The purest prayer isn't complicated

A vacation posting: re-posting from early last summer

Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your closet, shut the door, and pray to God in secret.”  Matthew 6.6

“But I can’t find such a place to pray,” a young mother tells me. “My life’s hectic. The only secret place in my house is the bathroom, and my four year old makes sure not even that’s guaranteed.”

You may not find such a place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enter the closet of your heart.

Let go your idealizations of prayer, and just breathe.

“The breath that does not repeat the name of God is wasted breath,” wrote Kabir.

The purest forms of prayer aren’t complicated. That’s their genius.

A simple way to pray

A vacation posting: re-posting a well-read post from December 2009

Mount Tabor, called in the Gospels “The Mount of Transfiguration,” is a little hill in Galilee. But it figures big in the history of Christian prayer. Jesus leads a few of his followers up the mountain. At the top, Jesus is suddenly transfigured, and is made radiant, clothes “dazzling white”. Moses appears. Elijah too. The great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, engaged in conversation with Jesus. One of the followers, Peter, awed by the sight, suggests a building project. He wants to build three shrines to commemorate the moment. Just then a cloud envelopes the mountain. They are rendered blind and dumb, and then a voice comes, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mark 9.2-8).

Here’s a metaphor for prayer. In prayer, we ascend the heights, our goal, a vision of God. But just when we think we’ve got it, darkness comes. Prayer is a dark path where we must give up all props and pretension, all assumptions and preconceptions. When we think we’ve got a view of God, all will go dark—for God cannot be seen (Exodus 33.23). See for yourself how often in Scripture the encounter with God is in the midst of a cloud (Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, the disciples with Jesus here on Mount Tabor, and again in Acts 1.9).

Peter’s response to his experience on the mountain of prayer was to say something, do something.

You’re tempted to do the same. You want all light and glitter. You want an experience you can take a picture of. Don’t. Sit in stillness until the impulse leaves you. Persevere when darkness comes. The truth is, you’re closer to God now than when all was light.

This practice, based upon the Mount Tabor story, is part of the hesychastic tradition of the Eastern Church. The Jesus Prayer is the chief “technology” for resting in God. Hesychia means “stillness” in Greek. It is the daring obedience of prayer that enters into the unknown, grasps at nothing, and seeks nothing but what the Holy Spirit gives by grace.

My gripe with the history of hesychasm is that the simple beauty and necessity of this prayer’s been essentially the experience of monks. But the Bible repeatedly summons us all into an encounter with God that is stillness, just God, nothing else, in order that we may find out who we really are in God’s presence, naked of our falsehoods.  Trends in spirituality today show that contemporary people seek just this kind of experience, but they’re not finding it in the churches where prayer is wordy and busy and all too certain, despite the clear teaching of Jesus that we are to pray with very few words (Matthew 6.7), and in absolute humility, even emptiness.

After Christmas, I’ll begin to explore the Jesus Prayer in greater detail. Until then, prepare for your encounter with the prayer, by

• sitting in stillness for 5-15 minutes twice a day,

• watching your thoughts like leaves floating along a gentle brook.

• Neither follow them nor fight them.

• Rest in God.

Your heart: a shrine in the midst of the city

One reader explores her own awakening and longing to live in full communion with God. She's begun a solid practice and the practice of this interior prayer is carrying her deeper into this communion. She knows the beauty of simply sitting in God's presence, just being. But she wonders, "Is it possible for that peace to always be there?" I offer this as an answer . . .

That peace is always there. Jesus assures us that the kingdom, the reign or realm of God, is both coming and already among us. What's more, it is within us. So is it always there, within us and among us. The trick is to create such a well-worn path by our practice of prayer that we can quickly find the narrow gate to that inner world of eternity no matter where we are or what we're doing.

We will not always (or perhaps often) live in the bliss of that peace. We live a mixed life (both active and contemplative) and will find ourselves tilting one way or another during the day. But we carry the peace of God within us.

Imagine your heart as a little shrine in the midst of the city, often overlooked by the traffic on the street or sidewalk, mostly ignored by the busy and important people in offices and restaurants around it. But it is always there and you can enter it whenever you wish.

There are times you'll forget it and the narrow gate at its entrance will become overgrown and hidden. But when you awaken again and return to your practice, you can push through the ivy on the gate and clear the path again.

It's no use berating yourselves for forgetting the little shrine that's always so near, or fearing that you'll get too busy to enter it. You will. But you can always return. In fact, every distraction is another opportunity for you to return. And you'll find God always smiling, arms outstretched when you walk back through that gate and down the path.

The wonder of all this is that this shrine isn't out the door and down the street. It's as near as the beating of your heart. The peace of God is enshrined in your heart and goes with you wherever you may go.

Communion

Prayer theme: the communion of the Holy Trinity Honestly, the Trinity will baffle you. You won’t ever get your mind around It. This is God we’re talking about, not beer or Tylenol. If we can say what God-as-Trinity is, then what kind of god would we really have? Any god we can describe cannot be the God who is the Source and End of all things—the Alpha and Omega. This isn’t a put down to your intellect. It’s simply recognizing its limitations. Your mind, made by God, can adore the One who made it but can never comprehend the Mystery Itself.

God is One—always, eternally. And God is Three—always, eternally. Three-in-One and One-in-Three—always, eternally. Three Persons, one Substance. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Mother, Wisdom, Sacred Fire.

God exists in community, but a community that gets along. Always, eternally.

There is no warfare between Persons of the Trinity. There is no hierarchy. The Father is not more-God than the Son, the Son doesn’t have a higher pay-grade than the Spirit. Just as the One exists as Many, so the Many exist as One.

Here’s the pay-dirt for you today—

It’s going to look and feel like things are coming apart around you. You’ll see plenty of signs of competition and struggle, anger and violence, chaos and madness. But you’ve joined up with God. You’ve welcomed “the communion of the Holy Trinity,” and this communion is your guarantee that a community can get along. The Trinity is your warrant of hope for the world in the midst of brokenness. The Trinity is the fountain of love in the face of hostility, the source of compassion and justice where there is anger and violence and alienation.

Now, when you pray, you welcome the communion of all things—your family, your friends and workplace included. One day all things, the nations and Earth too, will be as God-as-Trinity is—a glorious harmony, all things getting along with the One, and the One getting along with all things.

Take that to work with you today, or to school, or when you walk the dog . . . and raise a little heaven on earth.

For more meditations on the Daily Guide/Rule of Life, click on the blog category, “Daily Guide/Rule of Life”

Click here to read or pray the Daily Guide/Rule of Life

Love in a Time of Hate

A Short Talk given at the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, Californiaon 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