chris erdman

When distorted, prayer becomes complicated when, in fact, it’s really quite simple. Make too much of prayer and it looses its essential simplicity and beauty. Focus on prayer and you turn prayer into something you must accomplish, something for which you need extensive training, and certain experts to show you the way.

When this happens, you distort the experience of prayer into something other than everything that’s not prayer. Prayer becomes something sacred, an act tied to certain religious practices and doctrines.

When this happens, you separate prayer from your ordinary, daily life. As Sunday is different from Monday, the church sanctuary different from your office, home, or car, so prayer becomes something different from washing the dishes, designing a website, driving to work, making love, or performing surgery. I’m as influenced by this distortion as you are. Unfortunately, the confusion is part of sin’s legacy among us.

Prayer, while among the most basic of human impulses, becomes something delegated to super-believers—monks, mystics, and saints, not us sinners.

But Christ reverses all this. In Christ, prayer once again becomes what it should be—the experience of life itself.

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As I introduce this series of posts on prayer, I’ve got mixed feelings. I feel excitement because for me prayer is the very center of human existence—it is breath and life, fire and spirit. But I’m nervous too. I fear that prayer too easily becomes an end in itself, as if prayer itself is what we’re after. It’s not.

I’ve read book after book on prayer, gone to conferences, sought out teachers—all in the pursuit of praying better. And I’ve gotten all tied up by techniques and methods, which, while necessary to some degree, can also become hindrances to true prayer. I’ve gotten fixated from time to time on finding the right prayer technique, saying the right words, sitting in the right posture or place or for just the right amount of time.

But I’ve learned that all this can be nonsense; instead of giving me God, a fixation on prayer more often gives me a bunch of monkeys swinging through my mind, criticizing me and distracting me from what I really want from prayer—God. I get excited by the idea or practice of prayer, but then when I actually pray, my thoughts swing into action, instructing me, judging me, evaluating me, joining with various emotions that can just as easily plunge me quickly into despair under the stern gaze of my self-critic as they can raise me in pride over my sense of spiritual accomplishment.

All this is a distortion of prayer.

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There’s something deep in every person that leaps at the mention of prayer. That something—a deep, unspoken desire for the Divine—may not leap for long, and it may leap weakly, for our desire for prayer is often mixed up with guilt and fear, doubt and disappointment. Nevertheless, there’s an arousal within each of us at the mention of prayer. This arousal isn’t always positive; for some there’s a counter-leaping within us—a revulsion that makes us recoil from prayer.

Prayer’s a lot like sex. We’ve all got some kind of interest in it, but the mere mention of it can also arouse some stiff resistance to it because, frankly, we’ve all got one hang-up or another when it comes to sex. So, just by mentioning prayer I know I’m not only awakening desire but also shame.

(To be continued Thursday . . . )

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When your mind and everything in it learns how to yield to the priority of your heart, surrendered to the fullness of God within you (Ephesians 3.19), your mind will become the noble instrument God created it to be. As you learn to draw your head down into your heart where Christ dwells, your mind will become infinitely more than it can ever be alone. You’ll learn how to bury your mind inside the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2.16)—there, united with its Maker and liberated from the tyranny of its own self-management, there’s no telling what your mind can do.

I say all this to help you stay clear about what you’re after.

Your goal is to move past your distracting thoughts and emotions and into an unobstructed awareness of your self before God, the simple resting of your self in Love.

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Your thoughts can’t give you God any more than a photograph of the sun can give you life. Ultimately, experience—direct, unmediated, and real—is what you’re after. And most of the time, you’re thoughts will only distract you from the experience you seek.

They’ll manage your experience, chattering instructions at you or shaming and blaming you for this or that. Occasionally, a helpful thought may lead you to the threshold of an encounter you’ll be tempted to capture mentally—you’ll fumble for your camera and try to holler to a friend. Don’t. Your thoughts have done their job and must now retreat before the Mystery that has come to you in grace.

You must simply be still (Psalm 46.10).

Your mind will most likely be aroused and want to do what it loves to do— figure things out, record the moment, interpret it. Don’t chase the monkeys away; instead, meet them with stillness. Your stillness will help them learn to sit in peace and trust in grace.

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Of course, as you progress in the spiritual life, many of your thoughts want to help you toward God. They’re not evil. Most of them are good, but when it comes to real encounter with God they’re not best—just as a photograph of a sunset is good but not best.

Even the most spectacular photograph misses the energy and awe your soul feels as the sun bids the day farewell in a blaze of light and color an artist can imitate but never duplicate. Thoughts about God, no matter how true are not God any more than a photograph by the most renowned artist is never a sunset.

The photo’s lovely if you cannot see the real thing, and in some ways it might even be more beautiful, but it will never replace the experience of standing in the presence of the radiant Sun that gives life to all things, enrapt in wonder.

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I don’t want to move on to other spiritual teaching until I’m sure you understand what you’re really after. So, allow me a few more posts on the matters of the mind.

You can look at the beauty of a sunset, but the moment you start thinking about how beautiful it is, as soon as you fumble for your camera or holler for your friend to take a look you’re no longer beholding the splendor before you . . .

Instead, you’re beholding your thoughts about the setting sun. You’re thoughts now stand between you and the beauty that first entranced you, a glory that simply invited you to be.

So it is with God and your thoughts about God.

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I don’t always practice this inner spiritual discipline well. But when I do, something opens up to me I can’t fully explain in words.

I can be in the midst of a busy restaurant and suddenly find myself so deeply aware that this moment and the person before me is everything.

Undistracted for at least this present moment, I’m fully here. Now. Nowhere else.

Not in my head. Not following a thought that’s carried me miles away to an obligation elsewhere.

Instead, I’ve slipped past the narrow gate guarded by my thoughts, and fallen into my heart—Eternity itself—where the fullness of God dwells. And this, at least for one timeless moment, is bliss. It’s an authentic experience of the gospel Jesus preached: “the kingdom of God is here, within you” (Luke 17.21). Now is the moment of salvation (2 Corinthians 6.1).

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Here’s something I do as a concrete spiritual practice of the prayer of the heart:

As thoughts and emotions come to me—luring me, enticing me, distracting me—I simply look at them one by one, penetrating each thought or emotion as fully as I can, and then I say, “Not this.”

Another rises immediately in it’s place and I say, “Not that.”

To yet another, I say, “Not now.”

If I’m in a meeting that demands my concentration or sitting over dinner with a loved one, I must do this quickly so that I don’t cease to be present. But if I’m sitting in prayer or meditation, I have the luxury of trying to discern where the thought or emotion came from, why it’s come to me now, what may have triggered it, whether or not God is inviting me to explore it or if it’s merely a distraction sent my way by a mind not yet ready to surrender to God.

The point is, I don’t want to blindly follow these thoughts; instead I want keep unhooking myself from them, disidentifying myself from them, putting some space between myself and these thoughts.

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Unless you learn to hold your thoughts a safe distance from your heart, not only will your thoughts and emotions drive you day and night, but as you seek God in prayer, they’ll rise between you and the God you seek.  Even the best thoughts about God will stand-in as surrogates for God, mind-made idols jealous for your attention and affection (Exodus 20.4-6).  As John Milton put it so memorably: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n”.  With practice you’ll learn to turn your thoughts toward the living God (1 Thessalonians 1.9), and with the help of grace, make your mind a holy place.

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