Sacred Attachment: Escaping . . .
Michael John Cusick published Sacred Attachment: Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love (InterVarsity Press) in 2025. Cusick is the CEO and founder of Restoring the Soul, an intensive counseling ministry in Denver, Colorado. The author underscores that we need to be held in loving connection where we feel seen, soothed, safe, and secure (The Four Ss). Above all, God delights in doing the unprecedented to bring us into a childlike trust. Furthermore, our transformation synchronizes with a rhythm deep within us. A rhythm Michael John likes to call ‘God’s own heartbeat.’ Yet the primary concern centers not on the veracity of one’s Christian belief, but the reality of one’s Christian experience.
In contrast, Cusick defines dysbelief as wanting logical equations to explain, contain, and sustain our faith and our life experience. Certainly, our attachment style shapes human relationships and also determines how we experience being seen, soothed, safe, and secure with God. Therefore, the author exhorts, surrender your fears, doubts, and despair. Ask God to meet you there. For the God who looks like Jesus beholds us. However, Michael John cautions, two essential lies sustain evil. First lie – you can’t trust God. And the second lie – because God won’t come through, it’s up to you. Consequently, see these lies and replace them with the truth. Truth is not a proposition. Rather, it’s all of reality aligned with who God is.
Most significantly, Michael John Cusick views perfection as an integrated sense of wholeness that continues to grow, change, and mature. In addition, embodiment holds all aspects within the tension of both-and rather than the fragmentation of either-or. The body is our ‘truth teller’ and the truth sets us free. Thus, we need to integrate our beliefs with experience, a sacred attachment to God to embody our faith fully. And you only become whole when you understand that God loves you in your brokenness. Without the foundation of The Four Ss, you search and wander. You assume that you’re on your own. Hence, the author views God’s holiness as the center of spiritual gravity pulling us closer.
So, if we want to know holiness, we must know Jesus. Therefore, holiness involves a dynamic process, not a static state. Everything you do reflects that you’re either moving toward God or away from Him. Intimacy builds on a foundation of what is true and real. Abiding in a power greater than our own — the power of love that meets us where we are. As a result, Cusick stresses, we must learn to get out of our own way. Because we attempt to quantify and qualify, contain and conscript God to our usual ways of knowing. Instead, our senses, intellect, and spirit serve as a conduit for knowing God in a deeply personal and intimate way.
In conclusion, God created us to see with the eyes of the heart. A way of seeing all of reality, all of God’s transcendent truth. Also, we rely on our imagination because God is so real that we need the eyes of our heart in order to see. Our brokenness becomes the doorway — not a dead-end — for entering a new space where we commune with God. In union with Him.