chris erdman

. . . fully awake to the splendor of God’s creation, united with the One whose glory fills the whole earth (Isaiah 6.3):

To create beauty is to testify to God’s restoration; living beautifully facilitates justice. Check out this testimony from an artist exploring the role of spirituality, art, and justice:

A video from workofthepeople.com

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 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.”

All Christians are to live as saints—all are to live their lives in continuity with that long line of women and men whose witness shows us the infinite variety of paths holiness must take if we together are to enlarge the harvest of love. It is the “communion of saints,” so neglected among Protestants, who not only bid us to follow, but also show us the way until we make that way our own.

Hatred’s making a come-back.  Across the board.  So easy to fall in behind this new bigotry and take part.  I ran across this today in my early reading–from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation:

“Those who cannot love feel unworthy, and at the same time feel that somehow no one is worthy.  Perhaps they cannot feel love because they think they are unworthy of love, and because of that they also think no one is worthy.  The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian response to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible.  It is a prior commandment, to believe.  The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God.  That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy–or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!”

Nonjudgment requires humility. “Have no confidence in your own virtuousness. Do not worry about a thing once it has been done. Control your tongue and your belly” (St. Anthony).

And it requires patience, a patience that trusts that God will work all things out and that you are rarely competent to judge the path rightly. In fact, it knows that you by your own presumption will usually screw things up.

Nonjudgment, therefore, is nourished by a contemplative nonattachment to the false self.

If you’re attached to the many masks of your false or fallen self, you’ll be unable to judge rightly when necessary and instead will probably end up clobbering yourself and others.

Nonjudgment is the intentional ceding to God the sole role of judge; we refuse to take God’s judgment into human hands.

Nonjudgment lives in submission to Jesus’ explicit teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

Nonjudgment is a “paying forward” of the grace a mercy received by the sinner from Christ; by practicing nonjudgmental we preach the gospel (John 20.23). Improvising on this text, the Desert Fathers say: “When we cover a brother’s sin, God covers our sin; when we tell people about our brother’s guilt, God does the same with ours.”

This is the strange logic of the gospel–the opposite way.

We refuse to judge just as we refuse to engage in violence–so that we are vanguards, heralds, the New Adam/Eve of a wholly new way on earth and refuse to perpetuate what tearing us apart.

A vacation posting: this post from last spring is even more timely now in the midst of such widespread incivility

A Short Talk given at the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, California
on the Festival of Eid, September 10, 2010
the Rev. Dr. Chris Erdman

Thursday, in an article published by the Huffington Post, Muslim journalist, Omid Safi, compared the threatened Qur’an-burning on the high holiday of Eid to the Grinch who stole Christmas.  As a servant of Jesus and a representative of the holy catholic or universal church, I apologize that a Grinch has tried to steal your Ramadan peace, your Eid joy. The Rev. Terry Jones isn’t the only Grinch who’s tried to steal your spiritual joy; there have been others who, with ugly rhetoric, have tried to block the establishment of a prayer center in Manhattan. Sadly, there have been too many Christians among them.

There are people who use the Christian religion for purposes that run counter to the faith of Jesus. They misunderstand Jesus, they misuse his teaching. They are wounded souls who turn the gospel of spiritual liberation into rules and dogma that become weapons and tools for intolerance, hatred, and even violence.

You Muslims are frustrated by the same kind of troublemakers too, aren’t you? You know the same kind of wounded souls who turn your religion of humble submission to Allah into weapons and tools for intolerance, hatred, and violence.

So, what are we to do?

We must walk the humble path that weaves its way through the heart of both our religions.

We Christians must surrender ourselves to the way of Jesus—not merely ideas about Jesus—but Jesus’ way of life. We must live into the Great Commandment he gave us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself”—by which he meant, “who is an extension of your very self.” To love this way, our hearts must become one with the heart of Jesus.

Love is the path Christians must walk. In the end, love is the only measure by which we shall be judged. Love alone makes us what we were meant to be. Love alone will transform the world. Love alone will heal the world. And so, we must risk everything for love until love is the very air we breathe, the blood that courses through our veins.

Love is not some weak ideal, some squishy, let’s-just-hug-everybody emotion. Love is mightier than guns and bombs; love triumphs over governments and grinches.

I’ve got reason to believe that love is also the path for you as Muslims. I wonder if your spiritual purification this Ramadan is ultimately for the sake of love. Do you seek to love Allah with all your being? Is love the real meaning of Ramadan, the fruit of Eid?

Rabia of Basra is one of the most popular and influential female Islamic saints, a central figure in the Sufi tradition. She was born nearly five hundred years before Rumi, and some say is the poet who most influenced his writings. Rabia describes the path this way:

The sky gave me its heart
because it knew mine was not large enough to care
for the earth the way
did.

. . .

[But] my eye kept telling me, “Something is missing
from all I see.” So I went in search of the cure.
The cure for me was God’s beauty, the remedy for me
was to love.*

And what do we do with those who don’t understand God, who won’t dance in Love with us, who can’t live and love Love above all?

I’ll answer in the words of Teresa of Avila, the most influential female saint in the Christian world. In the sixteenth century, a century full of religious bigotry and intolerance she wrote:

How did those priests ever get so serious
and preach all that
gloom?

I don’t think God
tickled them
yet.

Beloved—hurry!*

And so let us join our hearts and commit ourselves to love above all. And when we’re troubled by the grinches and the grouches (who may sometimes be our own selves), when we’re threatened by those who hate, let us together pray: “Beloved, hurry! Tickle them . . . till they can’t frown anymore.”

*from Love Poems from God edited by Daniel Ladinsky