“Sacred Attachment” with Michael John Cusick
In this week’s wise and profoundly human conversation, Dr. Dan Allender sits down with longtime friend and former student Michael John Cusick, founder of Restoring the Soul and author of the new book Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love.
Together, they explore the link between spiritual exhaustion and divine love, and how attachment, or the way we learn to connect and be connected, shapes our experience of God, ourselves, and one another.
Michael shares pieces of his remarkable story: from surviving profound childhood trauma and addiction to discovering the slow, sacred work of healing that unfolds over a lifetime. He reflects on the moments that first revealed divine love to him and later, the painful exposure that became the turning point of his adult life.
Dan and Michael talk about what it means to practice attachment—to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure—and how even our deepest wounds can become doorways into God’s relentless, restorative love.
This episode engages the topic of abuse, particularly sexual abuse and child abuse. Listener discretion is advised.
About Our Guest:
Michael John Cusick is a Licensed Professional Counselor, spiritual director, speaker, and author of two books including Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting In Divine Love and Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle. Having experienced the restoring touch of God in a deeply broken life and marriage, Michael’s passion is to connect life’s broken realities with the reality of the gospel.
In addition to leading Restoring the Soul and equipping Christian organizations around the world, Michael formerly served as an adjunct professor at Denver Seminary and full-time professor at Colorado Christian University. He holds an MA in Pastoral Counseling from Colorado Christian University and an MA in Counseling Psychology from the University of Denver. Michael lives with his wife in Littleton, Colorado where he enjoys yoga, hiking and trail running in the Rocky Mountains.
You can check out Michael’s latest book, Sacred Attachment, and preview the first chapter for free at: https://michaeljohncusick.com/books/
Episode Transcript
Dan: Well, I can say that I am thrilled to be with a dear friend, but it’s also one of those contexts where I wish that instead of looking at my friend Michael Cusick over a digital screen, that I had the privilege of being with him in some of the high mountains of Colorado, drinking a fine cup of coffee. But Michael, that’s not possible. But what an honor to be with you.
Michael: It’s an honor to be with you, old friend and mentor. Thank you for the invitation. It’s great. Great to be with you.
Dan: Well, what I would love to do, and I think our audience would enjoy, it’s just have a chat, but there really is such a sweet gift not only to have you on, but to be able to tell people about this lovely and really compelling new book. I always feel like I need to hold it up, but since most people can’t see me, it’s sort of pointless. But. Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love. I’ll just say the title alone is a compelling, and I remember the first chance of reading, it’s probably been now two times through for me, but in the compelling beginning to go, oh my gosh, to link exhaustion and love. Just feels like one of those where you go genius, my friend genius book. So before we get too far, I just want people to hear a little bit about who you are, and I could do that, but you have started a profound center called Restoring the Soul in Denver, Colorado. You certainly have been a therapist, a spiritual director, a writer, speaker, taught at Denver Seminary, at Colorado Christian. Those are the things that again, are lovely. They’re credentials and they’re good things. But what I would say when I talk about you with other friends is this is a man who has known great darkness, but even more gorgeous, goodness and light. You’re one of those people who, when we use the phrase broken and beautiful, I think of you. You’re a broken man. You’ve been a broken man, you’ll be a broken man. But there is a stunning, well, just like reading your writing, there’s just so many points and times. I just laughed and laughed, tears later. The compelling presence of somebody who has known heartache yet has been so captured by hope. So beyond me telling folks who you are, just love to hear a little bit of your reaction to that.
Michael: Well, my first reaction is you said you read the book twice through. I’ve not read the book twice through, so I’m very impressed with that.
Dan: Of course not. If you had, you would’ve lost your mind.
Michael: Yes.
Dan: You read the book 400 times as it was being written.
Michael: Yes. Yeah, and those first sections and chapters probably a thousand times over and over as we do as writers. I attended my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when I was five years old. My dad worked two full-time jobs to support the five Irish Catholic kids, and I was the youngest of five. And so the way that we would get time with our dad was to go to AA meetings and AA really became my church at first, even though we were devout faithful Irish Catholics growing up in your neck of the woods on the north coast of Ohio in Cleveland. At age nine, my brother, who is six years older than me, had a drug and alcohol problem, and our family moved across the country from Cleveland to Fort Lauderdale where I lived for part of a year in a trailer park. So I checked that box. Sexually abused, starting around the age of four. And that abuse carried on until age 16 when the end of my abuse was I was hospitalized for chronic, what we now know to be pelvic inflammatory pain. And I was in the hospital one month in the Cleveland Clinic when they couldn’t find anything wrong with me, they sent me to a psychiatrist who sexually abused me, and I wasn’t able to name that until many, many years later. So I say that all of that was fodder for me, either dying under a bridge somewhere or becoming a psychotherapist. And by God’s grace, I became a psychotherapist by being trained by you in 1991 too. And then a couple of years there as an intern, and here we are today, which is again so uncanny and so unexpected that this is my life.
Dan: Yes. And again, not to even make the heartache more significant, but you’ve known not just abuse at a very young age, but the kind of abuse that involves human trafficking, levels of violence, degradation, cruelty. Again, I don’t want to create something of a continuum, but there is with regard to a single event of abuse, we know only too well leaves a dark and heartbreaking shadow over the human heart. Yet the nature of the kind of harm you endured, it is one of those like outlandish gifts and miracles that you didn’t annihilate, you didn’t annihilate yourself, but chose to live. But in that process, and again, I don’t want to just come back to the book, but what I want to say is as you describe the process of dealing with the question of exhaustion, and we know that in one sense the level of harm and abuse you’ve endured creates a kind of hypervigilance that nobody can sustain to keep from even more harm from occurring. But there’s something about love of connection of what it means to be delighted in that has somehow wrapped itself in you and around you for your whole life. Is that a fair sentence?
Michael: Yes, absolutely. I opened the book with the story of me being four years old, which is the same year that the abuse started and it’s the first time my dad got sober. He had five years of sobriety working two jobs, somehow managed to go to 90 meetings in 90 days over and over and over again. Don’t know how my parents stayed married or how my mom functioned, and she actually struggled to do that. But at age four, my father’s sister was a Carmelite nun, which is the equivalent in the Catholic orders of a nun, being a Navy seal. You renounce the public life and your family and you go behind the wall and the grill, which is a big set of bars that are cross hatched, like being in prison, and you take vows of chastity, poverty, obedience and withdraw from the world. And so we would go to see my aunt across town on the east side of the Cuyahoga River on about a monthly basis or so it seemed. And one day the kids are playing in what they call the parlor, and the adults are at this countertop and there are bars just like you’re sitting with someone in prison and these nuns who have no contact with the outside, but these occasional visits could put their hands through. They couldn’t be kisses or hugs. And my brother, who was always a mischief maker, lifted me up into the corner cabinet. And as kids, we didn’t know what this cabinet was, but it was a lazy Susan, when you open the doors like a giant can of Campbell soup and you could put in gifts and food and spin it around. And my brother lifted me up all 20 whatever inches of me and spun me around what the cabinet doors closed. And I remember this like it was yesterday, Dan terrified, number one, that the Pope or the bishop or somebody was going to walk in gaze at me over their glasses, on their nose and send me to hell because that’s the nature of the parish that we are part of. And my whole life I’ve been really sensitive to spinning and dizziness I’m going to throw up. And then finally the spinning stops instead of my brother being there, which is what I expected, the doors open on the other side of this grill with the quarantined separated nuns. And my aunt sister Ann of Jesus opens the doors and embraces me and holds me and hugs me and picks me up and runs her fingers through my hair, turns me around, walks back into the room, and there are now 17 nuns fawning all over me. These women would never have children. They’ve been isolated from the public and they are just loving on me, eating me up, as we would say as grandparents or parents of our little ones. And the terror dissipated and what happened, true story, because I called one of the surviving known sister Bernadette from Slovakia to say, did this happen or am I making it up? They pushed chairs out of the way and they circled around me and sang ring around the Rosie. And that moment, which was a picture of spinning and being disoriented and terrified, and yet on the other side of that terror and in the midst of it encountering this literally divine embrace by women who spent their lives contemplating the mystery and the love of Jesus being embraced, that prepared me. And it laid not a secure foundation, but a couple of very large boulders as a foundation for the trauma that would ensue from an uncle who sadistically abused me from the trafficking, from growing up in an alcoholic family that was always there. There was what Richard Rohr calls the Immortal Diamond, or what Parker Palmer calls the Hidden Wholeness. That was something that wasn’t attained or acquired. It was something that was received. And that’s one of the things that I want to communicate to people in the book is that all of our spirituality, all of our transformation, maturation, yes, we collaborate and cooperate with God, but it’s all received. It’s the only game that we’ve got in the spiritual life. And so that’s been this foundation underneath that, during the different crises and dark moments in my life, including when things really unraveled, was in 1994, July 10th, right after I was done doing an internship with you at Colorado Christian, my double life got exposed and my wife was deeply betrayed by that double life and sexual infidelity and addiction and alcohol abuse to numb the shame. And that was the worst day and the best day of my life. It was the first time I was completely known, and it was the first time, I believe when I came to know the love of God, even though I had a master’s in Biblical Pastoral Christian Counseling, even though I had done a lot of good counseling, I had been a Christian 14 years having prayed the prayer of Jesus, but I knew nothing of the love of God in an embodied experiential sense. But when you’re curled up in a ball on your living room floor and your wife has the door locked and she’s sleeping in the bedroom and I can’t come in and I don’t know if I’m going to stay married or ever have a family, and all my dreams just got flushed down the toilet and I’m watching her just decimated by this plane crash of a day, I experienced the love of God in the least likely place to experience it. And I call that my conversion.
Dan: Well, and if I can link the two events, one of dizzying yet embraced presence, and to say that the experience in the exposure of the double life is comparable to being surrounded by this gorgeous presence of women who have served God in that way, nonetheless, what I’m hearing is that that story at four, even in spite of levels of human cruelty that many will never comprehend, yet there was something about that dollop presence, that down payment that is a haunting reality that you could never escape from but needed. And again, it’s a tragic phrase, needed the exposure in order for the love of God to actually come to be. Is that fair?
Michael: That is not only fair, it’s a hundred percent accurate. It simply said the worst thing became the best thing. And isn’t that inherent in every aspect of redemption and whose ultimate picture is in the cross?
Dan: Yeah, yeah. Well, I hate to put it this way, but I think there are many of us who believe that to be true. But what we would sign is a doctrinal statement of that having to be true. But the experience of disaster, of exposure of, in one sense, your life coming to an end is so crucial for beginning the process of finding in your body something other than dissociation shame. In one sense, your body was filled by addictive processes that allowed you to numb out almost all the horror that you had known. But as you have written this book, and again, I just want to say it’s one of those books where it will stay with you. It will in one sense hold you and nurture you, but also it’ll disrupt you because you’re inviting people into the very process where the upside down kingdom, it feels like it’s going to kill you, but in so many ways, the healing process opens up magic and beauty. So as you wrote this, I’m just curious what you found out about yourself, even though you are a very wise, very self-reflective man. What did you begin to discover in the writing?
Michael: The first thing I discovered was how uncomfortable and afraid I was of certain parts of myself. I had done a lot of work around the four-year-old part of me, and people will ask me, do you do IFS therapy? Have you been trained in IFS? And I say, yes, I do. IFS therapy, but I’ve never been trained. And the reason for that is back in the mid nineties, there was no IFS therapy and I was diagnosed Dan with dissociative identity disorder. And when that diagnosis was given to me, it was not a label. It was clarification about the nature of what was inside of me. And to me as a therapist, it felt like a stage five cancer diagnosis. Oh my God, people don’t come back from this. The statistics, long-term pervasive disability, the disorganized attachment. And yet the two therapists that I worked with without even knowing it were attachment specialists. One of them in the late 1980s founded the Colorado Society for Dissociation and was decades ahead of the field. He brought EMDR to Denver in the 1990s, and I “fell” into his care and his wife’s care and they saved my life. And during that time when there wasn’t as great a knowledge as we now have about the central nervous system and the polyvagal theory and Bessel van der Kolk’s work around trauma, it was grueling, grueling. And I wrote about this in my previous book, Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle. There were times when I would be curled up in a fetal position, dissociated having body memories and flashbacks, and my family was downstairs celebrating Easter dinner. There were times when after I was an adjunct at Denver Seminary, one hour before day one of class, I had a flashback in my car and had to call my therapist who luckily answered and with swollen red eyes, I would go in and teach classes. And I don’t think anybody knew that I was barely hanging on, but the parts work that is now so much a part of the language of decent therapists that are trying to understand the inner world and so common back then I resisted that. And that’s because I had pure contempt for the vulnerable parts of me, for the parts of me that have been so deeply shamed for the parts of me that I could put together certain facts, things were corroborated by siblings, but I could not own the depths of what had happened. And so I resisted, I resisted, I resisted. So there’s always this invitation that I give people to kind of go at their own pace. Second thing was what I learned was a profound humility of I cannot change myself. And it takes as long as it takes. I remember Tim Keller saying years ago in a sermon that I heard, and it wasn’t, and by any means about therapy, he said, most people listening to the sermon, and most Christians have no idea how very, very long it takes to experience transformation deep inside of us. And I was like, yeah, I think I’ll be ahead of the curve on that one. I’m good. I saw you under Dan Allender and Larry Crabb, and I’ve read all the books and there was a kind of arrogance that we had back then and certainly that I can have today and decades later, I say Tim was right. And you know that because in your wise, hopefully not striking midnight years, but in this season of your life, you are still committed to doing your work and things still come up for us. So people told me over and over again, Michael, this is not a, as they like to say, a three to five year process. This is the rest of your life because of the nature of the cruelty and the abuse and the trauma and that it took me 40 years to get to a beginning of healing. How could it take anything less than that? And here’s the beautiful thing. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t miracles and resurrection and redemption. My life is filled with those moments, but it’s the accumulation of those things that make a life not going to a therapy session with Bessel van der Kolk because he wrote the book or whomever or Michael Cusick in intensive, and I’m one and done. It truly is discipleship, sanctification, spiritual formation, becoming holy, which as the Great Saints told us, takes a lifetime. And there’s this therapeutic almost over promise sometimes that if you get the right books, listen to the right podcast, go to the right trained therapist, that you’re going to be good in a little while, and then maybe you’ll even become a therapist. And I’d say to the last part, great, if you’re called to be a wounded healer, the world needs an infinite amount of those, but it takes a lifetime. And that’s one of the things as my soapbox is welcome to the club.
Dan: Well, the chapter on practice, which can be viewed as, I know that, of course that that’s just part of any skillset, any mentality, but I found myself in that chapter a number of times going, what’s different about this? And I think again, it’s the linkage of we’re practicing attachment. Actually, this isn’t something that is just given. You’re attached, you’re loved, now get used to it and live it. But there actually is a kind of how do you practice attachment? And I just want to step a little bit into some of the brilliant points that you make regarding attachment. You have four S’s, and it’s so helpful because people my age need alliteration to be able to remember. Walk us through those four.
Michael: Sure. This is not original with me, but maybe how I talk about it is original. Dan Siegel first used these terms, our dear friend Curt Thompson I was with last weekend, he asked Dan Siegel, where did you write about those? Where do you hear that? And he goes, I was literally speaking at a conference and it just popped into my head, which you and I, that’s kind of how we fly sometimes and good stuff comes out. And then Curt of course unpacked this in the whole chapter in his book, Soul of Desire, which kind of overlapped with sacred attachment. I think it was written a year before. And so it’s: seen soothe safe and secure. That’s the overview. And the premise is that if you’re seen soothe and safe, you’ll develop a secure attachment. But that seen is so important. It’s really the foundation. So baby cries, parent comes, and if they’re a good enough parent, they attune, they at attend to them, they will have voice prosody. So they’ll talk in a melodic lower voice and they might sing lullabies. Why? Because that activates the right side of the brain. There’s countless different things about this that attunement the effect that it plays into this neural network of being seen. Curt has told me that the infant is born with only 50 to 60% of the neurons in their brain active. The other 40 to 50% come online as the parent gazes into the face of the child. And that even before the child develops visual acuity, their eyes might be closed. They sense neuro perceptively that there is someone gazing on them with love, attention, attunement and care. So that being seen is physical, neurological, and literal. And yet there’s also the sense of being seen where the parent would communicate to the child. I get you. You’re an Enneagram four complex emotional, I get you. You’re an Enneagram three driven, maybe living with a sense of deceit and posing and performing. I get you. You’re a nine, you’re a peacemaker. I get you. In other words, the attunement is individual to who they are. And the scene is, I see you and value you and give you this attention, not for what you do, but who you are. And so many people that we work with, and I see you nodding your head are like, oh, yeah, I was seen. But it’s a helpful because you’re not asking someone to go back and look at facts or details, it’s just this, did you have that gaze? And there most people, their shoulders drop and they exhale. No, I didn’t have that gaze. And what is salvation for if not to live in the gaze of love from God and all who are beloved? So that’s seen. And if we’re seen then we can be soothed. But it’s very hard for a parent caregiver to soothe the child that they don’t see who’s actually in distress or pain because an infant and a young child can’t regulate themselves unless they’ve been regulated. So we talk about attachment styles, avoidant, anxious, disorganized or ambivalent, and that’s the lingo. But what a lot of people don’t understand is that there’s an attachment process, and that process is activated by these four S’s. The process is that as we interact with the one who is attuned to us, there’s a relational process where I begin to be able to regulate myself because the other person is regulated and calm and I begin to organize my world. So again, I’ll probably anticipate you smiling, but those of us who have some kind of a ADHD or for me, I have Asperger’s and I’m on the spectrum, my disorganization and way that I experience the world can be linked potentially to genetics because my father was clearly on the spectrum, a blue collar worker who read three or four thick biographies a week and had a savant knowledge. And none of us ever realized that, oh, that might be something idiosyncratic and neurological until more recently. But how we organize our world, I think I remember you saying one time you hyperfocus, I have impulsivity, kind of a bipolar bent, hyperactivity, distractibility. It’s all there. I’m the poster child and could it be? And my answer is yes. That is the result of the absence of a secure base where I wasn’t seen sooth and safe. So to my narrative as the youngest of five, I don’t remember this, but I’ve been told by my siblings that my mom, whose husband was working two full-time jobs, the third child, my brother was born with a cleft palate, had multiple surgeries, financial ruin for the family, paying for Catholic school. That’s what you did back then. My mom has a nervous breakdown after I was born. Now we’d probably call it postpartum depression, brief reactive psychosis. She was hospitalized almost immediately gone, apparently for a couple months, came back after electroconvulsive therapy, which in 1964 was very different from now. And she’s checked out. And so my nine-year-old or sister and 10-year-older sister attended to me and raised me, and God bless them. They did as wonderful a job as they could, but they were nine and 10 and that impacted them to today. So in the absence of that paternal attuned attachment that allowed an attachment to form, I believe that’s the genesis of my psychopathology. And I love how Gabor Maté and others are now seeing diagnoses that we use to understand people on a clinical level, that those are now being seen through the lens of attachment as opposed to some esoteric disorder that is the result of some very obscure thing in the water or something like that. And so I’d be curious…
Dan: I mean it ties to trauma.
Michael: Yes. Yeah, exactly. The kind of trauma that is not something that happened to them but is precisely something not happening to them that needed to happen. So many men that I work with, and as I said earlier, I’m in Monument Colorado, we’re hosting our 20th Men’s Restoring the Soul Weekend where men with trauma and relational disconnection come and over and over we hear about a third of the men walking through the door bleeding out with trauma that they’ve identified and known of. And then the other two thirds, I’m good, I’m good. I’m a CEO, I’m a doctor, I’ve got a great life, family but the man in his group that says, I realized that my parents never told me they loved me. I never got a hug. And so I went into hyper drive to perform and to achieve and to make my mark on the world. Why? So that I would feel like I was loved, I was worthy, I was somebody. And I know that sounds cliche, but it’s these attachment wounds of trauma that are somehow more insidious, not because of the presence of harm, but the absence of nurturing.
Dan: Well, it’s such a crucial point you’re making in that the reality of capital T, T as big as dinosaur, it leaves you in a position of going, but that’s not me. That’s not my story. So I don’t have the kind of craziness that Michael has and less than what Dan has. But the reality is that you have nailed this with that word insidious. It becomes then seeping into the soil, this acidic structure of loss that you don’t even know that you experienced until your body begins to show something of the symptoms that it’s not growing the good fruit. It’s not creating the ground is not creating what you were meant for. And that’s why when you link seen and soothed that phrase, I get you. And then what I loved was the next phrase, I got you. I not only get you, but there’s something about I can hold the world on your behalf. Soothing only comes when there is that ability to in one sense offer the other what indeed they need that you have the ability to do. That’s what the nuns did. They created both attunement and a circle, a song. And as you describe the dance, play, so I got you, is a soothing not just at the level of taking away stress biochemicals, but soothing the very core needs of what you sow every one of us so desperately need, which as you put it well is the only context for safety. It’s not going to happen without those first two.
Michael: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And just to reiterate, because it’s a little bit of alliteration as well seen is I get you, soothe is I’ve got you in this distress or I’ve got this, and then safe is I’ve got you as you suggested, and then secure is love has you or in an embodied sense, the infant, the child, the teenager, the young adult, the 70-year-old because it was Sue Johnson and her attachment work who said that attachment is no longer zero to four and then you’re good. It’s womb to tomb. So until the tomb, I’m going to need all those same attachment needs. And we now have massive data that psychologists and sociologists are saying that those who age without a relationship, without the gaze of another, without human contact, that something begins to rather than flourish, to diminish, to wither within the soul. All of these attachment needs are absolutely essential for vitality. And here’s one of the ideas I wanted people to get with sacred attachment is that we wonder why though we’ve been force-fed sermons and now podcasts and books and we are called to serve and to be on fire for Jesus, we wonder why that doesn’t sustain a vibrant relationship with God that’s experiential because it cannot, knowing more and doing better cannot create a secure attachment. So the very four S’s that we’re talking about of seen, soothed, safe, and secure are precisely why people feel so insecure in their relationship with God. Back in the seventies and eighties, eternal security was a big theological question. I remember early in my practice, a lot of so-called conservative Christians would come and say, I’m afraid that I’m not saved. I’m going to go to hell today. I would address that very differently as an attachment issue as opposed to you don’t have enough information.
Dan: Absolutely. That is a brilliant point. And again, what I want to capture is how you take us from in one sense, the left brain into the right hemisphere, into the body, into the process, that this is a mystical process that requires not mere surrender, but participation and practice. So capture for us what you wrote brilliantly in that chapter.
Michael: So the book unfolded in ways that really became surprising because I kept saying, okay, I wrote this chapter, so that means I’m going to have to write about this, and if I write about this, I’m going to have to write about that. So I actually had a chapter in the book on Eros, and it was not about sexuality, but the Eros life force, the generative life force that is inside all of us apart from genital sexuality. And we decided to cut that. The beginning of the book, I have a chapter called Delta, and that names this gap between what we are promised in the Christian faith and what we actually experience. And a delta in science is that Greek triangle, which is about the distance between A and B, but there’s another kind of delta, the delta to the Mississippi or another river. And that’s when two separate distinct things come together to create a new substance. And to me, that’s what happens in therapy. That’s what happens in spiritual formation, spiritual direction. That’s what happens in honest, authentic relationships. So people need to have an awareness that what they’ve tried to do to close that delta has failed them, and that it’s actually there for a reason. They’re not bad, it’s not their fault. They’re not lacking then to understand attachment that these four core needs are part of all of our relational currency, if you will. And then the two chapters that were the most surprising is we can’t heal our attachments without imagination. So I had a chapter on imagination, which I wish I could have written a whole book on that, and perhaps someday I will. But it’s this idea at its simplest that out of these three or four pastoral prayers that Paul prays in Ephesians, in chapter 1:18, he says, my prayer for you in light of all this good stuff, 1:1-17 about our relationship with God. My prayer in light of this is that you would see with the eyes of your heart that internally you would have sight to see your inner world, to see the truth of that which is invisible about the love of God, the incarnation of God, the ever present reality of God in our lives and our brokenness in particular. So imagination was important, but then that made me have to have categories of mysticism. And it was Carl Ronner, the German theologian who I think wrote in the sixties who said that in the future, he’s speaking to the church and he said, in the future, believers will either be a mystics or they’ll be nothing at all. And I think we’re living in that time where the people that don’t have inner experience and who are not fueled in contemplative lived experience that’s embodied, if they don’t have that, they’re walking away and they’re saying, Buddhist serves me better than Jesus in terms of a life practice that I can actually live. And he served me better in terms of becoming more kind and generative and compassionate. And so mysticism is having a focal point and an emphasis and a goal of an embodied internal experience of the living God that is pure mercy. And you know this because you used to teach me and others Hebrew words that have wonderful clinical implications. But Pope Francis, a couple years before he died, wrote a book called The Name of God is Mercy. And in there he taught me that the word mercy is from the Hebrew word of rachamim. And I was taught as a young Christian, grace is a gift you don’t deserve. And mercy is taking away the punishment that you do deserve. And that is, as our friend John would say, one third of one third of what’s true about the word mercy. The word mercy means womb. Mercy is the womb that is certainly developmental attachment, sexual, intimate, generative, sustaining, that we live in the womb of God where everything we have at a given moment is precisely there, we just don’t have an embodied felt experience of it. And therefore our faith and our personal growth and living in this very broken world is there’s a truth that’s there that I don’t have to any longer force myself to cognitively believe. It’s a truth that I experience by dropping into because I have a sense of embodied calmness, groundedness, quietness, peacefulness. All of the fruits of the spirit in my mind are embodied realities that are the result of a certain way of being in the world which is connected, attached, and grounded to others. And therefore, we can be grounded and attached and secure with God.
Dan: It feels like to become wise and mature, one cannot escape having to become a child. And in that child likeness, we’re talking about the parts of our own inner world that are fragmented, that are broken-hearted, that need the same capacity from others, but also from ourselves to think in terms of what does it mean to address that 4-year-old or 8-year-old or the number of different parts within you or me, where you go, what does it mean to see them? What does it mean to actually see the parts that require imagination? To be able to pull up a picture, see myself at age four, and allow myself to begin to get a sense of who was that little boy? What is his face? Why is there no smile whatsoever? And even in that photo to begin to go, I got you. I got you. I can hold on your behalf, something of the terror or the consumption and absorption you were in the middle of. So that to me is where as you’re talking about practice, when we think about prayer, I think seldom do we think about prayer as a form of engaging with God, those parts that indeed require us as older beings to engage the younger part of us that still are children. So I think as you’ve captured practice, it has opened up at least for many of us, a sense that what we do in psychotherapy, in a therapeutic healing context is so deeply spiritual that it almost requires us not to say psychology is spiritual, but spirituality always tends to those parts of us that we have renounced, ignored. And your chapter on shame, again, brilliant in terms of underscoring, why do we not respond well? Why do we not see? Why do we not hold and care? Why do we not soothe in a way that opens up the prospect of safety and security? And a lot of that has to do with how we are still bound in seen and unseen shame.
Michael: Yes. And not to correct you, but I did write a chapter about shame, but it was actually entitled evil. And I felt the need, as things unfolded, the world has received enough information about shame through Brene Brown, through Curt Thompson, the soul of shame. I mean, your work for decades has always incorporated shame and then the ensuing contempt toward ourselves or others that comes from that. But what I wanted to say in the midst of a book that dialed back on some of the religious language so that people that have been disaffected by toxic and unhealthy spirituality, that they could actually palette the book. I said, we need to address evil. This isn’t just some cognitive distortions we have because of small wounds. There is a force in the world that is palpable and present that hates our souls because of our capacity to bring goodness, beauty, relationality, generativity into the world. And therefore, we are being lied to over and over and over again by evil. And if people want to say, oh, that’s quaint, that’s an archaic idea, I would simply direct them to M. Scott Peck’s book, the People of the Lie, that as a psychiatrist, he wrote this saying that with great trembling, despite all of his colleagues’ objections, he wrote this book, the People of the Lie about evil. His daughter came up to him who’s apparently very young when he was writing it and said, one night while he’s in a study, daddy, what are you writing about, honey? I’m writing a book about evil. Oh, evil. What’s that? He said, I’ll tell you tomorrow. So she came back to him and said, daddy, I know what evil is. It’s live spelled backwards. And the evil in the world, the enemy does not want us to live, not bios like have a heartbeat and brain activity, but zoè–fluid, dynamic, spirit, proliferation of our nature, which is in the image of God. And as that comes forth, the kingdom comes forth and the world is healed. At Restoring the Soul, we have a little phrase, Jews use the phrase tikkun olam, and that means to repair the world. And we say, tikkun nefesh tikkun olam–repair a soul and you repair the world. And that’s the work that I feel bidden to do, precisely because, not despite, but because of how grace and mercy, the womb of God have been given to me in amounts where I just feel spoiled. And thankfully I’m able to give it back to others.
Dan: Well, Michael, let me just say, there will be a day, probably sooner for me than you when the transport into eternity will be the case. Nonetheless, what I would love to… book an appointment with you as you arrive in eternity, because I think there will be this beautiful gaggle of nuns that in some ways were like the wardrobe and the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe that gave you an access to another kingdom, another world in the midst of a world that you could never, in the midst of the harm that had occurred and would occur. Imagine that that down payment would actually bring the potentiality of bios, of zoè, of the river of life flowing in and through you in a way in which this book and your work and your life is nourishment. It satisfies the hungry soul and the thirsty soul. So to say to you, my friend, I still would rather have a good cup of coffee with you in the mountains. But this has been a sweet pleasure to be with you and congratulations on 20 years of inviting people through that process. And so we will make sure linked to this podcast are the means by which people can get ahold of the book as well as your remarkable work. So thank you, thank you, thank you.
Michael: Thank you, Dan. It was sweet and it’s been an honor. Bless you.