chris erdman

The images of homecoming, invitation, and waking from sleep are central to spiritual awakening.   Each image probably has powerful connections to your own life.

So, sit with them for a while. Don’t hurry.

Here’s a little exercise:

You might explore some of your earliest experiences, those you could label as experiences with God.

I remember vividly a “wake-up invitation” that came to me when I was a teenager, probably thirteen or fourteen. I thought I had things figured out and God was one thing I figured was certainly out—I was an atheist. But on a family fly-fishing trip in the San Juan Mountains of western Colorado, I was tromping through the high country chasing rainbow trout with Stan, an old family friend, and an expert fly-fisherman. I respected him greatly and knew he was not a religious man.

It had just rained and, though soaked to the bone, I can still recall the fresh scent of the slippery willows and pine trees we were crashing through. The sky had opened up and boasted a dazzling rainbow set against a bright blue sky.

Stan stopped and said half to himself and half to me: “Sometimes I’ve a sense that I’m involved in something much greater than I am.” And then he headed back down along the trail.

That moment holds a special place in my life; it’s the first invitation to come home to God that I can remember.

What moment or moments can you point to when light broke into your life, even if it was for no longer than a flash of insight?  Where were you?  What was happening?  What did that moment plant in your soul?  Did something shut it down or did something open it up further?

“[What we seek] is not distant from us nor is it external to us,” taught St. Anthony of Egypt nearly sixteen hundred years ago.

“Its realization lies within us and the work is easy if only we want it. The Greeks leave home and cross the seas in order to gain an education, but there is no need for us to go away on account of the Kingdom of God nor need we cross the sea in search of virtue. For the Lord has told us, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ All that is needed for goodness is that which is within the human heart”.

The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, ed. Benedicta Ward

The transformation of your life, the recovery of prayer and the discovery of all you seek will require a journey.

This journey is not from one place to another. Rather, it’s a pilgrimage into the deepest places within you where God dwells in fullness.  As scandalous as that sounds, it’s a universal truth—all who’ve sought God and found what they were looking for will tell you that.

I once traveled farther than the Magi traveled in search of all this only to find that what I was looking for was right beneath my nose: close as my next breath, near as the beating of my heart.

Such long distance trips to find God are unnecessary and can even distract you from looking to the only place you’re going to find what you’re looking for: your heart.

Prayer is coming home—to God and to ourselves, to heaven and earth and all that fills them.

Prayer is waking up to Life itself. It is opening to grace.

But prayer’s been so terribly reduced in our day. For most, it’s more like rubbing a Genii’s lamp than an encounter with the Beloved, whose aim is the glorious transformation of our lives into the fullness of our humanity, which is also the cradle of Divinity: the God who permeates and pervades all creation, even, or more accurately, especially . . . us.

Much of our lives are spent curved in upon ourselves—closed up within, and closed down to the Divine.

But there comes a time when each human heart receives an invitation to awaken to the Light that radiates from the Center, Source, and Substance of all things—to open what was once closed, to curve outward in a gesture of receptivity, like a chalice awaiting the wine.

Many of us ignore that this summons to come home; we minimize it, deny it, struggle against it.

When we do, we remain restless— vagabonds wandering this earth, searching and searching but never finding . . . until we awaken to the invitation to come home to the Light manifest in Jesus, who is, astonishingly, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, Love who gives life to all, our eternal Home.

Prayer—conscious, intentional, and in the words of St Paul, “unceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5.12)—is the highest expression of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual life.

Prayer, when we are awake to it, is life.

When you consciously and intentionally enter into the prayer that is always going on around and within you, you become spiritually active, free, and more fully aware that you are alive to more than your “self-made me” and its many compulsions, anxieties, and obsessions that keep you curved in upon yourself, fallen into the sin that separates you and contracts you and closes you off from the presence of the Beloved who is always near, and whose prayer is always calling you to the friendship that is prayer.

Prayer can be and should be as natural as breathing—for we were made to pray just as we were made to breathe.

The Bible tells us that in the beginning, God gently lifted the formless clay of the earth, cherished it lovingly, then kissed it and breathed life into it (Genesis 2.7). Prayer then is the experience of this tender intimacy, this reunion with the One who made us and loves us and who sustains us still by the Divine Breath.

Whether we know it or not, we exist by prayer just as we exist by breathing—God’s prayer for us and the prayer of our heart, which is always praying with each and every breath, each and every beating of our heart. Whether we’re mindful or not of this praying doesn’t matter.

Prayer is.

And without prayer—the sacred relationship shared by Creator and creation—things simply would not be.

Prayer is universal.  At all times in history and in all places, people have sought the Divine and uttered some kind of prayer.  Prayer is the yearning of life; it is a desire for the Source, the unending Fountain of life.

Prayer not only is this yearning, it is a finding.

In prayer we come home to God, we dwell with and in the One who is life (John 1.4).

Here is the third in a series relating our thoughts to the practice of unceasing prayer, the intentional awareness of God in each moment. It follows two other posts, The daily thought parade, and Unceasing prayer is no pious exaggeration.

So, standing there, water splashing down upon my head, baptizing me anew, I tried a little experiment. I gathered all these thoughts down into my heart. I made my heart a sanctuary and invited my mind to come to full attention before Jesus Christ. From that center, the chapel of my heart—where that ruffian horde of preoccupations and distractions were no longer in charge—I simply gave myself to the moment. I reveled in the clean smell of lavender soap, the holiness of nakedness, the too-easily-missed glory of thousands of little beads of water, reflecting the morning’s light, running in golden rivulets down the glass door of my shower stall. It was prayer. I was ecstatic, alive to the goodness of God, to God above all, and to myself, fully present to it all.

The command to “pray without ceasing” is not an exaggeration or an experience only for monks and mountain mystics. All of us think without ceasing . . . no exceptions. The mind never shuts off. And if that’s true, we can pray without ceasing. For at heart, prayer helps us to take charge of our thoughts. Prayer helps us resist being defined by our thoughts. Prayer helps us stay put in the present, in real life, alert to the seductions of those thoughts that want to carry us away into illusion, fantasy, and anxiety. Alert to God, we draw those ruffians down into the chapel of the heart where they swear their allegiance to Jesus Christ, and then, put in their rightful place, re-ordered and realigned, our thoughts can do what they are meant to do: help us live life rather than fret over it.

Thinking is as routine as breathing. Spiritual awareness awakens you to the fact that you don’t have to follow your thoughts where they want to lead.

A re-posting from November 11, 2009

Here’s the second of three posts relating our thoughts to the practice of unceasing prayer, the intentional awareness of God in each moment (it follows the post, The daily thought parade):

It was in the middle of all this that I realized I was praying. I wasn’t just thinking, I was prostrate before the unholy trinity of Hurry, Worry, and Vanity. My interior life was fully engaged, alert, and devoted to adoring this unholy Three unceasingly, from the moment my alarm buzzed me awake, until this very moment of awareness. And, I figured, they’d probably been at it all through the night as well.

Then in a moment of reverie, birthed by a sudden ray of light, I laughed out loud. St. Paul urged those who love God to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5.17), and “pray in the Spirit at all times” (Ephesians 6.18). But up till now, I’d considered them hyperbole, pious exaggeration, the enthusiasm of a saint. But in this flash of insight, it dawned on me that St. Paul’s advice wasn’t to be dismissed. I shouldn’t ask, “Can I pray without ceasing?” Instead, the real question is, “To What or to Whom do I pray unceasingly?”

At that moment, I figured that if unceasing, interior prayer to those unholy gods, Hurry, Worry, and Vanity, can rise so easily within me, why can’t I pray unceasingly to the Holy Trinity? Right then and there I wagered that if I can be this focused on worldly things and endlessly vexed by them, I could also be full of God, learning to rest in the Spirit, and in the midst of the active life that is mine, bring a sense of peace and wholeness and joy that transforms all of life.

A re-posting from November 9, 2009