chris erdman

Such talk of prayer is likely to awaken objections—

“How do I pray continually when my life is so full of obligations?”

“When I’m not doing the things I need to do to get through the day, I’m thinking about what I need to do. Prayer is often the last thing on my mind.”

“As much as I desire intimacy with God, the call to prayer loads me with more guilt than inspiration. The prayers I utter are basically prayers for help—for myself and for others.”

There’s no getting around the truth that Jesus summons us to unbroken communion with God and that the Apostles taught this practice to the first Christians. Throughout history, there’s also an unbroken line of praying people who’ve kept the practice alive, handing it down from one generation to the next. That it’s foreign to us is an indication that the Modern world isn’t very hospitable to interior experience, to mystery, and the mystic encounter with God that is above and beyond the heightened rationalism so characteristic of these last centuries.

Prayer then, according to Jesus, is more like breathing than sitting down for a meal at certain times each day. Nevertheless, the ability to live in unbroken communion with God is fed by formal times of prayer alone or with others, by the Psalms, Scripture, and by offering intercessions.

Unless you sit down and eat periodically throughout the day, you’re not likely to do much breathing. But, fail to breathe and the meal hasn’t done you much good.

Unceasing prayer as unbroken communion with God is not for super-Christians only—the spiritual elite—any more than breathing is for some special class of human beings. Prayer is life and life is prayer. You were made for this.

Prayer, according to Jesus, is life. Prayer isn’t a doctrine or a duty; it is bread, or better, breath.

Jesus lived prayer. He not only joined in the formal prayers in synagogue and temple, but also he prayed in the middle of a meeting, walking along a road, facing intense suffering, and experiencing conflict. The Name of God was constantly on his lips. His words were heart-deep, as if drawn up from a well of an inner life that was, regardless of outer circumstances, in constant communion with God.

And he taught his disciples to “pray always and not lose heart” (Luke 18.1). “Keep alert,” so God doesn’t “find you asleep when he comes suddenly.” So, “keep awake” through the practice of unbroken communion with God (Mark 13.33-36).

Christ’s disciples followed his example. Saint Paul lived a life of prayer, and urged it upon all believers. “Pray without ceasing,” (1 Thessalonians 5.17). “Pray in the Spirit at all times. Keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints” (Ephesians 6.18).

Prayer, then, is life and life is prayer.

When cultivating the spiritual life, don’t focus first on “how?”  But “how” is generally the first question people ask me.  It’s not ultimate.  How inevitably follows why or what.  Get why or what right and you’ll get to how.

So, focus instead on the disposition of your heart—that is, why you seek God, and what the experience is like.

Here’s Theresa of Lisieux:

“Sanctity does not consist in this or that practice; it consists in a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in God’s arms, teaches us our weakness, and inspires us with an almost presumptuous trust in his fatherly goodness.”

It’s that that’ll carry your where you need to go.  What’s more, you can rest yourself humbly and little in God’s arms whether your arguing a case before a jury, teaching kindergarteners, balancing your checkbook, or walking in a meadow.

Awaken your heart and all of life is prayer; daily life becomes sacred.

Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your closet, shut the door, and pray to God in secret.”  Matthew 6.6

“But I can’t find such a place to pray,” a young mother tells me. “My life’s hectic. The only secret place in my house is the bathroom, and my four year old makes sure not even that’s guaranteed.”

You may not find such a place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enter the closet of your heart.

Let go your idealizations of prayer, and just breathe.

“The breath that does not repeat the name of God is wasted breath,” wrote Kabir.

The purest forms of prayer aren’t complicated. That’s their genius.

Every human heart yearns for God; we are restless vagabonds upon the earth until we stop in our tracks and behold the light shining all around and within us. Here and now. Not somewhere else.

To experience God in the midst of daily life—whether changing diapers, arguing a case before a jury, painting a wall, teaching third graders, or walking in the woods. To burn with a holy and playful fire. To live intentional, happy, and compassionate lives in our turbulent world. This is what we’re made for and this is the spiritual life. Through prayer, meditation, and contemplation, the dawn comes; we kindle a fire upon the hearth of our hearts.

But most of us are hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated. We want to pray, but we don’t really know how to pray; and few of us have someone to show us the way.

Here are the stories of young, urban Christians who are recovering our historic spirituality, coming alive to who they are in Christ, and who are living lives of meaningful involvement in our world:

A life of prayer that awakens to the essence of the spiritual life—happiness, inner peace, and the most meaningful kind of exterior action in daily life—awakens to the presence of the Beloved within.

St. Teresa of Avila heard Christ speak these words: “Teresa, buscate en mi, buscame en ti” (”Seek for yourself in me, seek for me in yourself”).

Where do you seek God?  Here in the midst of your daily life, in this moment.

And how?  By awakening to what’s within you–the shadows and the radiance.

Prayer, then, is not a pious exercise divorced from daily life.  Nor are you to wander here and there in search for God.  Prayer is life, and life is prayer.  God is near as the beating of your heart, close as your next breath.

Here’s God’s whisper to Teresa . . . and to you:

Soul, you must seek yourself in Me
And Me you must seek in yourself.
. . . .
You were created for love
Beautiful, gracious, and thus
In my heart painted,
Should you love yourself, O my beloved,
Soul, you must seek yourself in Me.
. . . .
But if perhaps you should not know
Where you may find Me
Do not go hither and thither,
But, if you should wish to find Me,
Me you must seek in yourself.

Translated by Raimon Panikkar in Christophany: The Fullness of Man, 2004: 27-28

Here’s a poem I wrote in 2009, expresses the intention of prayer.  It joins both the necessity of human effort in the pursuit of God, yet meets our effort with grace—without which there will be no real meeting, no holy fire, no true prayer.  It also joins together the three elements of the person in a fully Christian psychology—body, mind (or soul), and heart (or spirit).

Unless these three unite and meet grace, there is only a superficial meeting with God.  We bring our full humanity to meet God’s full divinity.  Only then can we become what we are made to be.  As both St. Athanasius in the Eastern Church and St. Augustine in the Western Church teach: “Divinity became humanity that humanity might become divinity.”  This is the goal of prayer—Fire.

The Pyre

Desire Fire,
and God will send a spark.

When body, mind, and heart
unite,

You become
the Pyre.

October 2009

This is an excerpt from Cyprian Consiglio’s excellent little book on prayer: Prayer in the Cave of the Heart: The Universal Call to Contemplation.  The book’s a primer on the historical center of Christian spirituality—drawing from resources from the Christian East and West, as well as illustrating parallels to other religious traditions enriching our prayer experience.

In this selection, Cyprian introduces holy reading, or lectio divina, as a particular practice of prayerful feeding of the thinking mind with holy things.

“When choosing the object of our meditation, pride of place is given to scripture.  In addition, though, there is a long tradition of other types of reading (of devotional or spiritual books or of poetry) and other types of experiences (listening to music, looking at art) that can serve the same purpose.  At times we read academically, to learn facts and figures, dates and names, or we listen to music or look at art critically, analytically.  Lectio divina, however, is totally different.  It is gentle, like reading a love letter, or hearing a loved one’s voice, or gazing on a loved one’s face.” (p. 96)

It is my habit to read a very small section of holy scripture each morning, in addition to the non-reflective reading of a psalm, and invite the Trinity to be the Host of this encounter.  I read and listen, waiting upon the voice of the Beloved.

It’s one thing to offer a prayer expressing your intention to love God in prayer (see previous post). The form of prayer that follows that little prayer may be a meditation on Scripture, holy conversation with your Beloved, or intercession for others.

But, at some point Love will invite you into the Silence where no words can ever go.  It is the Silence from which words come, the home of the Word.  To go there, you’ll want to express your intention clearly for that journey as well. Here’s a prayer I often whisper as I ready myself for stillness before the Beloved:

I still my lips that my mind may seek;
I still my mind that my heart may seek;
I still my heart,
and hide inside the Great Silence,
till What I seek finds me.

It expresses my intention to gradually move from the outer parts of my body toward my deepest inner self, where Christ awaits. Such a prayer charts the path I will walk toward the divine encounter, every step a renunciation of self-will, self-interest, and self-control—a yielding to God who alone can carry me across the threshold of what I’ve known, into the Mystery I cannot know except through the blindness of unknowing, the renunciation of all previous ways of knowing.