chris erdman

Continued from a previous series of posts on the stages of spiritual growth . . .

In Stage Five, you are now moved by the Spirit outward again in love, a love that compels you into an experience of abundance you’ve not know up to this point. In the past, it was mostly your head that directed you–”shoulds” and “oughts” kept you moving forward, caring for others, keeping your practices. But now, in Stage Five, your heart directs you, and your head serves your heart of love. There is, as Jesus promised, a “stream of living water welling up inside you” (John 7.38).

In this stage, spiritual guidance is necessary to help you discern what this Power within your is impelling you to be and do. You sense God’s greater purpose for you, but what exactly that means may not be clear to you.

You will still suffer in this stage as much (or even more) that you did before. But now you draw strength from the unfathomable resources of the Spirit, and from your real experience of ongoing union with Christ. You may even sense an “unceasing prayer” (1 Thessalonians 5.17) beginning to form in your heart–an expression of communion with the Trinity that flows within you without your effort.

Lastly, you may find yourself struggling with a nagging frustration despite the presence of God’s love in your heart. Your love for God and others, combined with your commitment to God’s righteousness and justice, may lead you to do things that are perceived as odd, dangerous, and sometimes counter to the mainstream of the society around you. In addition, you may be disinterested in things that interest most other people, and your passions and interests will probably not be shared by most of those around you. This can lead to a sense of loneliness and isolation even in the midst of a strong community.

In this stage, you will need to seek out others who are emerging from Stage Four and the Wall, people who share your experiences and who can serve as companions as you journey deeper into the fullness of Christ.

To be continued . . .

Distraction is epidemic. You don’t have to look at the driver texting in the car beside you to witness this truth. You are distracted–much more than you’d like to be.

Real focus, concentration, and the kind of awareness that brings us back to our senses spiritually, bringing us happiness and meaning, requires some degree of relinquishment.

In this interview, John Gabel talks about what relinquishment means in his life and how this neglected spiritual practice is enriching his daily experience.

Here’s the invocation I offered tonight at the 9/11 Commemoration Service to an interfaith group meeting at the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno.  Note, I was asked by the director of the center to pray specifically as a Christian and not minimize my theological/spiritual convictions.

Almighty God,
we call upon you tonight as memories of September 11, 2001
weigh heavily on our hearts.
We recall our horror and shock
when buildings tumbled
and planes fell
and people perished.

We remember our fear and anger
our confusion and despair,
the sense of vulnerability and insecurity
that’s been with us ever since.

The world has changed,
and we have too.

But today, we come,
resolved to be people of faith,
taught by our sacred texts,
comforted by your presence,
instructed by your Wisdom,
given hope by the friendship we share
despite our differences,
and committed to work together
as people of peace,
working for the reconciliation of the world,
to you and to each other.

Come among us now,
awaken us to your presence within us,
drive fear and suspicion far from us–
for they are not the fruit of your Spirit.

Instead, open us to the power of your love,
that we may love you with all our hearts and souls
and minds and strength,
and to love each other,
for we are all made to be
“partakers of your divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4)

So, may we turn our grief into action
for the sake of your love for us and for all your world.

We ask this of you whom we call by many names,
you, who have revealed in Jesus–
who lay down his life rather than take up arms–
what it means to live a life pleasing and honorable to you
who call us to love one another.

Amen.

From a note to myself when my sons were in their late teens.  I was struggling as a father to give them the direction they needed while learning to step away and let them find their path.  Never as easy dance!  But parents must learn to adjust parenting approaches as kids develop.  That adjustment requires a spirituality that enables the shifts to take place, an experience of prayerfulness that make releasing our kids possible:

Why do I try to manage the path my sons take? Managing them isn’t really about them; it’s about me. I’m only projecting my anxiety upon them, fueling their self-doubt, their resentment. Their life is their life, not mine. What they most need is my love, my confidence and wisdom when they ask for it, my presence when they approach me.   So, don’t answer questions they’re not asking. Don’t do for them what they don’t want done. Don’t suggest what’s not on their minds. And don’t protect them from their mistakes—even their serious ones. Remember your youth. remember that you’ve not learned anything worth learning without pain. Tend to your own life, prayerfulness, wholeness—your own path. There’s enough work in that alone. Love what is, not what should be, could be, or would be if only . . . .  Crucifiy your illusions, idolatries, ideals. Delight instead in everything here and now. This is life. You have no other.

They know your values. They know what works, even if they’re unconscious to it now. Let them fail and put their own practices into play, learning their own values—which may or may not be yours. That is success. But keep pushing and demanding, and you’ll not only push them away, you’ll cripple them.  Do what you want and need to do. No more. And keep watch over your wounds that can quickly turn to stifling, oppressive demands that make us all into losers.

From my journals.  Monday, May 21, 2007
St. Macarius Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Merton writes that we won’t find the likes of the desert fathers and mothers today—not even in Skete. What the fathers did had not been done before. With them “you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one’s life into an apparently irrational void.”

The examples and sayings of the Desert Fathers have become themselves conventional stereotypes, models for the accepted social context of monasticism which is no longer shocking.

“We are no longer able to notice their fabulous originality,” writes Merton. “We cannot do exactly what they did. But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God. We need to learn from these men of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion, and strike out fearlessly into the unknown.”

From my journals.  Sunday, May 20, 2007
St. Macarius Monastery.  Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Father Zeno and I spoke for quite a while tonight. I asked him about the path to wisdom.

“Remember that you are nothing,” he said. “And remember that you are everything—bought as precious by Christ. And if you’re everything, so are others; you are to love them, embrace them. You will find yourself in them, and you will find them in you. Love is the path to wisdom. When you are nothing, you have nothing and need nothing and you are free to live in love.”

I wonder how differently we’d tread this sacred earth today if our praying taught us to do this:

“Not to run from one thought to the next, says Theophane the Recluse,
but to give each one time to settle in the heart.”

From Thomas Merton’s journals

How would you treat the clerk at the grocery store?  Your child at the dinner table?  Your spouse?  Balancing the check book, paying bills online? Driving?  Talking with a friend?  Arguing with a foe?

Our distraction, the scatter of our thoughts, our inability to concentrate, our hurry and worry . . . all this is a great enemy of good living, of spiritual awareness, of holiness.

Sainthood’s so terribly misunderstood.  We think of little carved statues or untouchable characters from a dusty book.

But if we can’t point to a saint around us, we’re a pitiful people.  More likely, we’re just blind.  Saints are everywhere, but unfortunately, they’re not often where we need them to be . . . in positions of leadership.  Don’t get me wrong, ordinary saints lead.  But we can use a few more in positions of official leadership.  Too few of us have desired or required leaders who are saints—women and men of humble virtue.  Consequently, we’ve gotten the kind of leaders we deserve, and we’ve become the kind of communities we’ve become.

Thomas Merton, who led us with remarkable wisdom through his pen and his prayers, couldn’t see the kind of leadership the twentieth century needed until he was pushed.

As a carousing and ambitious young man walking the streets of New York City, he wondered out loud to friend about his sense of vocation.

His friend told Merton he needed to become a saint.

“A saint?” Merton replied.  ”But how?”

“By desiring it,” said his friend.

And that’s what he became.

In the fourteenth century—a century not much different from the one facing us today–the anonymous author of the little book, The Cloud of Unknowing, wrote: “It’s not what you are, nor what you have been, that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.”

I’m praying for a new generation of leaders who will desire what we really need, the only thing that will guide us through this tumultuous twenty-first century . . . sainthood . . .in our homes and offices, schools and public places.

So many things crowd into a leader’s mind.  Consequently, leaders can be terribly absent people . . . distracted, busy, fretful, pushy.  You’ve been around such leaders, and you follow them only if you have to.  Usually the only authority they have for leading is the power of their position.  If you’re lucky you’ve also been around leaders who you’d follow anywhere.  They are rare, but we know them when we’re around them.  They have presence.  They are healers—no matter what kind of work they do.  They possess a presence of mind.

Here’s a message from Christ, inviting you into the only kind of leadership that really matters.

You are to think of nothing else,
only love.
You are to want nothing else for another,
than that they know My love.
You are to have nothing else in your mind
or heart when you are with another,
only love.

Love them.

See Me stooping,
lifting mud in my hands,
breathing life into the soul before you,
cradling them lovingly as they come to life.

Do that.

This is the kind of leadership that truly matters—whether you’re a parent dealing with a troubled teenager, an executive trying to awaken life in your management team, an artist wanting to invite others to see what you see, a politician working for the common good, a cop trying to break up a domestic fight.

Fail to do this, and you might push people around, get some stuff done, make a pile of money, build an empire.  But you’re not going to take those around you where they need to go.

Unless a leader knows loss, a leader isn’t leading.

It’s how you deal with loss that matters.

To be united with Christ in his passion means to suffer loss with him. To be united with him, you cannot wield power as the world does. Anger has no place. Controlling others is excluded. Leadership is inverted—the ways of worldly leadership are unmade. You learn to suffer rather than protect yourself, to serve rather than be served, to lose rather than win.

But to what end, what purpose?

Does the end even matter, really?

No, worry about the end and you’re already trapped.  Instead, you are to simply live as Jesus lives rather than to live conditionally—that is, attached to goals, outcomes, some self-invented-end. You are to wield only the power of secret prayer, of a heart united to Love.  You are to lead from where you are.  You are to be radically present, even to loss.  Especially to loss.

So, be present to loss, to pain.  Dare this glorious humiliation of yourself, and line yourself up with the true grain of the universe, the real current of creation’s flow.