One thing I ask from the Lord,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple.
For in the day of trouble
he will keep me safe in his dwelling;
he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent
and set me high upon a rock.
(Psalm 27:4,5)
In our current series ABBA, FATHER we are exploring how the modern theory of attachment styles might speak to our relationship with God. It is important to recognize that quite often is is not the acts of faith - prayer, worship, scripture reading, and so on - that are the problem; sometimes our relationship to the things of faith has been skewed by how we understand love. Attachment theory is meant to give us language for relationship patterns that we imprinted upon in the first year or two of life that tend to become a pattern in adulthood if we don’t recognize and repair. We learn this language not to simply become a victim of personal history and blame our parents for how we’ve been screwed up, but to forge a clearer path towards health. We can develop new patterns of attachment that help us grow and move forward in our stories.
First, let’s understand what anxious(or ambivalent) attachment looks like in our daily relationships. When you were very small, you may have experienced your parents as inconsistent. In one moment they responded to your cries with reassurance and tenderness, yet in others they seemed distracted or even resentful. A child who perceives this unpredictability soon intuits it is her job to keep them constantly close, because they don’t put in enough effort. This can become a never-ending need for reassurance in relationships, fueled by a constant alert for any signs of possible disconnection. The anxiously attached person lives in a vigilant state. He cannot enjoy moments of togetherness or relax because he is white-knuckling his relationships. In fact, the closer he gets to others the more worried he may become that something might go wrong. This leads to people-pleasing, an inability to maintain healthy boundaries, and at times when the stress rises a tendency to become overly-dramatic and demanding in order to protect connection. Ironically, this clinginess often drives others away.
Our ancestors on the plains of the Serengeti hundreds of thousands of years ago were in constant survival mode. Our species developed complex nervous systems to keep us attentive to possible danger in the rustling of the grass, and quick learning when we are burned by an open flame or made sick by a poisonous berry. This is what we call the negativity bias, and it’s not all bad. It keeps us alive. But when we get trapped in negative thought patterns it becomes hard to thrive. Neuroscience teaches us that 2/3 of the neurons in the amygdala, our “lizard brain”, are oriented to negativity. We imprint upon a negative experience in less than a second. Conversely, it takes our brains 30 seconds to a minute to imprint upon a positive experience. That is why, despite the pleasurable moments and affirming words we may have encountered all week, we will fixate on the one unkind or critical word spoken to us.
So what does anxious attachment to God look like, and where does it come from?
When we’re anxiously attached to God, we constantly worry that we are never doing enough to earn God’s favor. For many in the Christian household, we have been told that “sin is what separates us from God”. This leads to all sorts of anxiety-inducing questions and struggles because it insinuates closeness is directly proportional to our ability to manage our sin. The program can look a variety of ways depending on the values of our denomination of origin.
For Catholics, it might become a compulsive need to attend holy communion, get all the words right, and confess every sin imaginable to a priest. For Pentecostals, it becomes a question of mustering up enough of this thing called “faith” - when God doesn’t do what we ask, someone must be to blame. For evangelicals the fear of backsliding means we have to do our quiet time daily, listen to the right celebrity speakers, and win enough souls to impress God. The irony is especially tangible for those of us in the Protestant household, who end up working very hard to be saved by faith and not works!
Sadly, the solutions all imply a sort of behavior modification that can only lead to spiritual exhaustion - those acts might make us feel closer to God, but certainly not relaxed. We find it impossible to lay claim to the free love and grace we were promised. Furthermore, an anxious attachment to God has us constantly scrambling for the next encounter, the next word or revelation, in order to be validated. The anxiously attached Christian tends to barrel forward so compulsively that she forgets what God has already said and done in the past. Any word from the Lord that does come cannot be cherished, because it slips through the fingers of anxiety that demand more.
When considering anxious attachment to God and how we might repair, I am reminded of the story of Joshua. He was a young man, chosen to be Moses’ assistant in guiding the Israelites through the desert to at last enter the Promised Land. Because of his own hubris, Moses was not allowed to complete the journey, and died within view of their salvation. When we pick up the story in the Book of Joshua, we find God’s ordination and encouragement to his new chosen leader. Read Joshua 1:1-9 before moving on.
It is important to note above all else that God promises to be with Joshua and his people always: “I will never leave you nor forsake you”. God’s loving presence is not contingent upon the sins of his people, or their ability to perform in a way to earn God’s favor. What might that reassurance have meant to Joshua, overwhelmed by the massive shoes he was called to fill? We see this echoed throughout the ministry of Jesus - he dined with sinners, drew close to the broken, and patiently endured the foibles of his own followers until the end. Before his ascension Jesus makes the same promise to the Church given to Joshua and the Israelites: “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt. 28:20b). What joy we should find in the promise that God has bound Godself to us eternally, regardless of our condition!
In this first portion of the Book of Joshua we find a key practice that helps us build secure attachment to God.
Sabbath is an opportunity to slow down and relax into the loving embrace of our Abba Father, knowing we are perfectly loved. We too often misinterpret the Law of Moses as a list of rules given by God to earn God’s favor. In fact, it was God’s rehabilitation project for a people who had been misused and abused for 400 years. The Law was meant to help them come to understand the heart of God, and what it means to be a human made in God’s image.
To put Sabbath practice in the original Ten Commandments is to see it as the discipline upon which all others are built. In fact, God takes great measure to call the day of rest “holy”. This weekly rhythm reminds Israel, and by extension us, that our value is not in our productivity and performance, but in the fact that we are unconditionally loved. Sabbath is an act of rebellion against our Pharaonic anxiety-ridden culture that insists we must keep striving in order to be acceptable. Americans are like sharks - we believe if we slow down and rest we might die.
Sabbath is more than what we term self-care in the modern era. Too often our reaction to the busyness of our lives is to use what precious time we have outside work for alternative forms of busyness or non-intentioned frivolity. This is why many of us approach Monday mornings with a certain dread. We may have done things in the name of self-care, but we have not tended to our souls, which I would define as the true self at rest in God.
However, I don’t believe the pivot from self-care to soul-care is that drastic. Part of it is leaving behind the idea that all spiritual exercises ostensibly cost us time and energy. What if worship could be invigorating? What if deep fellowship with our Christian brothers and sisters could be life-giving? Sabbath invites us to times of focused attention on God, but it also welcomes times of acknowledging God in moments of rest or play indirectly. We take by faith that God delights in our delight. This can mean taking a walk, swimming in the pool, enjoying a compelling film, even playing videos games. We just have to be sensitive to when active enjoyment becomes indulgence that feeds our egos rather than our souls.
PRACTICE:
Use your calendar to designate a specific day of the week to be Sabbath for you. Perhaps right now you can only carve out half a day, and that is okay. Then, make a list of things you can do that will help you directly connect with God in a relaxing way, and things you can do alongside God that bring you delight. Try to plan your Sabbath time with some intentionality so it doesn’t breeze past you accidentally.
The second way to repair our attachment to God is found in Joshua 4:1-9. Read the passage before continuing.
Just as God brought the Israelites from Egypt into the desert through the Red Sea by Moses, so God brings Israel into the Promised Land through the Jordan River by Joshua. This circular narrative reminds us that God is steadfast in God’s loving presence and guidance.
In the ancient world, memory stones were erected to commemorate God’s faithfulness. Even today in places like Peru and Ireland we see stacked stones or large dolmens placed in a sacred space that invites passers-by to remembrance. It is profound symbolism that God asks the Israelites to bring up stones “from the middle of the Jordan” to commemorate this miraculous event. Water signifies the chaos of the world throughout the Old Testament, and God continuously holds back the chaos to protect and provide for God’s people. For Joshua and those in his care, it was imperative that they could reach down beneath the surface waves and draw up something from the deep place that would stand for all time: “and they are there to this day”.
Remembering the past encourages us to peer beneath the surface so we might perceive the fingerprint of Abba at work in our stories. The Jewish faith is full of sacraments of remembrance, whether it is monuments, festivals and feasts, or liturgical prayers like the psalms. These rhythms are invaluable because they recall what was true in the past in order to ground Israel in the present, so they might look to the future with genuine hope.
When we struggle with anxiety we become unmoored from the deep story of God’s faithfulness. We look back over our lives and only perceive the chaos of the waves - we take what we feel is true in the present moment and use it as a lens to interpret our past. It is akin to wandering through the woods and accidentally stepping in a hornet’s nest. Our nervous system is overloaded with panic and fear. We then see a shadowy figure moving towards us from amongst the trees, and we transfer our fear from the hornets to the stranger, assuming they are here to harm us as well. This is why we tend to so easily forget what God has already done for us, has already spoken over us. We clamor for the next sign, more evidence of God’s faithfulness, but our anxiety prevents us from holding it tightly and trusting it.
The spiritual discipline of remembrance helps us slow down and build the neural pathways of positive experience. The scientific concept of neuroplasticity posits that we are able to literally rewire our brains away from destructive patterns and towards healing ones, which in the Christian tradition we would say is one way God brings salvation to our bodies.
Quite often a word from the Lord is not measured by its grandiosity, but how specifically it meets our stories. I recall a time at my former church in which we were learning to listen and offer prophetic words to one another. The wonderful older lady who was leading us through this exercise went around the room and prayed for each of us, asking the Lord for a word of encouragement and then speaking it over us. When she came to me, she paused and said, “God wants you to know He sees you, and he’s proud of us.” Honestly, it was rather deflating. That could apply to anyone, I thought to myself. Yet, as I answered the call to move to Orlando and pastor this church, there were many moments in the early years when I would question my ability, my capacity, or whether I had even made the right choice. I felt misled, abandoned, inadequate. It was in those moments that simple word from my friend in Nashville would rise up from deep within my soul and offer me solace. It became a balm of remembrance to my anxious thoughts.
PRACTICE:
Erect a memory stone. Consider a moment in your past when God spoke to you clearly, or acted faithfully in your story. Try and recall the details of the moment - where you were, who was there, what the room sounded and smelled like. Then, consider what it felt like to recognize that gift was indeed from the Lord. Remembering the feelings associated with a memory will help it sink deep into your soul.
Take about two minutes to meditate on that moment. Write down what you can in a way you will be able to revisit it later. Then, share your memory with a friend. Not only does speaking out our stories help us latch onto them as true, it also encourages those around us to witness God’s faithfulness to us all.
If you would like to hear the sermon version of this essay, click here.