chris erdman

I’ve turned the popular meditations offered during the Twelve Days of Christmas as twelve ways to deepen and enrich your life of prayer into a free, downloadable eBook.  Click here to download the eBook.

This brief and suggestive series of meditations involves you in the deeper journey of living prayer drawn from the ancient Christian tradition shared by both the Christian East and West.  Best, or course, during Christmas, but helpful at anytime you need to strengthen your practice.  Here are pointers to the twelve ways:

1. Awareness
2. Awakening
3. Companionship
4. Wonder
5. Walking
6. Desert
7. Words
8. Humility
9. Darkness
10. Perseverance
11. Fire
12. Return

Day Twelve in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

You’ve come at last to the full mystery of Christmas. “Divinity became humanity that humanity might become divinity,” said St. Athanasius in the East and St. Augustine in the West. God in Christ and Christ in us, the full presence of God (Colossians 1.27). Your heart is now the home of God, and God the home within your heart. Before this mystery your mind stands dumb; reason cannot think its way across this chasm and bring you home.

But love can.  Love will carry you into the intimate union you were made for.  When you love you cannot be anywhere else but present.  Up till now you’ve lived far, far away—always somewhere else, distant from God and from your true self, not present to the Presence. But that’s changed now.

You’ve come all this way to Bethlehem only to realize that what you sought in this far away land was not far away after all. It was in you, but you were outside yourself.  You were conscious of everything else but absent to the one thing that really matters. Now you’re different—you’ve entered your inmost self and found the sacred center, the place you can enter wherever you are and whenever you want.  You’re more present now to the Presence.  This is the essence of prayer.

So you needn’t stay on this mountain.  You can return to writing emails and going to meetings, changing diapers and washing dishes. Go ahead, paint a wall, teach third graders, walk in the woods. But as you do, take another approach (Matthew 2.12): be present.  When you are, everything changes.  When you’re present, you’re no longer anxiously looking everywhere else for happiness or fulfillment.  You’re no longer resisting this moment, even if it’s awful; it’s awful largely because you want to be elsewhere. When you’re present, no longer haunted by the past or obsessing about the future, it’s very hard to be unhappy.  When you’re present, you’re as near as you can be to God—who’s as close as your next breath, near as the beating of your heart.

Today, when I get knocked around or confused or sucked too long into the past or future, I’ll return to the present—the face before me, the task at my fingertips, the breath filling my lungs.  And in this moment I’ll return to the happiness of Christmas: God in Christ and Christ in me.

(for a printable version of this post, follow this link)

Day Eleven in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

You who walk this way toward Christ—long and fearsome as it may be—who persevere in this difficult inner journey of prayer will come face to face with what you’re looking for. Take care though, the life of prayer is not magic—speak the right words, do the right things, and presto, enlightenment. No, you’ll never conjure up a mystical experience; the mystical is not magical.

Instead, you’ll be lead into the fullness of God (Ephesians 3.19). This fullness is the end of the journey, the goal of all life, the fruit of your spiritual practice. But the moment we say “goal,” we’re tiptoeing close to danger. The ego loves goals, and talking about the goal of prayer arouses your ego and launches you into the kind of grasping, reaching, and achieving that’s the antithesis of true prayer.

So here’s what you’re to do:

The eleventh way is the way of utter relinquishment. There is no further you can travel. You’ve come as near to the Light as you can get on your own.  You must now stop and sit still before Christ.  Ask nothing.  Demand nothing.  Accept whatever comes. Open the treasure chest of your heart and keep it open by breathing gently, letting your breath fall into a natural, uncontrolled rhythm.  Offer the three gifts that have carried you here: gold of faith, frankincense of hope, myrrh of love. They’re all you have now. And these too you must surrender to Christ. Empty and naked you wait, ready to receive what nothing can buy, earn, or comprehend.

The divine Fire, the Light you’ve sought from the beginning, will come suddenly and unexpectedly—an exquisite, unexplainable joy. When you no longer care when and how the Fire comes, or what it’s like when it does, you’re less apt to miss its warmth.

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Day Ten in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

The light of the star is leading you uphill now. Bethlehem doesn’t sit on a plain; it rests on a mountain. The last stage of your journey is a climb—a sweaty, gasping-for-air ascent toward the light of Christ.

Spiritual enlightenment is no walk in the park. You’ve crossed snow-covered mountains, crossed raging rivers, defeated bandits on the road, overcome thirst and hunger and fear, trudged on in the darkness against the howls of your inner demons. You’re thinner than when you set out. Older. Poorer. In pursuit of this great Light, you’ve left nearly everything along the winding road behind you.

Your lungs burn with each step upward, but as you pause to catch your breath, you become increasingly aware of another sensation within you—pleasure. At first it seems strange, for why should such hard work, such risk, such fear and deprivation and loss result now in pleasure? Then it dawns on you. All you thought you needed, you don’t need; all you thought you couldn’t live without, you can live without; all you once thought mattered most, doesn’t matter. You are free.  You shudder with a brief and exquisite happiness.

You own nothing now but faith, and the two gifts that cannot be separated from it—hope and love. Three treasures available to all, but possessed only by those who persevere in this difficult inner journey of prayer, those who traverse their own interior geography through landscapes as beautiful and challenging as anything on Earth.  Persevere, and Grace will meet you just beyond the next rise. (Romans 5.3-5)

Today, I will persevere in prayer. I’ll yield all I once thought I could not live without. I’ll breath-in the brief and exquisite happiness of this holy nakedness. Faith, carry me these last few steps. Hope, hold me. Love, fill me.

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Day Nine in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

On Christmas, a Light broke into the darkness of the world’s night, and a star—marking the crossroads between East and West, North and South—stood sentinel above the place of Christ’s coming. You glimpsed this star while still far way, and awakened by fresh hope, left everything behind, setting out on the one journey that truly matters: find the Light, come hell or high water.

The one thing you underestimated was the darkness—it feels like hell and high water. Out here, between the life you left behind and the Light you seek, it’s night. Much of the life of prayer is spent here—in between, in the dark. Here, you have more questions than answers; you feel more of God’s absence than God’s presence; you’ve set out for the Light, but it’s only gotten darker; you wonder if this wasn’t so wise after all.

But darkness is the one great necessity in the spiritual life. The saints will all tell you this. Your ego loves daylight, but night unsettles, even unseats it. The ego—the little self-manager within you—doesn’t know how to function in the dark. When you can see, your ego knows just what to do. But in the darkness all your mental faculties are disoriented, and you have only your heart of faith to guide you. (Isaiah 50.10-11)

True prayer must take you by the dark path. Only so can you come to the true Light that is true God and not some projection of your ego. In the darkness you must let go of all but faith—all props and pretension, all assumptions and preconceptions.  In the darkness you will be tempted to turn back and return to lesser lights. But if you press forward, blind to all but the faint light of faith, you will find what you’re looking for.

Too long I’ve feared the darkness. Today, I will embrace it as grace—a severe but liberating mercy. I will walk through the darkest valley, and I will be afraid. May my fear strengthen my faith until faith is all I have.

(for a printable version of this post, follow this link)

Day Eight in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

You seek God, but the further you go in this journey the more you keep bumping into yourself.

Let’s say you decide to take a few minutes and enter the quiet of prayer; you descend into your heart and journey further toward the intimacy with God you desire. But the moment you do, a riot breaks out within you. Your mind jumps to life and your thoughts leap around inside your brain like a bunch of monkeys on crack. You’ve come face to face with your ego.

The ego is not pride; rather it’s the self-managing faculty within you whose job it’s been to take care of you all these years. The ego’s not bad; it just thinks it’s God. So when you begin to seek God in earnest, it’s not amused. It doesn’t mind you being religious—if you’re religious, it’s still in charge telling you how to be good, condemning when you’re not, and reminding you of the rules.

So long as the ego still rules the roost, you’ll never really know God; your ego can know all about God but that doesn’t mean you know God. To advance in the spiritual life your ego must be humbled, and that’s no easy task. “Humility,” someone’s said, “is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.” But that’s precisely what the ego can’t handle. When you seek God earnestly, it will holler and scream at you, and will try to distract you with a parade of ugly thoughts, fears, even the most beautiful things in the world.

When it does, don’t give up; you’re moving in the right direction. Concentrate on the light you seek. You’re humbling your ego; you’re un-selfing yourself. Behind the idol of your humbled ego waits God. Humility, then, is the beginning of wisdom. But know this: it will get darker before it gets lighter; you’ll feel more like a fool before you feel wise. You’ve entered the narrow gate and the way is hard. Only a few walk this way. (Matthew 7.13-14)

Today, rather than just letting my thoughts rule the roost, I’ll take a few moments and watch them without following where they want to take me. That ought to infuriate my ego.

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Day Seven in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

You will, of course, want to pray along the way—that is, you’ll find yourself wanting to speak words to God and about God. Prayer, you think, is about words, and yes, you’re right. It is about words, there’s no escaping that. But prayer is so much more than words.

In truth, you’ve been praying all along—from before you awakened to your deep desire or desperation to follow this star to the End. Prayer is not merely asking God for things. It’s not just using nice words to massage the Divine. It may include these things, but prayer is essentially your awareness of God. It’s not merely the mind or mouth in motion; prayer is an awakened heart, an interior awareness of God. This is why the Bible often shows how the mind and mouth are made dumb—stone silent—when God shows up (Habakkuk 2.20 and Mark 9.7 are just two of many examples).

The problem with words is that we tend to become hypnotized by them. First, we form them and then they form us. We think that once we’ve attached a label to something we know what it is.  But consonants and vowels can’t explain a flower, let alone its Maker. I think that’s why God played coy with Moses and gave him a riddle for the divine name rather than a label. “I’m not going to give you a label by which you can think you’ve got Me figured out,” said God, “Just call me ‘I Am Who I Am,” (Exodus 3.14).

Of course, you must use words, and words have a beauty of their own. The trick is not to be tricked by them. You must not misuse them or attach too much to them, to over-identify with the words themselves.

So when you speak to God or about God, take up a Psalm or little twig of Scripture and lay it on the fire of your growing love for God. “But take care,” says God, “and don’t misuse the Book; its only aim is to light the way to Me.”

Today, I’ll not heap up empty phrases. Instead, I’ll light a small fire on the hearth of my heart. A few sacred words are all I’ll need for kindling.

(for a printable version of this post, follow this link)

Day Six in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

So, you’re walking now. It’s night, and away from the city lights you’re more able to perceive the haunting beauty of the landscape around you. As you do, two things begin to happen to you.

First, with each step you take, each day and stage along the way, you sense a growing anticipation rising within you. Deep within there’s a growing conviction that you’ve finally set out on the one journey that truly matters; you’re pursuing the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Source and Goal of all life. All you were made for and destined to be lies at the end of this journey, bathed in the pure radiance of the star’s bright light.

Second, you notice you’ve begun to enter a new and strange land you’ve never seen before. The familiar landmarks are gone. You’ve moved off the map. You’re lost to all except the light of the star. Anticipation emboldens you, but the strangeness of this new land unnerves you.

If you’ve not known something of this eagerness and nervousness, you’ve not gone far enough in the spiritual journey; your praying’s been too safe.  At some point, all who seek God are carried into some kind of desert experience, for the desert is the furnace of transformation. In the desert, we’re stripped of all that is external. The only thing that remains is the nakedness of the heart’s pure trust. This is why every spiritual “athlete,” from Abraham to Mother Theresa, was pressed by the Holy Spirit into the desert.

Today, I’ll acknowledge that the desert frightens me, but I must not avoid it if I’m to find what I’m looking for.

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Day Five in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

Most of us live life mostly in our heads, but our thoughts are not where real life is lived. Your thoughts may be memories of real experience, they may imagine experience yet to come, but they’re not real experience. They’re interpretations of the past and projections of what may come. They’re illusions, fantasies. Powerful, to be sure, but not ultimately real.

The only life you can live is the one that’s coming to you right now. Jesus said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, tomorrow has enough worries of its own.”  You cannot meet God in the past or the future, but only in the present. So, you must find a way to live here, now, “taking every thought captive” as St. Paul taught.

This is why walking is a spiritual practice. When you walk on the earth, your feet touch the ground. You awaken to your senses, and they root to to this moment. But you can’t be in this moment when you’re galloping along, eyes fixed on the future (or fleeing the past) lost in your anxious, calculating, or ambitious thoughts.

You’re a wise woman, a wise man, when you regularly get down off your high horse, get out of your head, and walk the real earth for a while, aware of what’s right around you.  The feet of the God you aim to meet walked this earth; yours ought to as well.

Today, I’ll take off my shoes and feel the ground beneath my feet. I’ll wiggle my toes in the carpet, stroll in a garden or to the kitchen or copier—and pay attention while I’m doing it. Remember, “the place beneath your feet is holy ground” (Exodus 3.5).

(for a printable version of this post, click on this link)

Day Four in “The Journey of the Wise Men: Twelve Days and Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Spiritual Practice”

To live with wonder is to live with awe and reverence. Wonder is childlike—wide-eyed and innocent before a mystery bigger than you are. You don’t have to be a child to know wonder, but most of us grown-ups no longer know what it’s like to stand wide-eyed and awe-struck before a mystery that’s beyond us.

Beauty is the surest way back into a sense of wonder. Beauty renders your mind temporarily dumb, your thoughts overwhelmed by splendor. There are no words, no thoughts that can pull into your mind the beauty that’s before you.

Prayer needs beauty like your camel needs water. Not frequently. But here and there, a taste of beauty will carry you a long, long way.

On this journey, your prayers often become more like a supply list of things you’ll need to pick up at the next town along the way, or like a to-do list for God. That’s understandable. But take care to get yourself out of yourself from time to time, and into something much, much bigger. Wide-eyed and innocent again before beauty. There’s no better way to infuse your prayers with wonder and a sense of the Divine.

Silent, still, and awe-struck before beauty—now you’re speaking the language of God.

Today, beauty will cross my path, but I’ll miss it if I’m preoccupied. I must watch for it. And when it comes, I’ll stand silent and still, drinking deep of wonder.

(for a printable version of this post, click on link here)