chris erdman

The Resurrection is likely a belief you affirm (or maybe don’t), a doctrine that’s part of the religious faith you affirm.

But the Resurrection is not a mere idea. It is to be lived. Not just by Jesus or by others, but by you . . . in the ordinariness of your daily life.

A woman with young children tells me that resurrection is something she practices each day–when doing dishes, parenting a child with a challenging emotional make up, talking with her husband about her day. It’s no longer an idea, something she confesses in the creeds. It’s a reality that feeds her way of life.  She says she’s learning that she can’t live life anywhere other than where she is, what’s in front of her, who she is right now.  Resurrection frees her to open to Life here and now.

Religiously we say that the Resurrection is God’s triumph over sin, death, and evil. It is, in a word, freedom.

So, as St. Paul says: “Awake sleeper, rise from the dead.” (Ephesians 5.14)

You’ll make the Resurrection more than nice ideas by practicing the resurrection daily. Free now to embrace this moment as sacred, this moment as the meeting place between you and God, this moment as alive with wonder.

The holiness of daily life; the sacredness of this place, this moment, this body of yours; practices that open you to see and embrace the presence of God here, now.

That’s what this site is about.

In her book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, Episcopal priest and college professor, Barbara Brown Taylor, summons us to that life and gives guidance for embracing it. I love the way she calls to us with the voice of Holy Wisdom (Proverbs 1.20-21):

“What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily human experience of human life on earth.

In a world of too much information about almost everything, bodily practices can provide great relief. To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary or lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. . . .

In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life. . . .

So welcome to your priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life. The good news is that you have everything you need to begin.”

This site focuses on awakening the spiritual life.  Frankly that’s easier said that done.  Sometimes there are forces at work in us that make awakening on our own pretty damn tough, if not downright impossible.

Holy Saturday seems an apt time to reflect on the nature of depression and the spiritual life.  We live most of our lives somewhere between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  And for millions of people clinical depression can make us feel so far from Easter that it’s announcement of life’s triumph over death seems little more than whistling in the dark.

The recent and tragic death of a cherished friend has made me more more aware and sensitive to the effects of depression, as well as the dangerous and debilitating stigma we still attach for mental illness.  We must work much harder to remove this stigma, and find ways to stand with and support suffers and their families so that clinical depression is no longer a hidden and isolating disease.

Here’s a link to a remarkably candid and healing interview on Speaking of Faith—one of my favorites podcasts (you can download the MP3 or just listen to in on your computer; see the links under the photo banner; it reads like this: SOF OnDemand: » Download (mp3, 53:18) ¦ » Listen Now (RealAudio, 53:00) ¦ » Podcast).  If you prefer, here’s a link to the written transcript.

In it Krista Tippet not only engages a few remarkable people who explore their own experiences with depression from a spiritual perspective, but she shares her own journey through the darkness.

I commend it to all with the prayer that a thin ray of Easter’s light may break in upon us and help us find healing—both in us and through us.

Following up the last post on the distraction of thoughts and multitasking and the power of the breath, here’s a breathing prayer from Christine Sine’s Godspace site (see also Jonny Baker’s site in the UK).  She uses it in groups and alone.  ”I suggest that people sit with their hands in their laps,” she writes, “palms up while they say the first line and take a deep breath then turn palms down and breathe out as they say the second line.”

Breathe in the breath of God

Breathe out your cares and concerns

Breathe in the love of God

Breathe out your doubts and despairs

Breathe in the life of God

Breathe out your fears and frustrations

We sit quietly before the One who gives life and love to all creation,

We sit in awe of the One who formed us in our mother’s wombs

We sit at peace surrounded by the One who fills every fibre of our being

Breathe in the breath of God

Breathe out your tensions and turmoil

Breathe in the love of God

Breathe out your haste and hurry

Breathe in the life of God

Breathe out your work and worry

We sit quietly before the One who gives life and love to all creation,

We sit in awe of the One who formed us in our mother’s wombs

We sit at peace surrounded by the One who fills every fibre of our being

Find a quiet place and sit down (or lie down) and spend a dozen or more minutes with God. Not the kind of prayer when you talk at God (there’s place for that). But the prayer that listens deeply. Yields. Is simply present to God. Being with the Mystery. Communion.

What do you do?

Begin this way . . . step one of three.

Sit (or lie) still. Alert. Become aware of your body. Find places of tension with you. (I carry my tension in my jaw and cheeks. My gut too.) Find the tension and release it gently. Let your body, settle into a natural stillness. Now let your breath fall into a natural rhythm. Don’t control it. Let it comes to a natural in and out rhythm, as if you were sleeping.  Feel the life in your body.  The Orthodox Fathers searched inwardly until they could feel their heart beating. Tough. But most beginners can feel a sense of aliveness in their hands.

You seek God alone. But your body is a vessel for the Holy Spirit. The fullness of God dwells in your body, scandalous as that may be. The Incarnation teaches us to honor the body; so does Christian thought and practice. If you’re going to meet God, you will meet God by becoming more aware of your body, letting your body be that vessel of encounter. If you’re not in your body, you’ll not meet God. You’ll be everywhere else but the one place God’s come to meet you.

Sit still. Sit straight. Breathe. Relax. And as you do you may begin to gently let a prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) rise and fall with your breath. In . . . “Jesus.” Out . . . “Mercy.” Or something similar.

Don’t fret if your thoughts drag you away. They’ll try. When they do, simply and undramatically return to your senses—follow your breath into your body, and corral the mind with a simple prayer.  Classically, this is the purgative or cleansing step.  With each breath, confess your tension.  Confess the difficulty you have getting still.  Confess the thoughts, ideas, images that want to lead you anywhere but here.  Confess your need for God.  Let go. Release.  Unburden.

Begin with 10 minutes and work up to 25 minutes. Once or twice a day.

Step two next post.

I admit it.  I’ve got a thing for old things.  Old is certainly not always better, but I’ve not found much wisdom yet in the new.  So, when I’m looking for wisdom to help me in the spiritual life I mostly look to the past.  The past holds wisdom that’s been tested by time.

Here’s a little tidbit that helps me awaken to real life from the dream of the illusions that want all my attention:

“Human life is a mostly a dream.  In our dreams we look without seeing, we listen without hearing, we taste and touch without tasting or touching, we speak without saying anything, we walk without moving.  The mind invents realities that are entirely imaginary.”  Philo of Alexandria (50 BCE-20 CE)

It’s awfully easy to look without seeing the person right in front of me.  To listen to the sound of traffic or the song of the bird in the tree outside my widow, but not really hear.  To taste and touch . . . and miss it all.  And of course, to utter something that has no life behind the words because I’m not really in my words.

I might as well be dreaming, because I’m not really living.

Changing that’s not hard; but it means no longer allowing my thoughts to render the rest of me unconscious.

Awakening to the spiritual life after a long, raucous, and wandering path, a life full of many mistakes and painful episodes, a North African named Augustine lamented his spiritual dullness.  Augustine, later acknowledged as a doctor and saint in the truest sense of the word (doctor as healer; saint as holy one), points us toward the only place any of us can really meet God:

“Late have I loved You, Beauty, at once so ancient and so new!  Late have I come to love You!  You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.  You were with me, but I was not with You.”

As the world turns toward the mystery that is Christmas . . . God with us . . . you are awakening.  You are awakening to the God who is as near to you as the beating of your heart.

Here’s a simple practice to move you from living all in-your-head, or “in the world outside,” and instead into relationship with that “Beauty, at once so ancient and so new”:

Quiet yourself, even for a moment before your computer.  Gently follow your breath (click here for suggestions on breathing) and the Breath/Holy Spirit will guide you from “the world outside” yourself and into the inner realm.  Gently repeat, “Come, Oh come, Emmanuel,” and let the words ride on your breath.  The breath is the narrow gate into the heart, and the heart is the cradle of Christ, God-With-Us.

You touch eternity.  You brush up against heaven.  Now you know heaven’s not up or out or somewhere other than where you are, nor is it waiting for you when you die.

It is in.

It is now.

It is here.

The spiritual life is a life of no illusions. Meet God here in the daily realities of this life, this place, the person or task or thing before you now. Meet God here or you’ll not meet God anywhere. There’s something deeply false and unspiritual in the temptation to want something else, be someone else, or go somewhere other that where you are now. Some people mistakenly think that spirituality is a flight into a different realm, a rejection of the world and ordinary things. There is no other world or place than this one. And if the incarnation of God in Jesus means anything at all (and I think it does), then this world, this place, the faces before us, the streets we walk, the chores we perform, these bodies of ours are all sacred. The truth is, matter matters. And an intentional spiritual life means you live fully awake to the wonder and sacredness of it all. A true spirituality is a united, undivided self–mind, heart, and body.

I’m saddened when I realize how must of my life I’ve spent elsewhere. Elsewhere is always fantasy, illusion, unreality. I’ve spent too much of my life simply “in my head” and not really in my body, not truly present. It’s little wonder, then, that true love has so often escaped me–except for those moments when I found myself drawn into the exquisite pleasure of the present, intensely awake to things like the allure of a rose’s fragrant scent, the wonder of a child’s innocent view of the world, the glory of a drop of dew trembling precariously on a leaf and looking as if it may burst at any moment.

The narrow gate into the spiritual life you seek stands before you . . . here, now . . . through practices like meditation, contemplative prayer, and the Jesus Prayer.  Many, Jesus said, will take the wide and easy road, undisciplined and nearly always pulled out of the present by the unruly thoughts in their heads. But there’s nothing there for you but pain and disappointment.

• Enter through the narrow gate, walk the uncommon path.

• Plop down on the grass (or plunge into the icy, invigorating cold of a snowy field) and see and feel the world from as near the earth as you can get.

• Return to the moment over and over again and you will feel the spirit of life rising in your bones, the fire of the Spirit dancing within you saying, “Yes, Yes! More of that.”

This beautiful photo comes compliments of Petra Oldeman Photography, the Netherlands.

One reader explores her own awakening and longing to live in full communion with God.  She’s begun a solid practice and the practice of this interior prayer is carrying her deeper into this communion.  She knows the beauty of simply sitting in God’s presence, just being.  But she wonders,  ”Is it possible for that peace to always be there?”

I offer this as an answer . . .

That peace is always there. Jesus assures us that the kingdom, the reign or realm of God, is both coming and already among us. What’s more, it is within us. So is it always there, within us and among us.  The trick is to create such a well-worn path by our practice of prayer that we can quickly find the narrow gate to that inner world of eternity no matter where we are or what we’re doing.

We will not always (or perhaps often) live in the bliss of that peace. We live a mixed life (both active and contemplative) and will find ourselves tilting one way or another during the day. But we carry the peace of God within us.

Imagine your heart as a little shrine in the midst of the city, often overlooked by the traffic on the street or sidewalk, mostly ignored by the busy and important people in offices and restaurants around it. But it is always there and you can enter it whenever you wish.

There are times you’ll forget it and the narrow gate at its entrance will become overgrown and hidden. But when you awaken again and return to your practice, you can push through the ivy on the gate and clear the path again.

It’s no use berating yourselves for forgetting the little shrine that’s always so near, or fearing that you’ll get too busy to enter it. You will. But you can always return. In fact, every distraction is another opportunity for you to return. And you’ll find God always smiling, arms outstretched when you walk back through that gate and down the path.

The wonder of all this is that this shrine isn’t out the door and down the street.  It’s as near as the beating of your heart.  The peace of God is enshrined in your heart and goes with you wherever you may go.

Music connects with something deep within us.  It awakens us spiritually.

Here’s my 19 year old son, interpreting a song by Yiruma.  He’s added a bridge he wrote, but it fits in so well I can’t tell what’s his and what’s Yiruma.  And that’s as it should be when the river flows in you.  Josh started playing the piano this past year.  But it connects deeply within him.  This video reveals the way he’s letting his body inhabit the music.  Rather than just playing notes, he’s beginning to yield; whenever we yield the the Spirit we’re no longer playing at something, we’re being played.

Okay, so I’m a proud father.  But Josh’s playing illustrates the path of spiritual awakening, the yielding that’s necessary for prayer.  There comes a point when we must lose our heads and inhabit prayer itself, until we’re no longer conscious of praying, but find ourselves being prayed.

Josh is still a beginner and probably making some mistakes.  But he doesn’t care; he’s already letting go.

So, if you’re beginning at prayer, don’t let your need to get your praying right dam up the river that wants to flow in you (John 7.38).

1. Make some mistakes.

2. Try new things.

3. Feel.

4. And let the Spirit pray in you.