chris erdman

I’m writing a lot about the role of the ego as you move nearer to God.  Unseating the false self is no easy task.  For help along the way, here’s a top-notch resource from two veteran guides to the Christian inner journey toward the fulness of God in Christ.

James Finley PhD has wrote Merton’s Palace of Nowhere decades ago.  It’s even more meaningful today then when he first wrote it.

“Spiritual identity is the quest to know who we are, to find meaning, to overcome that sense of ‘Is this all there is?’ At the heart of this quest are found Thomas Merton’s illuminating insights leading from an awareness of the false and illusory self to a realization of the true self in Christ.

Here’s a summons into the Beauty within you.

It comes from Psalm 4—Nan Merrill’s translation of the Psalms called, Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness. Cynthia Bourgeault PhD has called Merrill “the Rumi of the Christian faith.”

If you seek a biblical collection of prayers to sustain you on your inner journey, her Psalms is a faithful partner.

“You know that the Beloved dwells with all
who are filled with love;
Love hears when our hearts cry out.
Though you may feel angry,
do not give in to fear;
Commune with the Heart of your heart
as you rest; be in silence.
Bask in the stillness.
Face your fears with forgiveness,
and trust in Love.”

When you pray, check your ego.  A product of Enlightenment rationalism and individualism, it’s got a hankering for the novel, unique, and so-called “authentic.”  It wearies easily of praying the same thing because, frankly, it’s not much interested in obedience to anything besides itself.

The ego wants to be your god, but it doesn’t want you to know that.  In fact, it likes that you’re trying to be spiritual, to seek God, to practice the life of prayer.  So long as you’re trying, it can still boss you around.  It can swell with pride when you’re good, and knock you around when you’re bad.  All this only feeds the ego.

The perennial wisdom tradition in all spiritual traditions knows that humble, dogged obedience in the same direction bears the fruit of a holy life.

Modernity is quite ignorant of all that, and my ego, at least, is pretty well infected with its disease.

That’s why I pray the Jesus Prayer over and over again.  It’s a dumb prayer.  It’s aim is to silence my ego who can’t stand its simplicity or my dogged obedience to drawing my mind down into my heart.  When my ego is brought into submission to my heart, the Center, it stands dumb before Christ.

I still can’t figure out why it resists its healing.

I continue in this conversation about the use of repetitive prayers.  When Jesus commended the particular prayer known as the Lord’s Prayer, did he mean for us to repeat the words as they are or to use them as a guide for our own improvising?

Modern, Western culture prizes a heightened individualism—or I should say, an untethered individualism.  We who’ve drunk deep of its intoxicating brew will need to turn more toward the tradition rather than away from it.  Praying with firm connections to our spiritual heritage doesn’t mean a mere rote and empty repetition of prayers like the Lord’s Prayer.  Rather it means, as in jazz, that we learn our scales so well that we can then improvise properly and freely when given a chord chart or lead sheet.

The Lord’s Prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) is a lead sheet, as are the Psalms. From a prayer like this we can playfully  and confidently improvise.

Too many of us modern people want to improvise in prayer like jazz musician, Miles Davis, plays the horn but without the long, hard apprenticeship in the tradition.  That would be as silly as a teenager picking up a horn, stepping onto the stage and thinking she can imitate Miles Davis.

The saints and mystics would all tell us that there is power in the words, as-they-are (like scales to Miles Davis, they are non-negotiable).  So take up the words of the Lord’s Prayer or Jesus Prayer.  Pray them over and over until they play in the heart, until the heart is alive with them, beating out the rhythm of the words, and the mind is no longer thinking them.   Only then will you approach the only kind authenticity that matters.

Continued next post…

C.S. Lewis once wrote a piece called “Festooning ready made prayers.” He understood the temptation of free improvisation and the poverty of the unfettered individualism it springs from.  He urged believers to follow more closely those prayers that are good representatives of the faith, tested by age.

So, to turn from whatever poverty in prayer leaves you hungry for God, consider:

1. Rethinking your stance toward what is rote.
2. Re-evaluating history and the gifts of the tradition (the Bible and historic practices).
3. Becoming suspicious of the mind’s desire to always be in control, always thinking, always demanding to know and understand (which is a form of control).
4. Suspend rational thought for awhile.  Has it really gotten you where you want to be in terms of intimacy with God?
5. Take the Holy Name of Jesus upon your lips and let it move down into your heart. Rest in the Name. Let your meditation (rote repetition) on the Name, keep you coming back to the one thought that really matters: the Name of Jesus.
6. When your thoughts assail you (like: “This is dumb; it’s just rote repetition”), come back to the Name and interrogate the thought: “Why should I believe you?”. Dwell instead in the presence of God.
7. Set apart some sacred time in a quite place.  Let your body settle into stillness.
8. Sit of lie still while remaining alert.
9. Watch your thoughts but don’t follow them or judge them good or bad, pleasurable or frustrating.
10. Return over and over to the Name.

This may not seem like prayer because we often think prayer is more like chattering at God.  But silence is the true language of God (click on 1 Kings 19.11-12; Psalm 4.4; Isaiah 50.4; Habakkuk 2.20; Mark 9.7).  When you’re least conscious of your own thoughts about God, yourself, and the world—when you’re naked of illusion, when there’s no false self you have to feed, when you’re dead to all but love—you are nearest to God, and nearest your true self made in God’s image.

About contemplative prayer, Joe asks: “How do those of us for whom the ancient practices are so foreign, connect with the sense of awe and intimacy you advocate? I can see that while the Jesus Prayer can focus us, I’m concerned that it might just as easily become nothing but more than a rote and empty old habit.”

Joe asks an important question and offers a helpful caution. We don’t want rote and empty old habits; Jesus does warn against vain repetition (Matthew 6.7).  Here’s my take on this—

When Jesus taught us to pray, and warned us against “heaping up empty words,” he nevertheless taught us to pray by rote (Matthew 6.9ff): “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

And if we look at the Bible’s many prayers, so many of them are essentially a recitation of the tradition (cf. Mary’s response to the angel in Luke 1.38: “Here I am, servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word,” compare also the disciples’ response to persecution in Acts 4.23ff: they pray Psalm 2, verbatim, then improvise on it).

The Bible, and biblical prayer, celebrates rote repetition and is highly suspicious of the forms of free prayer we in the West consider “authentic.” They’d consider it vain. Any improvising the believer does in prayer is done based upon the memorized text from the tradition.

The problem is that those of us raised in modern, western, enlightened civilization think rote repetition is a bad thing. We’re hung up on so-called “free thought”. There’s no such thing as free thought. We all improvise on some “text”.

Listen to the prayers that spill from our lips; they do not cohere very closely to the Bible, but rather to Western values–mostly for security, safety, and abundance. There are a few precious exceptions of course, but these praying persons have drunk deep of sacred texts.

Next post, how repetitive praying can move us toward silence, the language of God…

THE 14th CENTURY ENGLISH SCHOOL OF SPIRITUALITY

February 19-20, 2010

In our turbulent world, it’s easy to let distraction and turmoil scatter us and leave us spiritually dull and cold. This retreat explores the resurgence of the Prayer of the Heart among the fourteenth century English spiritual writers and mystics: Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing. There was nothing easy about living in the fourteenth century, but these witnesses lived a life rooted in Jesus Christ in such a way that their world felt His grace.

Led by Dr. Robert Hale of the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California, Dr. Steve Varvis, historian at Fresno Pacific University, and yours truly.

University Presbyterian Church, Fresno, California

Follow this link for more information on The Prayer of the Heart Conference

For those deepening their spiritual practice, here’s a simple introduction to the classic text on Christian prayer, The Cloud of Unknowing.  Follow this link for the longer article with helpful excerpts from the text.

For the first 16 centuries of the church, all Christians engaged in this silent form of prayer. Both then and today, contemplative prayer is practiced in the orthodox context of communal Christian worship and intense Bible study. Since it acknowledges the inadequacy of language to describe God, contemplative prayer is often called the via negativa (”negative way”). In the 16th century, John of the Cross embraced this prayer, saying that it purifies us and prepares us to love. Teresa of Avila taught that this “prayer of quiet” revives a “desolate and very dry” soul, creating an intimacy with God that is like “rain coming down abundantly from heaven to soak and saturate” the gardens of our hearts. Christians of all backgrounds are returning to this simple Jesus-centric prayer to grow their souls and learn to love in an increasingly complex post-modern world.

In Anonymous’s timeless teaching on Christian contemplative prayer, the Cloud, he shows us how to pray and reconnect with a very personal, very forgiving God of love.

There’s a pretty broad consensus in the classical Christian tradition around the three essential steps or stages of prayer.

I repeatedly return to the classical tradition for the same reason many of us return to Mozart or Bach, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and U2. These artists are classic because they’ve proven themselves over time.

So too with the historic prayer tradition. That it’s old doesn’t make the ancient teaching valuable—there’s plenty that’s old, but worthless. It’s valuable precisely because it’s proven to be true over the ages. That is, those who’ve awakened to the spiritual life have found the teaching not only consistent with their experience, but competent to guide them on the path.

Okay, for those interested in digging around in the dust a bit, here’s a list of just a few of the old ones who essentially agree: St. Dionysius, Evagrius, Maximus the Confessor, Nikitos Stithatos, and St. Isaac the Syrian. They speak of the stages or steps of prayer with several different terms such as “the purgative,” “the illuminative,” “the mystical” (Dionysius), or the “carnal,” “psychic,” and “spiritual” (St. Isaac).

For our ears today, I’ll identify the steps in the Prayer of the Heart, the practice of the Jesus Prayer, in this way:

1. Letting go

2. Becoming aware

3. Resting

There’s little new in what I’ll show you. It’s old as dust. But it’s a tested path for all who seek a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God—who want to pray in such a way that they live with a nearly continuous sense of the Holy no matter what they’re doing or where they are.

More on each of these stages or steps to come . . .

The spiritual life requires wonder.  Well, life in general requires wonder.  Unfortunately, wonder too often evades us.  Maybe it’s we who evade wonder.  I’ve written on this previously.  Here’s an example of how we can walk right past some of the most remarkable beauty in the world and miss it entirely.

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. (See the video and related Washington Post article here).  He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist.

Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written,with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty?

Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?