chris erdman

How an ordinary person awakens to a life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

My misery shut me down. Sleep was the only way I could find respite. In sleep, I could inch myself minute by minute toward the day I would leave. One afternoon as I slept a fitful sleep, the Light came to me, an angel awakened me—though it still seems hard to believe. Some, of course, will dismiss this as the fabrication of a troubled mind trying to find a way out of its trauma. It’s true that the psyche is remarkably agile and able to find ways to rescue itself. But it would be a pity to dismiss such a grace, or for me to forget it. Just as the desert was stripping me of all that had become as Pharaoh to me, so too this terrifying nothingness was my baptism into my own exodus—a death necessary for rebirth.

Roused from my sleep by the angel, I heard these words: “You didn’t need to come this far to learn what I must teach you. Though perhaps you did—to finally know the futility of searching the world for answers. The journey is within, and anyone can take it without even leaving home. The fullness of God is near as your breath, near as the beating of your heart. For the kingdom of God is within you.”

All was suddenly full of light. Fire everywhere.

End of series.  For more, download my free ebook Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World. Available here.

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

In the desert, I was stripped down to nothingness. No one knew me. My degrees, my accomplishments, my skills meant nothing to these monks. And no one who mattered to me really knew where I was. I had come to the edge of the known world, maybe even stepped off the edge, and for all intents and purposes I was dead. I could do nothing for those I loved back home and for all I knew they were getting along quite well without me. Here in the desert, I had nothing to offer that mattered. There was nothing I had to do, nothing I had to be. And there was nowhere I could go to win back my sense of significance.

I descended into a desperation I had not known was possible. A terror in my sense of nothingness. The kind of terror that’s only possible in the desert where you are stripped of all the props that hold you up, all that’s dogged your every step. My fears and insecurities, my ambitions and idiosyncrasies had hounded me for all these long years and the desert was now killing them, but I didn’t yet know this as an act of grace. I felt like I was dying.

More tomorrow . . .

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Father Irenaeus stepped from the shade of the monastery’s little door, squinting against the sun’s glare, and greeted my Muslim drivers and me with a suspicion that only added to my heightened anxiety. This monastery does not welcome strangers without an invitation. And given the current state of politics in Egypt, and the fragile state of the Christian church under a regime increasingly pressured by hard-line Islamic fundamentalists, two Muslims bearing an American caused no small stir. The monk, dressed head to foot in black, his black beard salted generously with white, looked at Mohammed and Mahmoud, then at me, and finally at my bags. He looked long at my bags—too long, I thought. I handed him my email invitation from Father Johannas and waited nervously. Time stood still, the silence broken only by the buzzing of the flies.

Made desperate by the prospect of returning back through the desert to Alexandria or Cairo with two offended Muslim drivers, I looked at the monk, then at my bags, and said, “Father, Jesus said, ‘Take nothing for your journey.’ I often disobey him—that’s why I’m here.”

Irenaeus laughed, a new light in his eye, and said in impeccable English, “Then welcome, brother!”

At St. Macarius I prayed with the monks before dawn and again at dusk. I ate bread for breakfast, and a bowl of lentils for lunch and another for dinner. And I drank tea, lots of tea. The monks eyed this strange American who’d come among them—I was obviously not Coptic, not even Orthodox. But they were generous and warm, and those who spoke some English were eager to try it out on me.

My cell was a little cubicle adorned with nothing more than a lumpy mattress, a fan, and a spray can of Raid. “Enter your cell,” a desert father said long ago, “and your cell will teach you everything.”

More tomorrow . . .

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Several hours southwest of Alexandria, on the eastern edge of the Libyan Desert, a narrow road descends into a basin made fertile by millennia of hard labor. The Wadi Natroun, known from the sayings of the desert fathers and mothers as Scete, is home to a handful of primitive monasteries. My destination was the Monastery of St. Macarius, inhabited in one form or another for some sixteen hundred years. “Find them,” I’d heard the Light say so many months earlier.

Aside from St. Anthony the Great, there is no soul more renowned for wisdom than St. Macarius the Great, the one who first inhabited this part of the desert. Over the centuries, it was to Macarius and those who cultivated a holy life in this desert that archbishops and emperors, senators and scientists, the wealthy and the poor all made pilgrimage, seeking a word to sustain them, convert them, heal them, transform them. Some found what they were looking for, others did not.

If I were to find wisdom, I wagered that there wasn’t a place on earth more capable of helping me than this one.

More tomorrow . . .

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Mahmoud negotiated his Toyota minivan through Alexandria’s crowded streets and chaotic traffic, defying the laws and gravity and physics, deftly carrying Mohammed and me past one near collision after another. Safely outside the city, the desert stretched out endless before me. But I’d come out of the frying pan, only to enter the fire.

An Egyptian Christian had hired Mahmoud and Mohammed to drive me into the desert and to the site of the most ancient of Christian monasteries. I had nothing to fear from them; they were earnest and devout Muslims and if I were an infidel to them, you’d never have known it. Nevertheless, the thought crossed my mind more than once that, as an American whose government seemed to be on a crusade against Islam, I was a sitting duck in this land. I had brief visions of ending up on the evening news—blindfolded and made to spout anti-American slogans. Hours passed. I alternated between panic and prayer. The desert shimmered, heat rising from its ancient sands. I knew where I was paying them to take me, but I had no idea if the two were actually driving me there. My panic turned to raw fear. Egypt, as it had done for so many others desperate or crazy enough to follow God here, was already killing me.

More tomorrow . . .

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

Two Muslim drivers picked me up early one spring morning at the Windsor Palace Hotel, crammed in among the once regal waterfront buildings along Alexandria’s bustling Corniche. On this northern coast of Egypt, Alexander the Great had mapped out one of the ancient world’s most important ports, linking Europe to Africa, and beyond, to the mysteries of Asia. Here, Cleopatra once entertained Marc Antony in her palace, and the great rabbi, Philo, once taught the Hebrew Scriptures. Here, too, Jesus may have played in the streets after fleeing the wrath of Herod with his parents, Joseph and Mary. Clement, Origen, and Athanasius taught the faith and formed vibrant and courageous disciples in the early years of Christianity.

Egypt. Land of the Pharaohs. Egypt. Land of slavery, death, and the desperate pursuit of life. Egypt. Land of exodus. I wondered what this land might hold for me.

More tomorrow . . .

How an ordinary person awakens to life as prayer.  Continued from yesterday . . .

As I looked out beyond the tiny part of the world I was feverishly trying to manage, I saw a world entering a season that was shaping up to be, by all accounts, a period of extreme testing. Around me I saw no shortage of leaders willing and eager to champion great visions and projects and plans—skilled politicians, scientists, activists, and managers, even religious leaders, with plans to guard us from suffering and build for us a future. But there were few I would call wise, few who could be called “great souls.” And those who were, were strange to the eye, formed more by an ancient and durable tradition than by the vicissitudes of a world in transition. They were not enamored with the popular and intoxicated by the latest trend. They were not dazzling experts, effective and efficient by modern standards. In fact, they seemed unmoved by such things. It’s not that they were ignorant of the world around them. On the contrary, they seemed to be the best observers of the world, deeply immersed in ordinary life. They were simply anchored firmly in an alternative reality. And when they spoke, theirs was a voice of wisdom that came from the edge—that is, they spoke for God and lived a life of hope from the margins of society.

“Find them,” the Light whispered. “Learn from them.”

So, granted a sabbatical by my congregation, and given the freedom by my generous family who knew how badly I needed it, I turned my back on what had become of me and set out to become wise.

From my ebook, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World—The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-First Century Christian.  Download it here free.

More tomorrow . . .

As an introduction to how one ordinary person can awaken to life as prayer, here’s the first in a short series of posts excerpted from my little book, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting World—The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-First Century Christian.  Download it free here.

I knew from history that those who were truly great did not set out to be great. We remember few who built great buildings or managed great projects or discovered great things. Those who stand tallest in our collective memories were great souls. I also knew the truth made clear at every funeral I’ve ever done: few are remembered for the things they thought mattered, the hours they spent at work, the ambitions that drove them, even the money and possessions they acquired. Those who are remembered well are those whose lives bring us hope and show us love—those who are generous of spirit, those who are wise.

More tomorrow . . .

From my journal | Tuesday, May 29, 2007 | Iona, Scotland

Begin by greeting the Beloved.  Follow your easy breath, in and out.  Survey your whole body, beginning with the toes and ending with the nose.  Release all tension.  Sink into the Presence of God.  Gently breathe, giving your thoughts the freedom to come and go. Like snowflakes, you may notice them but you can’t hold them.  Simply let them fall.

If the Devil brings ugly things, lusts, lists, or pride into your mind, you can find freedom by telling him that you know what he’s up to.  Smile at him.  Laugh at him in the confidence that greater is He who is in you than all the hosts of the Devil.  The Devil cannot abide when you jeer him.

Return to the Beloved.  Open your heart to love.  Become drunk with love.  The demons are terrified when they encounter a soul aflame with love.  Love will tame the wild beasts—your mind, your commands, your will cannot.

Wait, wait, wait until you reach the silence which is the voice of the Beloved, then on the inhale speak inwardly, “Jesus,” and on the exhale, “Mercy.”  Repeat, following your uncontrolled breath as you rest in God.  When the restfulness begins to come to a natural conclusion—or you sense the need to do so—simply bring your soul to an awareness of its body again.  Thank the Beloved Trinity and re-enter the day.

eBook excerpt–

I’d resolved to become holy, but it didn’t take long for the ordinary tasks of ministry to bury the light that entered me that day.  And because I had no one to show me the way, I slipped back into a life that, while fruitful on many levels, left me increasingly dissatisfied.  Over the course of the next decade and a half, ministry became subtly yet increasingly colorless and drab, sometimes downright dreary.  Not entirely, of course.  In fairness to the God who’d called me and to the people I served, there were enough bright spots to keep my heart in the work.  But bright and lovely as these persons and experiences were, they still couldn’t mask the widening gap between who I was called by God to be and the life I was actually living.

When crisis finally came knocking that day late into the second decade of my ministry, I took a long, sober look at myself and saw a person who’d set out as a pastor but who along the way had become a manager—a fairly competent manager, but still a manager.  I was able to write memos, lead meetings, organize events, raise money, supervise staff, and keep track of details.  I was running a relatively successful church organization, teaching at a nearby seminary, writing, and consulting.  In addition, I’d kept track of a remodeling project in our home, and was helping our teenage sons negotiate their path to adulthood.  On top of this I also did what I could to provide the home environment that made it possible for my wife to teach fulltime while she took night classes to complete her credential in special education.

But all this just helped to mask the crisis within and assure me that for all intents and purposes people were pleased with my work, and that I was, by most measures, successful.  I could have been quite pleased with myself but for the light that once had pierced me.  What light remained would allow me no real pleasure in my status or achievements.  It showed me that little I was doing really required God.  And none of it needed a saint.  I had become laughable, precisely the oxymoron I’d resolved not to become those many years before.  I was stretched terribly thin—like too little butter spread over too much toast.  And, while in many ways successful, I knew I was truly failing, not only in what God required of me but also in what my family, friends, and congregation truly needed.  It became increasingly difficult for me to assure myself that the life I was living was the life the Light intended for me.

Desperate, I opened the door and embraced the light of God that lives inside the terror of every crisis.  Fifteen years earlier I hadn’t known what to do with the light of God that pierced my heart and whispered to me of holiness.  I hadn’t the foggiest idea then how to become a saint, and I didn’t know a soul who could show me how.  A decade and half later I figured I at least knew where to look for a few great souls.  And so, I determined to track them down . . . or die trying.