Episode 336 - Michael John Cusick, "Sacred Attachment, Part 1: Being Held"

Welcome to another episode of "Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick." In today's conversation, Michael sits down with AJ Denson to dive deep into the profound themes of Michael's latest book, "Sacred Attachment." Together, they explore the concept of 'spinning' introduced in the first chapter and reflect on how it symbolizes the disorientation and reorientation we experience in life's journey. Michael shares a personal childhood story that beautifully illustrates the unexpected embrace of love amid chaos, providing a powerful foundation for understanding God's unwavering love and connection. As they unpack the transformative power of love and spiritual connection, Michael and AJ delve into the idea that true change is possible when we fully embrace the divine dance of love and faith.

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Transcript

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Hi, Restoring the Soul. Friends, it's Michael. Welcome back to another podcast. Today I am talking with my friend AJ Denson. Hi, aj. Welcome. Hello. Good to be here. AJ Is a man who I met as he staffs our men's Restoring the Soul weekend. He is from Texas. And as Sacred Attachment has rolled out, he and I began rolling around the idea of whether it would be fun to have him interview me. And very quickly I answered. It would be fun. Logistically, it's been hard to make that happen. So here we are online in two separate states, and I'm just going to let you take it away as you pick my brain about Sacred Attachment. Awesome. Yeah. And I'm so glad we're doing this, by the way. This is. This really is going to be fun. Oh, man, it's going to be a blast. I'm honored to be a part of it. So, yeah, yeah, we'll get right into it. I know even in reading the book, there's this overall theme. I mean, the title, obviously, Sacred Attachment, what a beautiful image for it. But chapter one starts with spinning, and I thought that was an interesting title for that chapter. What brought you to make it? Not just obviously you have a story that involves spinning, but tell me more about what brings you to that place of spinning and how that inspired it. Well, I'm going to riff here for a minute because as people ask different questions and I've never actually been asked that question related to the book, it makes me think of when I was a little boy. We had a lot of books in our home. There wasn't a lot of education in our home. Neither of my parents went to college, but my dad was a voracious reader. And I had this book that I took on my shelf in my bedroom. And I don't even remember if I read it, but I liked the title and it was called Stop the World, I Want to Get Off. And I think that was some kind of popular self help book in the early 1970s. But I remember that image of the world spinning and I want off. I want out of here. And I think even before I became a believer, there was this sense that the world is not my home and my life feels like it's spinning constantly. And so it's a metaphor for both, I think, the reality of when we're honest and when we pause about what is happening in the world around us. The normal pains and disappointments of relationships, certainly in the midst of joys and all of the good things in life. But life is hard. And so it's a metaphor for spinning. And then the second level is how in later parts of the book I talk about how there's a three step process in life that I call the rhythm of heaven, or I've referred to it as the rhythm of the kingdom. And that's this idea that there's life as we know it, there's life as we'd rather not have it, and then there's something new that emerges. And Walter Brueggemann, the theologian, referred to this as orientation, disorientation, reorientation. Richard Rohr has called this order, disorder, reorder. One of my pastors, Larry Renaud, called this thrive, dive, revive. And regardless of what we call it, it's a pattern that's clearly in Scripture. Brueggeman said that you can look at most of the Psalms and you see some starting point either in orientation, disorientation or reorientation. And it usually takes you through that kind of process. And that life is not static. And that can be a really hopeful thing. God is fluid and dynamic and generative. And therefore that in and of itself is hopeful. But finally it's the image of the story that opens the book. And that is where I'm four years old and I'm inadvertently placed into a cabinet, not unlike the Narnia cabinet, but a different size at a convent where my aunt is a cloistered nun. And this cabinet, as you open up the doors, inside of it was a lazy Susan kind of a canister that spun around and these cloistered nuns who could not have touch or physical contact with the public. And one of them was my nun, my aunt, Sister Ann. I was placed into this cabinet and spun around by my brother, six years older than me. And I was terrified. And I never forgot this four year old memory. And as I was writing the book, I actually called the convent. And of those nuns that were there in 1968 when I was four, there's seven that are alive. And Sister Bernadette from Slovakia is still alive. And I called her and I said, did this really happen or I'm making this up? She said, no, no, that, that happened. So I spun around in this cabinet and the door finally opened after what felt like many, many minutes of terror. And instead of the door opening to my brother, pulling me out back into this parlor where the visitors were on the side that couldn't be with the nuns, the door opened and there was my aunt, Sister Anne, this cloistered nun, dressed in her nun habit. And she pulled me out and hugged me and ran her fingers through my hair. And then what happened next was there were 16 other nuns there and they pushed some chairs out of the way. And these nuns that could have no contact with the public, they were behind this metal grill, they began to dance with me, ring around the rosie, and we sang songs and each of them picked me up and hugged me and kissed my cheeks and ran their fingers through my hair. And I tell that story in the book because that was the very same year that my uncle began to sexually abuse me and traffic me to other men. And that led to a long experience over a number of years of sexual abuse, which led to my sex addiction and a number of other addictions in my life. And that picture of spinning is not just the disorientation and the disorder, but it's a picture of how at the end of that spinning, from a biblical narrative, the story of God is that in the midst of the spinning and the disorder and the disorientation, that there is an embrace that we are held by love, that love has us, which is a phrase that I use over and over again in the book. And so it's this picture of here's what's happening that shouldn't be happening. And yet a picture of God's faithfulness to give me both an experience and a deeply, deeply ingrained memory of being embraced and held by love. Now, just, just for further significance, as a four year old, and I was a good Catholic boy, although there wasn't much I could do at age 4 to be a bad Catholic boy, I guess I was terrified that as I was in this cabinet and I knew very well that the nuns could not come out and have contact with people. But I don't know that there was a written rule anywhere that little four year old boys couldn't go through that cabinet. But I remember being on the other side and for a moment terrified that the Pope or a bishop or somebody was going to come in with their glasses down on the end of their nose and their hands on their hips, exasperated, disappointed, frustrated with me that I was on the wrong side of the grill and that I was doing something wrong, that I was breaking the rules. And that really was deeply rooted in me as well, despite that moment of love, because my family of origin, it was an alcoholic family until my dad got sober when I was in second grade, there was all kinds of dysfunction and abuse. And so God to me was somebody who was certainly punitive, somebody who was distant and who really only showed up when I was doing something wrong and when I was in trouble. And I was certain that I was going to be busted for what my brother did, when in fact I was embraced. How beautiful. That story definitely caught my attention even too. And the part that I really loved was that, yeah, even though they're behind these bars, they still put all the idea of their passion, their story behind them and put you first. How did that feel to be prioritized in a moment that could have been like, oh, well, you know, have to do X, Y and Z. Yeah, I. Think I didn't realize it in the moment, but as I have reflected back on that, especially in the process of writing the book, that that experience at that Carmelite monastery has in many ways become a foundational way of how I think about life with God. And the nuns saw relationship more important than rules. And this is true of the desert mothers and desert fathers, you know, beginning in the 4th century, 5th century, 6th century, where men and women would leave the cities and they would go out into the desert to try to live for God contemplatively through prayer and fasting and to not be corrupted, you know, by the city and by others. And I've talked to many people over the years that they always, to a person, say that for those ascetic individuals that were trying to focus on being faithful to God, one of the things that would always override their meditation, their silence and their fasting was hospitality. So if someone showed up and they needed to sleep, if they needed to be fed, if they needed some kind of medical care, everything stopped in terms of these practices to attend to the relationship. That's what was so important and that's what was true with the nuns, is that here's this little boy, what do you do? You delight in him. You pick him up, you dance. And I'm sure there was something in the nuns that thought we're cloistered and we're never going to have our own children. And who knows when the last time they got a hug was. And there was probably a huge win in it for them because who doesn't love a little four year old kid? And I have a picture of myself there, actually, with a little peach fuzz haircut, wearing corduroy pants and a flannel shirt from 1968. Oh, yeah. But that idea that relationship overrides rules is really reflective of the heart of Jesus. We see that in the stories again and again. And for people that are listening, well, what about rules? What about God's law? Of course, but all those rules and all the laws are really meant to Honor, relationship, both God's relationship with us, our relationship with God, and our relationship with one another. And I would also say our relationship with ourselves, that's what God's laws, ways, statutes, precepts, those are all about, is to help us align ourselves with love. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even quoting your book, what it's all about is an invitation to be held in loving connection, to participate in a dance, literally and metaphorically with your story, where we are seen, soothed, safe and secure. And as you're talking about the rules and this duality of holding the personhood and the rules in both hands, what is this like when you were held in that moment? What does this loving connection look like with you and Jesus after in all of your reflection through this book? Yeah, I think if you had talked to me the next day when I was 4, I would have told you or felt as if nothing had changed. And I do believe that that gift was for me as a four year old, that something in a very deeply embodied way received what happened and that something actually changed inside of me because of that moment. But it didn't prevent the abuse, it didn't prevent or take me out of the dysfunction. But maybe it gave me a level of resilience and that allowed something to develop in me neurologically, emotionally, that I might not have developed the way that I did. You know, I might be a sociopath today without that. And there might be some listeners or friends that say, well, you, you are a sociopath. And I don't, I don't think I am. At least not today. No, no, but my, my point being that it wasn't for many, many years until I actually came to a personal faith. So in my Catholic family, I was baptized as an infant. I was confirmed in the Catholic Church, which, interestingly, in Lutheran traditions and Methodist traditions, Catholic and Anglican and Episcopal. Confirmation is when typically a junior high student, you know, who has entered into puberty and they now are of the age of accountability, they are saying yes to faith, yes to the church, yes to, I want to follow God. And for me in my family, and this, I think, was kind of a popular thing in Catholic families, at least in Northeast Ohio, where I grew up, where you could make your confirmation and say, yes, I want to follow God and be a part of the church. And then after you did that, you were good. It's like you could not do anything. So my parents actually said to me, after your confirmation, you don't have to go to church if you don't want to. And as I reflected Back on that, I was like, what? That's a little, you know, ironic. But I also think about it this way. I think what my parents were trying to do was now that you've made this decision as a, quote, semi adult, you're a teenager, but you're making this decision on your own, not the faith that we've chosen, if you want to go, go, and if you don't want to go, don't go. And I actually would like to believe that that's what they were thinking. But that was when I was 13. And then when I was 16, I actually heard for the very first time. I had never heard it in all of my Catholic background. I think I missed it. It's not that it wasn't being said that God loved me, that God loved the me, that I didn't love myself. God loved the me that felt such shame and unworthiness and dirtiness and disgust. And God loved the me that felt so inadequate. And I learned that he forgave me for my sins. And at 16, I had a lot of sins that I took on as, you know, primarily because I was a horrible person and that I was disgusting. In the particular church that I went to, A.J. i was given a picture of a heart, and it was embossed with a little prayer card. And that heart was black. And it was basically, this is what sin is. Your heart is black. So I had this picture of my heart as black, as dark, as dirty. And of course, that aligned very conveniently with sexual abuse and with the sexual compulsion and addiction and sexual sin that I engaged in later. But so at 16, I learned that God loved me, forgave me. I wanted that relationship with him. I said yes to that relationship, decided to follow him. And that love never actually got internalized. It never went deep inside of me. And I won't say that it was just a cognitive thought thing or an intellectual thing, but there was something where it wasn't until 14 years later, and I've said this in other contexts, that when my life blew up July 10, 1994, from my sexual addiction and double life, it wasn't till then, 14 years after asking Christ to be the Lord of my life and saying yes to that, it wasn't until that 14 year later period where I actually felt the love of God for the first time. And so there's a phrase that I use in the book that love must be metabolized until it can be internalized. And I think it took me from age 4 until age 30, 1994, for love to be metabolized inside of me so that it could go down inside and begin to then move throughout my spiritual bloodstream and actually into my physical body and into my nerves and neurons and muscles so that the peace of God and the love of God could actually be felt. Wow. Yeah. You said 14 years from your D day to when you really truly felt like love had you. Well, yeah, actually, it was 14 years from the time I quote, accepted Christ and became a Christian until my D day. Oh, that's right. And it was on my D day of when everything blew up that that's when I felt the love of God. Because, see, then I had nothing to stand on. I had no game. I was completely broken. There were no, you know, let me@psalm51. There were no burnt offerings or sacrifices that I could make at that point because I was guilty. I was discovered in my lies, my double life, my breaking my marriage vows. And I couldn't say, well, I'll read my Bible more or I'll try to witness more or I'll memorize more Scripture, which previously, those were all the things I did. You know, the more I sinned and acted out my addiction, the harder I tried to be better. I tried harder to, quote, love God more, but that's exhausting. And I can't love God more by effort any more than my wife would feel loved by me. You know, bringing her flowers. If I have a loving heart toward her, and that already is there, and I buy her flowers, hopefully she'll feel loved and blessed. But if I don't have love in my heart, because that's not down inside of me yet, and I buy her flowers, she's going to feel manipulated. And unconsciously, I think that's what I was doing for so long was that. And the church was teaching me, and the people that were discipling me were doing their very best. But it was basically, work hard for God and he'll be pleased with you. Now, that's not the gospel message for salvation. Because that said, it's not by our works, it's by faith that we're saved. But once we're in Christ, we're not talking about getting saved. We're talking about living in his love. And we simply can't earn love. And on July 10, 1994, I absolutely, positively could not earn it. And that's when love, if you will, broke through. To quote an old Phil Keagi song or Keith Green song, whichever person wrote that good song. Yeah, absolutely. You talk about people changing and that it is you Know, the argument of chapter one is, can people change? And you use the concept of love, having you, this sacred attachment, as the way to do that. As someone who might be picking up that book and like, you know, maybe they're like, oh, this is like the first thing I've tried, or this is the last thing I have and they're reading this chapter. What would you encourage them as? Not only from your book, in the words of you can change and that love has you, but from a personal standpoint, just in this conversation. Yeah, the first thing I'd want to say to a person who is identifying with this chapter, but also who's drawn to the book because they're spiritually exhausted, they're tired of trying to earn God's affection or to muster up faith, or maybe they've just been wounded by Christians, you know, really deep. I, I, I would say that I get it. I've been in all of those places. I can't identify with every human being experience, but I, I've definitely been in a place where life has been spinning, where the life that I thought that I had and the life that I thought that I would have was not actually materialized, where all of my efforts didn't bring it about. I remember from a very young age going to really good Christian churches and hearing what most people would consider really good Bible teaching and thinking internally. And I don't say this to be arrogant, but I think there's going to be people listening that will go, I get it. But hearing what would be considered really good Bible teaching and internally, a sense of that's it, like really just get more information about God and do more for God and try to bring more people to God, and that's it. What about in here? What about this inner life? Why do I feel such unworthiness? Why do I feel so much shame? Why am I struggling so in relationships? Why can't I rest? Why am I always cracking jokes compulsively and the minute I stop making jokes, I feel nervous and anxious and why can't I look people in the eyes? These were all questions that I asked when I was 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Because I knew that there was something really unsettled inside of me that the gospel and this life with God wasn't touching. And I share this in another part of the book, but I think you've probably heard me say this as we battled together for men's hearts at the weekend. But there was a prayer that I prayed at one point and I said, God, if this is what Being a Christian is. I don't know if I want to be a Christian because the idea of the deeper life, I had no way to make that happen. I had heard people speak about it. The idea of abundance, the idea of joy and love, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, self control, all of those fruits of the spirit. I felt like those were things I had to work for. And it was like grasping water where I could never actually take hold of it. And I rarely felt God's sense of love. I really felt God's sense of pleasure over me. And I think the thing ultimately that until my life fell apart in 1994, is that I lived with tremendous self hatred. Now, I don't think the average person in my church or in the young life groups that I was working would have seen Michael and said, oh, that's a guy who hates himself. You know, he looks like Eeyore, or he looks clinically depressed. But internally, if any of the gifts or abilities or charm or humor were stripped away, I would have thought, there's absolutely nothing inside of me that would make anybody want me, that would make any kind of positive impression. And therefore, I've got to keep up these fig leaves. I've got to hide what's real on the inside, and I've got to present something on the outside that's so much better than I actually am. And so the words that I would say are everything inside of a reader that comes to this book. Any struggle, any real or perceived deficiency, or real or perceived inadequacy. And by the way, there's a difference between I am inadequate to do brain surgery or fly an F18 or to hang shelves on a wall because I'm not very handy. I'm inadequate to do that because I either don't have the training or my learning disability. It makes it really difficult for me to measure things and do things with my hands. But it doesn't mean that I'm inadequate as a person. So whatever the lies are, whatever the wounds are, whatever the struggles with faith or God himself that a person's bringing, it's all welcome. And that welcome is not from Michael. That welcome is from the God that looks like Jesus. It's a welcome that says you can belong regardless of who you are, that God's arms are outstretched wide, that his embrace is secure, and that this thing called the Christian faith is something that Jesus himself invites us to reimagine, a new way of living with him. And it's not a new way that Michael's invented. It's actually a new old way that combines contemplative Christian practices and ancient Christian rhythms, along with what modern psychology calls attachment theory, what neuroscience and medicine call interpersonal neurobiology, and what human relation experts simply call compassionate connection. That's what God is like. And we have been told this so often, but I want to encourage people as they read the book or they're thinking about reading the book, I want to encourage them to dare to believe or dream that God is actually way better than we've been told he is, and that Christianity and this life of faith is way better than we've been told it is. And I'm not coming with new truth. I'm just trying to identify some of the obstacles to seeing the treasure of who God really is and the expansiveness of the Gospel and the depth of grace that's offered in the person of Jesus. Well, Michael, thank you so much for unpacking that and diving into chapter one. So excited to dive in to more of this book in the next chapter in the next episode. AJ this has been a blast to talk, so I can't wait for another conversation as well. We'll talk soon. Sounds good. Thank you.