Episode 314 - Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love

Welcome to another inspiring episode of "Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick." In today's conversation, Michael is joined by Brian Boecker, as they delve deep into the themes of love, faith, and spirituality. Together, they explore the idea of embracing playfulness and love over living in fear and the role of mysticism in experiencing divine love.

Brian and Michael discuss how attachment and love connect to the gospel and faith and the importance of embodying spirituality through our senses and recognizing our physical experiences. They reflect on personal stories and the profound lessons from childhood experiences, such as moments of tenderness from nuns and the beauty of a sunset on Lake Michigan.

As they journey through these reflections, Michael highlights the launch of his new book, "Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love." This book promises to guide readers through spiritual struggles and help them find joyful divine attachment. Pre-order your copy today.

Feeling stuck in your relationships? Discover insights into possible underlying reasons with our complimentary resource, "Five Ways Unresolved Trauma May Be Derailing Your Relationship." Download here -> https://restoringthesoul.com/our-resources/

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Transcript

0:56

Hey everybody, welcome to the restoring the Soul podcast. I'm Michael John Cusick, and today I have exciting news. We are talking about my new book, Sacred escaping spiritual exhaustion and trusting in divine love. The book will be released January 7, 2025. That feels like forever from now, but in the publishing world, six months is not a long time with a long rollout. I finished this book about nine months ago after what feels like a lifetime and the culmination of a lot of my thinking and work. And the special thing is that today I'm going to be talking with my colleague and friend Brian Becker, who's a familiar voice on the restoring the Soul podcast. For other episodes that we've done together and want to encourage you, here comes the sales pitch to go to Amazon or any other bookseller and pre order sacred attachment. It's already gaining preorders there. Just type in Michael John Cusick or sacred attachment and it will pop up. There's a lovely, lovely, lovely book cover. I'm so proud of the team at university press that they put together. The whole theme of the COVID as you'll see, is Kintsugi, which is the japanese art form where broken pottery is put back together with gold or precious metals, and therefore those broken pieces become more precious, valuable, and beautiful as a result of the brokenness and the filling in of the cracks. So I just couldn't be more excited. And before I hand things over to Brian to interview me about the book, I just want to read the text that is on the back cover of the book that you can read on Amazon, but this will just give you a sense of what the book is about. 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 in spiritual uncertainty, but still longing for relationship with God? In this book, I voice questions and contradictions that are inherently part of living an authentic spiritual life. With raw honesty and vulnerability, I share my own zigzagging path to God and reveal a brokenness and pain can be the gateway to experience joyful divine attachment. Because God's love has you, you can put aside fear and loneliness, and you can rest seen, soothed, safe, and secure in God's presence. This book is a gentle, kind, trauma informed path and guidance that lets you, the reader, reimagine life with Goddesse in a way that can repair wounds and deeply satisfy and restore your soul. As you read this book, hopefully you're going to discover if you're someone who has stepped away from your faith or lost your faith or struggling about why you should still be a Christian. Or if you just want to go deeper, this book is going to help you realize that you're not losing your faith, you're not regressing, you're shedding baggage, and you're in a growth spurt of your struggle to believe or your needing to make sense out of where you're at in your faith is not a barrier. It's the bridge to a restored and embodied spirituality. So that's the overview of Sacred Attachment, my new book, escaping Spiritual exhaustion and trusting in divine Love, that comes out in early January. So, having said all that, Brian Becker, I'm so excited to be talking with you today and kind of proud that you get to interview me. So thanks for being here. Well, it's awesome to be here, Michael, and I just felt really honored to be able to read your book. It feels like a huge gift to me, but also to the world. And so I think when I read the title sacred attachment and then escaping spiritual exhaustion and trusting in divine love, it feels like just in the title alone, it's tapping into things that both I've personally experienced kind of a deep desire for that as well as kind of what I see clinically with people. If there's a phrase that comes up over and over again, like when people walk into my office, what are you feeling? I'm just tired. Right. And I'm just worn out. Like this way I've been living, life isn't working anymore. It's wearing me out. Yeah. And so often it's not even a physical tired they're talking about. It's a tired they can't really articulate, but they start to realize that it's a spiritual and emotional tiredness that comes from sometimes really obvious ways that they live under pressure spiritually, to perform, to please God, to try to have to measure up, or in unconscious ways that are driven by our story and our family of origin. Yeah, very much so. And that's why the book, you know, immediately within the last number of years, you know, the idea of attachment has felt so critical to my own journal, journey, as well as the journey I walk with others on. But I think some words that really popped out as I read this one was just the word welcome. And that's become a big word. And that's where I feel like the idea of attachment feels like it takes on a much more felt sense when I think about the idea of being welcomed. And the other word is belonging in the sense of actually fitting in and not just fitting in, but being welcomed and wanted and all of me being welcomed. Right. And I think the phrase that really popped out to me again just as a starting point, right. Was this reframing you did of the idea of holiness. Right. And I think I've kind of cringed at that word a lot. And I think when I read this phrase, it felt like I could. I get that word back. I can honor God as holy. Because you said, holiness discards nothing. Holiness hides nothing. Holiness is the energy of God making things whole again. And I just. It feels like that's such a beautiful picture of what? Welcoming attachment. Right. Belonging. Like, it feels like it brings it into holiness. And then I go, yes, holy, holy, holy. You know, he is holy. And it's like. That feels like such a good word again. Right. And so I just really just wanted to mention that or bring that up and just, that feels like a big piece of kind of, you know, from a big picture point of view, kind of what you're trying to do is reframe even God's love. Is holiness what we worship, how we worship. It feels like that's really at the heart of what you're doing here. Yeah, it really is. And although there's a freestanding chapter on holiness, the theme is woven throughout the book, and nothing like, here's the biblical exegesis of holiness. And let's understand this passage. But even as I start out the book, telling the story about being a four year old boy, the year that I started being sexually abused by an uncle, the year that my dad got sober from alcohol for the first time, and my family of origin. And then I had this moment at a carmelite monastery where book will explain this, but I was put into a cabinet and spun around because my aunt, the carmelite nun who had been cloistered for many, many years at that time, they were behind bars. They were behind what was called the grill. And going back to the, you know, before the 13th century, in the beginning of the Carmelites, monks and nuns would separate themselves from the world to contemplate the love and mystery of Christ, and that their ministry was prayer and devotion. And that that wasn't a withdrawing from the world to just improve their relationship with God. It was actually a withdrawing from the world to bless the world through their. Through their prayer. So it was a withdrawal for the purpose of being other centered. So I'm four years old, and my brother spins me around in this cabinet very unexpectedly, and there's a very clear line at the counter with these bars, and I'm spun around, and I'm dizzy, and I'm telling my brother to stop. And the doors open in this cabinet, and I end up embraced by my aunt, Sister Ann, and she takes me out of this cabinet. And even at four years old, I was aware that I'd done something terribly wrong. And I'm on the wrong side of this. And the pope could walk in or the bishop and see this, and I'm gonna be in trouble. And that moment became this metaphor for my life, of this tension between what I longed for at four years old, in the midst of my life being chaotic and crazy, was somebody to see me, to soothe me, to say, you're safe and your world is secure. But what was really happening? So it set up this gap, or what I call in the book the delta. In science, a delta is the greek letter delta. The triangle represents the starting point and the distance between the starting point and where somebody wants to be. They use this in engineering and science and the military and in business. So the delta represents this gap or the separation. But then delta also means, like, the delta of a river, where the Mississippi delta flows into the ocean. And so delta can either be this gap and this pain and this distance between what I was promised or what I once thought would be, and then what's actually happening. Or it can be the coming together of two very different realities, like the brackish water of the Mississippi and then the salt water of the sea. And in that, there's a brand new union. And so, out of my own experience when I was four, I think that becomes a metaphor for what many people are experiencing in their faith today. A kind of disorientation, a kind of spinning where they're uncertain, they're disappointed, they're disillusioned, they're different. They don't fit in. They've somehow not measured up. And ultimately, where I found myself at four years old, was not ashamed and in trouble, but embraced by my aunt and 16 other nuns on the other side of those bars where I should not have been. And I actually believe that that was a kind of conversion for me. At four years old, I had no cognitive understanding. You know, I'd been baptized a Catholic, but I was embraced in a way that is still visceral and experiential to this day. Brian, when I was writing this book, I had this memory, but I had. My aunt has been gone since 2003, but I had to call the convent. I haven't been there for twelve years. And I had to call up Sister Bernadette, who came from Slovakia in the 1950s, still has an accent. And she was nun, who as a little boy, she would squeeze me, and we used to say to my kids, squeeze the stuffing out of me. She would squeeze me in this uncomfortable, loving way. But it was the kind of uncomfort of being held so tight that the pressure was there. And today I understand as a therapist, as proprioception, kind of the calming effect of being embraced and squeezed. You know, today people will buy weighted blankets for what Sister Bernadette was giving me. So I called her up, got her on the phone, and there's only five of these nuns left in Cleveland, Ohio. And I said, am I crazy? Did this really happen? Did I really spin around in this cabinet and go to the other side of the grill? And she said, oh, I remember that. And then she said, like she was going to get in trouble herself. She said, my nieces and nephews used to come in and we did the same thing. So this was kind of an unspoken secret, hidden, unhidden secret, where the nuns had their loved ones spin around in this cabinet. And the cabinet was actually there to give gifts and food back and forth because they also have the ministry of hospitality. So having said that, if there's this disorientation in this gap, I had to ask the question, what are the barriers to closing that gap? And how do we close that gap? And one of the barriers is a lot of really important concepts like holiness and sin and imagination and what it means to live within our bodies and things like that. Those concepts that we've been given are often hurtful, and they become barriers to a life of union with God into living in a restful place where we're securely attached to him. And one of those words was holiness. It really became foundational because at restoring the soul. Of course, you and I do this all the time, but we use the words interchangeably of wholeness and holiness. And so if we think about holiness, what is one of the holy things about God? And often we think of holiness as kind of a moral perfection, that God is pure white, and unholiness would be one drop of black ink into that holiness, and then it's tainted. And that's really a horrible misunderstanding of holiness. That's one small and particular aspect of it. But God's moral perfection is not defined by the absence of sin or taintedness. It's defined by the presence of a unified love that embraces brokenness and that steps into sin. And I overcomes the sin by embracing it. And consuming it, which we ultimately see on the cross with Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. I love that story, man. Just captivated me, you know? And it's just such a gift to think of you as a four year old kind of dancing and playing and being loved on by these women. Right. And just the joy and the laughter and the play. Right. Again, it wasn't a. You're thinking I did something wrong, and yet it's really what your heart deeply wants. And it feels like whatever was planted in you at four years old is coming to fruition in that. Now you're finding words maybe to put to that story as well as to give the gift. Right. That's the interesting thing. Right? You were in there kind of screwing, screwing around, but you were a gift to them. They were a gift to you. Right. This thing that was supposed to meant to past food or gifts or things was. It was a gift, right. A gift of love and something. Again, I think of the word holiness as God's other than us, but he's also imminent. He's entering into and coming for us. Right. And I just think that picture somehow puts their separate, but they still just delight in you. And again, you share this in the book, right. At a later point is the song by Redbone. Come and get your love. Come and get your love now. Right. Feels like that song goes with that story. Right. Like that's what you would be dancing to almost, if you could put a soundtrack to that story. Yeah. And, you know, that song is important to many of us who at a couple of the men's restoring the soul weekends, that song spontaneously became part of our program. And it's a little cheesy, to quote a 1970s pop song, but the refrain of it is, of course, it sticks in the head. It's like a earworm. And yet I almost didn't include that in the book. And I think it's important because there's an ordinariness and a very non religiousness to that song, and it's about a human relationship. But back to the idea of play. You know, the four year old, as I turned 60 this August, I'm aware that I'm getting older, and I'm aware that life is changing for me, and I'm not near retirement. But what I'll say is this life is a whole lot more about play than production or performance. And I don't mean that. That means that I'm spending more time on a pickleball court or going skiing more. I actually am doing more hiking and exercising and yoga and taking care of myself because I have to and because I enjoy it. But I really believe that worship is play. Worship is not work. Worship is not laborious. It can be intense. It can be emotionally excruciating. Life can be really hard. You know, around the office here, we work hard, we overcome organizational struggles. We all have issues with loved ones, with health and family, etcetera, etcetera. And yet it's play. So I'll let you kind of lead this, because there's so much. I mean, we could do well, you. Just lead us into another good topic, right? Because you say this phrase, he goes, I've heard that worship is what we give our hearts to in exchange for life. I would add that worship is what we give our hearts to in exchange for security, in exchange for being seen, soothed, and safe. We can worship what we do, how much we earn and acquire, and who we know, all in attempt to meet our own four s needs. Seeing sue safe and secure, which is the essence of idolatry. And so it's like we've settled for something less. But what's in that picture of that little boy is he's getting the fullness of it, right? He's getting the taste of this is who I was made for. Rather than settling for these idols, I'm going to worship these things to try and eke out something. This is actually what my heart is most deeply longing for. And again, maybe you can speak to that reframing of worship again, away from something towards something new and different. Yeah, I think that's a big theme both in the book and in how I think and how I have lived my christian spirituality for the last decade and a half, that that faith and spirituality and following Jesus is less about moving away from something, and it's more about moving into something. So, you know, from 1994 till, I don't know, 2004, maybe 2014, because I was still working through a lot of serious trauma then. It was all about getting away from what was bad in all the ways I was broken away from my addictions. And there's a time and a place for that, right? But it was often shame and pain that was driving that when the whole point is attachment, of moving into something. So, in the cabinet, when I was four, if I had spent all my energy and time just trying to get out of that cabinet, and when the door opened, I turned around and started to try to spin myself back in the other direction, I never would have been embraced in divine love. You know, the reason why we talked about play a minute ago? Is because you alluded to this. But once my aunt picked me up and kissed me and hugged me all over, and then the other nuns came and did the same, is we literally did ring around the rosie. They pushed the tables out of the way. And I'm four years old, and I have this memory of doing ring around the rosie with the nuns. And that's worship. Worship is experiencing that kind of love, and that's just so, so powerful. Yeah, that's a beautiful picture. And again, it goes back to that initial idea of holiness. Isn't discarding something, it's not getting, it's making sense and bringing wholeness to it. That even in our idols, even in our addictions, there's something deep of what we're longing for. They point to something that we're actually longing for. And as we pay attention to that, we can actually enter into the love that our heart actually desperately needs. Yes, yes. Yeah, that's really helpful. I want to touch on a couple themes here. One is kind of the idea of embodiment. Again, you have a quote from Thomas Keating in the book. Most of us have a heavy burden of emotional junk accumulated from early childhood. The body serves as a storehouse for this undigested emotional material. The spirit initiates the process of healing by evacuating the junk. This takes place as a result of a deep rest of mind and body and contemplative prayer. I would just. Yeah, maybe speak to that a little bit. Just both the idea of embodiment and how our body holds a lot of our story and our pain and maybe keeps us kind of clinched and I and cut off, but also to kind of the work that God invites us into to experience him in a very embodied sort of way. Sure. Well, two big ideas that I want to put out to people. The first is, and I've said this before on this podcast, that if we think about the soul, the greek idea of soul that modern christians have inherited is that the soul is the mind, the emotions, and the will. And that's an incomplete picture. That as we have inherited that in the modern age, it's left us with a dualistic approach to that spirit is good and body is bad. Or to say it another way, flesh and spirit. Spirit is good, flesh is bad, to the point where even the word flesh is translated as sinful nature in the New Testament. And that's not actually what it means. The greek word is xerxes, and that actually means flesh. Like flesh, like cow flesh or human flesh, not sinful nature. And that's not a controversial, you know, issue for liberal or conservative interpreters. So we've inherited that idea. Therefore, the body is bad, therefore sexuality is bad, and therefore, you know, taking care of ourselves, but especially experiencing God in our body, in our senses of touch, taste, sight, smell, sound, that's not important. And we just need to focus on believing. And therefore, if we believe the right things and we get that in us enough, and then we think about the right things enough, that's what it means to be a Christian. And the hebrew idea of soul is far more holistic and rich, and actually representative of the trinity of God himself. And the hebrew idea is body, mind, emotions, and will. And so soul starts with the body. And whether it's books by Dan Siegel, Kurt Thompson, Andy Kolber, many of the friends that have been on this podcast, and a lot of secular writers, there's this explosion of literature and conversation in mental health and in the church, around embodiment. And I make the point in the chapter on embodiment that you can have faith and religion and even be saved, although I don't typically use that language, as an Anglican, about getting saved. That's obviously an important aspect of our faith. But you can have belief and faith intellectually, but you can't have experience with God without somehow integrating that into your body, into touch, taste, sight, smell, sound, and that sense of feeling God's presence. And we can still have touch, taste, sight, smell, sound to experience God. And those things mediate the reality of God's presence, even though we may not feel him emotionally or viscerally, because the visceral feeling is not as important as having things that mediate the fact that he is present and that he is powerful in our midst, and that we are loved in that kind of a way. So without an embodied spirituality, there is no spirituality. And we can't close the gap between what we think Christianity should be, or what we are told or what we are promised, what we had hoped for, and what our actual experience is, whether that's with addiction or a sense of not measuring up, a sense of having to perform or live a life of exhaustion, we can't close that gap without an embodied sense of God. It's just absolutely central. Yeah, yeah, that's super helpful. And I think that's one of the gifts for me of coming to restoring the soul is the attention on our bodies and somatic work and understanding what we're feeling and experiencing and beginning to connect that. So that feels like a newer place for me. I would say I'm a noob. When it comes to that. But it feels like such a gift to be more and more attentive to that and to allow myself to both attend to what feels tight. Like, I was even walking this morning, right? And there's just a sense of, like, I take a deep breath and I exhale, and it's like, man, I've been holding my breath for a long time. I've been clenching, right? And there's a sense of, like, oh, what is that tightness? What is that clenching? What does that need to hold my breath and just get through, right? Like, it just feels like it. My body holds my beliefs just as much as my head does, and it. Sometimes it needs to be actually healed or released from those things. It's okay. You can relax into it. Yeah. Again, I just think of that little boy. He's just so tight and fearful, right? And suddenly he's dancing, and it's like his whole body gets to enjoy this experience. And so it feels like that feels like it goes from this clinch type place to this relaxed dancing, doing the hokey pokey, right? Like, there's just such a difference from a body point of view that there's a different experience of that. Yeah. I love what you said, that our body holds our beliefs. Our friend Kurt Thompson says that God inherits all the same neural networks in our body that our spouse does when we marry them. All the same reflexes and responses and neural pathways and patterns of. Of thinking and responding. And, you know, as concrete as, you know, Julianne inherited a guy who would eventually snore really loud. And God inherits a guy who gets very distracted and who can get caught up in fantasy about future, you know, scenarios of winning the lottery and things like that that just consume all this time. And God's not surprised by that. God's not disappointed with that. God's not frustrated with that. God's in the midst of that. God's in my crazy fantasies. He's right beside me, his hand is on me, and he's just saying, okay, now what? I'm right here. And we go for a walk, or I take a shower, and God is there. And let's go to psalm 139, because people are saying, ooh, this sounds a little bit woo woo. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? I want to just also comment, since you just talked about the little boy. I don't talk about this in the book, per se, but if I had to describe, what is this book about? It's really about Jesus words in Matthew 18, where he says, unless you become a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom. And when Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, he was never referring to what happens when you die. You know that somehow in this lifetime, if you don't somehow become childlike enough, that when you die, you're not going to go to heaven. The kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God is defined by heaven happening here. It's defined by the rule of God, the reign of God, but mostly the presence of God that is in our lives and bearing fruit in our lives at any given moment. And so for us to have this closure of the gap and the sacred attachment, it's not by becoming more and more mature. It's by becoming more and more childlike in these vulnerable ways of surrendering. And now to tie in your words about being clenched while you were walking. And now I'm holding up my hands on the video screen for those who can't see it. It looks like I'm having a pentecostal moment here, pumping my hands up and down, but I'm clenching my fists tightly. And we may not have in our spirit or our intention that our fists are clenched to God, but let's just say that I come to God in my quiet time, and I'm like so many people I know that are exhausted from reading their Bible through in a year, for the fifth year in a row, and they've never made it through. And then, like me, I've said, well, this year I've got to do it. God said to me a while back, stop trying to read the Bible through in a year. Just. Just be with me. And for those that are doing that, I think for many people, that can be a really good thing to understand the story of God and be reminded of that. But for me, those kinds of things have often been like my clenched fists. Right now, it's not my heart that as I'm reading through the Bible in a year, or let's say, memorizing scripture, or just praying really fervently with my brownet God, I want to know you. I want to know you help me not to be so broken. That's like my fist clenched. And now I'm trying to release my fist. I've been squeezing them really hard, and I can't initially open my fists because the muscles are so cramped. But as I wait a minute, I'm now able to open my hands and stretch my fingers because I'm aware that I was clenching my fists. But after a while, I'm not even aware that I'm clenching my fists. And now a minute has gone by and I can open my hands and stretch them and I can now hold them out to. So our posture of our heart is we're either grasping towards something or toward God, and we can't actually grasp God. That's what the first sin was in the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve, they were reaching and grasping for something that they could control, something that would make them God, something that would bring life instead of death. And it was all based on the lie that you can't trust God, that he's not really who he says he is. And we can't grasp, we can only receive. Yeah. That requires our hands and our heart to be open in a posture, and that's the posture of a child. Yeah, that's really good. And I think you put words to that, and I think the other topics that you touch on in the book, and again, I think, again, a gift of, to me in that is both the idea of imagination and, in a sense, mysticism. Right. Like, there's just a sense there's a different realm. It's not just the world of linear facts, kind of left brain, but just kind of right brain, right mode. Again, different ways. People have recently talked about that, but just this idea that our imagination is really critical to understanding that. And I think you've put the words to it. God, help me to see with the eyes of my heart. May the eyes of my heart be enlightened. I think as scripture talks about it, maybe you can just touch on that a bit, because I think this feels like a really vital kind of new pathway for many of us that kind of have been brought up in that very linear, kind of factual way of approaching our faith. Yeah, well, first, let me go to the scriptures. Since you talked about that, I've spent a lot of time in the Book of Ephesians. In grad school, I wrote a paper on it and kind of introduced a model that it's a book of bookends. Chapter one and chapter six. In chapter one, it's the spiritual reality in heaven, in the kingdom, and in what God has done for us. It's all these blessings in Christ. It's that we've been adopted and cleansed and made new, and that God is bringing everything together into oneness in him. And then chapter six is the spiritual battle that tries to oppose that, and that stands in the way of that. And chapters two, three, four and five of Ephesians are basically how we live in these bookends in this gap. So Ephesians is really where the gap is probably most described systematically in scripture. And at the end of chapter one, or toward the end of chapter one, where, where the apostle Paul or St. Paul has said, you know, here's all the great stuff. Here's who, who God is and what he's done for you. He says, but here's my prayer. I pray that the eyes of your heart would be open or that you would be enlightened in the eyes of heart, your heart. And then he goes so far as to say, in order that you would know the hope to which you're called, which is so that you become the person that you're meant to be, so that you grow up into the fullness and the wholeness of a fully alive human being, so that you can live the abundant life, so that everything that your heart resonated with when you heard about the love of God, that you can actually integrate that and become that. And he says, the only way that that can happen is if you begin to see with your heart, not with the organ of your eyes that ophthalmologists do surgery on. Yeah. And I want listeners, and I want you to, if it feels comfortable, don't do this if you're driving, but take a breath, exhale, and then think about a pepperoni pizza. And not just any pepperoni pizza, but your favorite pepperoni pizza, not one from the grocery store that you thaw and put in the oven. But I, I remember Santos Pizza at Lorraine Road and West 220th street near where I grew up. And Santos Pizza had this pepperoni pizza. It was about twelve inches wide and you'd open it up and the crust was about an inch thick and there was double cheese on it and there was, there was pepperoni grease and cheese that had boiled up and you wanted to save the crust so that you could dip it into the oil. I can't. I'm there in that moment. I can smell the pepperoni pizza. I can see the antipasta salad that we were in 7th grade and we pool all our money together and we barely have enough. We wouldn't leave a tip, but Mike Santo would bring that over again and again. I can see it, I can smell it, I can taste it. That's my imagination. Yeah. Now close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Don't do it. If you're driving, I want you to picture a beautiful sunset. So I'm standing on a cruise boat in Lake Michigan outside of Saugatuck at the last family reunion I did. And we're out a couple miles into Lake Michigan, and the captain stops the boat, the engine gets cut, and I think, okay, you know, we've been kidnapped, we're all going to die and be left at sea. But right now I'm imagining this moment where I'm starting to feel a little anxious. What's happening? Wow. The quiet of the engines makes the waves kind of lap against the edge of the boat. And then the captain says, everybody turn to your left. And we look out to the left and we see this orange ball come out from behind a cloud. And you realize, oh, we're actually going to see the sunset. And the chatter dies down. And as the sun gets lower and lower to the horizon, it quiets. And there's about 150 people on this little evening cruise boat, and I'm with my family. And as the sun goes down closer and closer and it's now resting on the edge, the whole boat is absolutely quiet. You could hear a pin drop. And then it goes lower and lower, and there's just a sliver of orange above the horizon and it's dead quiet. And then the sun dips below and it's gone. And in that silence, 150 people on the boat burst into applause and say, yay. It was a holy moment, first of all, because presumably many or some or all of those people were not born again christians that were there to experience the glory of God in his creation. It was a holy moment where there was something profound and transcendent and beautiful happening, where we all realized, whether we knew it or not, here was this gift of beauty that every day it happens again and again and we're here participating in it. And it was absolutely stunning. And as I'm describing that right now, and my eyes are open, looking at the camera and talking to you, I'm using my imagination. Yeah. So the obvious point is that we use our imagination all the time. Twenty four seven. And even when we're sleeping, dreams are basically maybe a random, maybe a not so random, depending on the kind of dreams you have, but it's your imagination. And the root word of the word imagination is obviously image. We are made in the image of God. So God has an imagination. The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, they dreamed up, if you will, what a human being would be. They dreamed up what a human being would look like, like what men would look like and women would look like and sexuality and peanut butter and flowers and the smell of sage up in the mountains and coral reefs in the sea and blackberries. Been eating a lot of blackberries. And sometimes I feel kind of spiritual when I just take a BlackBerry and before I eat it, I look at it up close and I see that a BlackBerry is made of, like, two or 300 little mini berries that are all pressed together. And why is it this color? And why are there blackberries and blueberries and strawberries and boysenberries? Why are there so many different kinds of bees in the world and thousands and thousands of kinds of fish, if not tens or hundreds of thousands? Because God, imagine that. And then you have the fish that became little Nemo. And now children delight in that. And they light up when they think of a fish that's orange and white with a clownfish. I think it is. That's Nemo. And they light up, and it brings them joy. And God imagine that. Yeah. And an artist has a blank canvas, and they imagine something. And I went to a famous rock and roll concert last night at Denver Mile High Stadium. Okay, I'll say it. It was the Rolling Stones. I know some people go, he can't be a Christian if he went to the Rolling Stones. But it was an amazing concert. Concerts are one of the ways that I experience God and the music. Yes, there's some profane music with the Rolling Stones, but Mozart, Bruce Springsteen, Beethoven, Jim Brickman, piano, you know, anything. Somebody sat at a keyboard or guitar or had a drum and said, I wonder how this would sound if I did this, this and this. Now, what's my point? My point is that we get to imagine reality. But what Paul's talking about in Ephesians 118, about seeing with the eyes of our heart, that because the spirit of God is in us, we actually have the capacity to see reality that's oftentimes invisible, that we can only see with the eyes of our heart. It was Helen Keller who said that you can basically only see what is spiritual and what is most real by being blind or having your eyes closed. Because the world around us, that is physical, that's not ultimately what's real. You know, what's real is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, self control, the smile of a child, the feeling that you get when your heart breaks because you've lost a loved one or you've experienced a great disappointment. Those are things that are real. And as we have talked about since the time of Jesus and the scriptures, we know that truth sets us free, and we know that God's word is truth. But we've thought for too long simply about truth as propositions, ideas, paragraphs that we read in scripture, and that's truth versus. I like to use the word as a synonym to truth. Reality, that when I read a story in scripture about Jesus speaking to the woman caught in adultery and him looking at all the older men who had picked up rocks ready to stone her because she deserved death, of course, the men who were committing adultery with her were nowhere, and they weren't throwing stones at her. But Jesus kneels down and starts writing in the dirt. We don't know why, but one answer is that he's distracting those men so that they're looking at him and not at this naked woman. So he's trying to even there, take away her shame. Others have suggested that he's writing out their sins in the dirt, and somehow they have a sense of that going, oh, crap, here's mine, too. But then his words of you who, without sin, throw the first stone. So he's kind to the sinner, and he's confronted with the ones who want to judge, and that's a picture of holiness. But then he says to her, I don't condemn you. Go and sin no more. Yeah. And the words, I don't go and sin no more is not okay. When you leave here, you've been let out of jail. You got your let out of jail free card. And so I want you to be really intentional. Don't sin anymore. Of course, don't go back and commit adultery. But I want you to be really religious now and follow the commandments and see how well you can do. Take advantage of this gift you've been given. That's not what he's saying. Yeah. What he's saying is you've just had an encounter where you are seeing what God is like, where God doesn't count or tally your sins. God sees your heart. God sees your brokenness. God sees your pain. And now, woman, you're invited and sent into living a different way. Yeah. You're invited and sent to find a way of living with me. And Jesus was preaching the good news of the kingdom, and John the Baptist was preaching the good news of the kingdom. And they weren't talking about sin and Jesus needing to die a death on the cross. They were saying, this is what God is like. The kingdom has come. You're living in it. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, like, to me, it was like, go and sin no more. It's like telling that little boy, hey, you don't need to go back to spinning in the cabinet. Just stay here in my love. Like, that feels more like what he's inviting and stay in my love. Yeah, exactly. Enjoy that. Enjoy the play, enjoy the delight. Right. Like that feels like a really, again, a different perspective on that story. Right. It's like, I don't want you to go back to harm. I don't want you to go back to the way you're clenching or fearful. Right. Or doing things out of that fear. I want you to stay entered into my play and in my love. So. Yeah, exactly. Hey, Brian, we have time, I think, for maybe one more question or comment from you about the book, and then I'm just going to close this out. Yeah. And I'd love to just read that quote at the end, but I just want to come back to the idea of mysticism because again, this idea you said kind of this picture, right, of it's an orphan reading a book about parenting doesn't really help him, but what that orphan needs is to have this experience of being welcomed and wanted and held. Right. And that's kind of what this journey has been. And I think there's kind of a mystical nature that you speak to about how we go about actually experiencing some of that. So again, just any words that you would have about the role of mysticism and kind of, again, you put really good words. It's not mysticism like the spectacular, but it's really mysticism in the mundane of seeing and tasting God's love, even in the ordinary. And so maybe you can put some words to that before we wrap up. Yeah. It's kind of a funny thing to have a chapter in this book on mysticism, but I don't think we can talk about attachment without talking about mysticism because there's something mysterious about how an infant laying in a crib knows from sensing in their neural pathways and in their nervous system, they know whether the parent is anxious, whether the parent is calm and peaceful and grounded and has their needs met, generally speaking. I mean, sometimes when we get up in the middle of the night with infants, we're exhausted. That infant knows if the parent gets them and sees their needs, and they know that someone will come to soothe them and they know that they're safe somehow. Even if there's a loud noise or if the crib side railing clicks and the baby startles, they know if that caregiver or parent is there, that love has them. And that's a big theme through the book. Love has me. And so life itself is mysterious. Relationships are mysterious. In proverbs, Solomon says, there are three things that are far beyond my comprehension or three things that are too great for me to know. The way of a ship upon the sea, the way of an ant, how it works, and the way of a man with a maiden. I can't figure it out. I never will. It's a mystery. The gospel itself, Paul says, is a mystery. And in the liturgical traditions, during the Eucharist, the priest or the pastor will hold up the bread and say, the mystery of faith. The mystery that Jesus himself, regardless of what you believe about the bread and the wine, says that this is my body broken for you, and the wine, this is my blood shed for you. What an example of how we need imagination. And that imaginary experience with God is a kind of mysticism that I think generally I would define by two things. First of all, mysticism would be in contrast to certain. And we live in a christian world, particularly in the evangelical Bible, believing groups of folks where faith is really defined by, the more certain you are about these facts or truths in the Bible, the greater your faith is. And frankly, the devil knows a lot about the Bible, and probably the Greek and the Hebrew and all of that, and believes that it's true. He's just never surrendered to it. His fists are clenched as opposed to open. So mysticism in contrast to certainty. And then the other aspect of mysticism is that the mystic lives for experience with God. And if we don't have experience with God, what is Christianity for? And for people that don't have experience with God, they may get to heaven, to the proverbial, non biblical pearly gates, and Jesus is there and says, welcome, and goes to embrace us. And we look inside at the kingdom, and we see that it requires being poor in spirit. And we see that the homeless are the ones who rule. And we see that the powerful and those who can't let go of all that they have controlled and maneuvered and manipulated and found on their own to bring life, people that don't want to release that, and to lose their life in order to find that they won't want to enter heaven. Which is why Dallas Willard once said, when people said, asked him the question, who will be in heaven? He said, anybody who can stand it. Because heaven is a place where we will surrender to love. And that requires a lot of practice ahead of time, of surrendering to love. And, you know, this life is about, yes, bringing the kingdom of God to earth, but it's also about practicing for living attached securely, to love where we're seen, soothed, safe and secure. Yeah, beautiful. Well, again, Michael, thanks for the time today to introduce your book again, it's sacred attachment, escaping spiritual exhaustion, trusting in divine love. It's open for pre ordering wherever you get your books. Michael, if you're okay, I just like to read at the end of each chapter in this book, you kind of have a prayer or blessing, some words to meditate on. And I'd like to just close this out with this from chapter 1. May you open yourself to the child within. May you let go of the shame that haunts you. May you embrace your whole self, body, and soul. May you open your heart to the reality of being held in divine embrace. Again, thanks for this gift, Michael, and thanks for the time today to introduce it to us. So.