Attached to God: A Practical Guide to Deeper Spiritual Experience

by Krispin Mayfield

is it possible to focus too much on your relationship with God? How can you tell the difference between fervent devotion and frantic insecurity? How do you distinguish between secure spirituality and an anxious attachment style? If you think about it, church history is full of spiritual heroes who focused on God above all else.

Many Christian practices create ecosystems for perfectionism to grow, because on the surface the effort appears to flow from a deep relationship with God. While this spiritual insecurity can feel like a constant knot in your stomach, it may often bring applause from a church community. You always show up to Bible study having completed all the homework and with the best insights. You volunteer for three ministries at your church. You regularly read books about growing closer to God. You appear to be devout—and you are. But this devotion is driven by an underlying feeling that without spiritual activities, the connection will evaporate. Without regular routines, you doubt that God will stick around.

See winner's danvers of spiritual practices

when you engage in an anxious attachment style, you are doing exactly what you’ve learned to do. You relentlessly pursue God in the way you’ve been taught, deprived of the opportunity to experience his unending faithfulness.

It was generally understood that God’s presence was at the center of the temple, and only certain people were allowed in. Then Jesus showed up and ate with sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes and those who were not ritually cleansed. Nothing stops God from coming close, especially not sin.

It’s important to see the ways that the anxious attachment framework is embedded in our very language. When we use “close to God” as a euphemism for living righteously, it only reaffirms the belief that our connection with God depends on our behavior.

To see something in a new way, you have to engage emotionally with your own experience and your own memories, harvesting and reorganizing them for a new way of seeing. But if you are always dodging your emotions, you will avoid your own experience, as well as avoiding the experience of others. If you always ignore your own emotional suffering, you’ll likely take the same approach to the suffering of others.

many Christian communities have downplayed teachings of a God who wishes to heal us and emphasized a God who only judges us, simmering with resentment and disappointment. We end up feeling alone in our sin, unsure how to change yet knowing we should.

“Change my heart, Oh God,” we cry, and what we mean is, “Make me into someone you actually can stand to be around.” God would prefer us to be a little less ourselves, a little more like Jesus, before we can truly have the connection we long for. Often it feels like we must be incredibly holy people before even considering approaching God, or else risk the pain of judgment and criticism and disgust.

in the modern-day church, the idea of being “just like Jesus”22 has often been taken to mean we should become less like our unique selves, as though there were something inherently wrong with the way God created us. Sometimes it has even meant we are supposed to become “Jesus-robots”23 that reflect him to the exclusion of reflecting the unique ways we were made in the image of God.

There are reasons to change and grow and heal and transform, but getting closer to God is not one of them. If we try to change ourselves because we fear disconnection, it won’t lead to healing. If we conclude that we are the problem, then we think the solution is to get rid of ourselves, often through self-destructive ways.

In current times, shame-filled attachment can look like fasting or committing yourself to spiritual practices from a place of self-punishment, hoping it forms you into someone that God will like more. Or it could be constantly berating yourself with self-critical thoughts. Or continually confessing to God that you know how horrible you are. If we can hate who we are, it might motivate us to change into someone who would be good enough to get close to God.

Somehow, along the way, we’ve lost the story of a Parent who wraps us in a huge hug, embracing the whole of us, pig slop and all. We need a secure base, even when we’ve blown it all, a Parent who meets us with great delight just to be near us, absent of resentment or stifled frustration or disgust. This is a Parent who understands what connection is all about and knows what we need to feel safe and secure in a relationship. Rather than a God who loves us in spite of who we are, we need a God who delights in who we are, in spite of what we’ve done.

We all know God loves us, but God’s delight is a whole other matter. We need a God who looks beneath our sin and shame and sees a beloved child. A relational God created us for a relationship in holy communion. True connection happens when we are delighted in, brought close not in spite of who we are but because of who we are. Danielle Shroyer puts it plainly: “Who we are, before anyone else, is children of God.”

Based on the popular teaching that God can’t stand sin, we’d expect that God would be disgusted with humans, especially those least holy in society. Surprisingly, when Jesus comes to earth, he doesn’t start puking everywhere. He’s not disgusted. He delights in people, loves spending time and sitting at tables with those who would never have been welcomed into the temple. Jesus, the perfect picture of God, delights in us. This doesn’t mean God’s not upset about harmful systems in the world—Jesus culled corruption from the temple by overturning tables. But clearly he delights in people, including those marginalized by oppressive religious structures.