith. If somebody comes to me and says, what does it mean to be a Christian? I'll say, Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God. He died, he's alive today. And what it means to follow him is to say, yes, I want to be on his team.

I wanna be what he's about, and I'm gonna be still. Encounter him on the inside and in my body and in my imagination, which is not to say in make believe, but in the eyes of my heart as Ephesians one 18 tells me and. It's to be loved to receive that love in the same way that Peter said, God, you're not gonna wash my feet.

And Jesus said, if I don't wash your feet you'll have no part of me. And Jesus wasn't saying, you won't go to heaven. He was saying, you won't be able to be in this place of spiritual vitality and to overflow and to live in my kingdom. So be still, be loved is my mantra. That would be a great name for a book coming [00:37:00] up.

Yeah the be still be loved. It would be. It would be an extended devotional with 40 to 90 days of centering prayer exercises that reflect on attachment. That's something I've been playing with, but it's nothing that's absolutely forthcoming. The book I wanna write next is actually about the Serenity Prayer, the extended version of it, written by Reinhold Nebo, and helping people understand how to detach from outcomes so they're not depressed, anxious, angry, or addicted.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

 restoring the soul.com is our intensive counseling program. Restoring the Soul Weekend is our men's intensive. And then my partially completed website is michael john cusick.com. And the book of course, is available as they used to say on UHF tv, wherever fine books are sold.

A great conversation, Geoff. Thank you. 

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