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”

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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

Guarantee

Prayer theme: The communion of the Holy Trinity You awaken today and all around you are signs of conflict. You read the newspaper, scan the Internet, listen to the news, talk with a family member or co-worker, feel the stress in your shoulders or stomach, and you realize that there’s tension everywhere.

You’re part of a world where everything and everyone is related, but most everything and most everyone have trouble just getting along. God intended harmony, but discord’s the raucous symphony that plays twenty-four hours a day.

This is exactly why you rise and greet the day with prayer to the Holy Trinity.

Pound for pound, there’s more goodness around you than you can imagine. There are more angels with you, more saints for you, more loving companions near you than you can now see. But without the Trinity, the babel of a world gone mad would long ago have drowned out the music of this goodness.

The Trinity is many things, but it’s at least this—it is our guarantee that despite appearances all things hold together. Harmony, not discord is the center of all things. Today, you rise to welcome this truth, gather yourself into this Center, and pray for the faith to dwell there no matter what comes your way.

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

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Everywhere

The companionship of angels saints . . . Angels are heavenly beings—supernatural, sometimes visible, sometimes not. How many they are and what they do is not yours to know. It’s enough for you to know that there’s an unseen dimension and a thin line often separates the invisible from the visible. Angels can appear to you in a blaze of pure light—if so, they’ll put you on your face in fear and awe. But most times angels appear in human guise. They appear abruptly and slip away quietly. They’re so natural that you’re tempted to think they’re a neighborhood kid or a co-worker down the hall. Only they’re not.

When they’re gone, they’ll have left you some gift—not usually something you’ll hold in your hands, but something you’ll need to take into your heart. Figuring out what that gift is and what it means is the work the angel’s left you to do.

There are saints too, present and past, whose lives will guide to you (Hebrews 12.1). Saints are simply those who’ve made it their aim in life to abandon themselves to God. They’re not always nice, and often not pretty. But they’re good. Saints are utterly natural. They can be the kid next door, the person down the hall. Departed saints will guide you from the pages of a book. Present saints care for you when you’re hurting or sick. There’s a band of them, past and present, praying for you now. You can take that to the bank.

The point is, as you curve yourself open to the goodness that’s all around you, open also to the serendipitous companions God’s sending your way today—visible and invisible. When you rise and pray, welcoming the “companionship of angels and saints,” open yourself to this heavenly and earthly host. They’ll surprise you with a word, a kind gesture, a firm and sometimes-unwelcome challenge, a nudge, a whisper on the wind. Listen. Watch. They’re everywhere.

On this journey, you’re never alone.

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

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Sufism: bridge between East and West

Here's an excellent essay by one of my favorite authors.  Muslims in the Middle.  New York Times, August 16, 2010 William Dalrymple's book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, helped inspire my own pilgrimage in 2007.  That tale is told in my little e-book, Returning to the Center: Living Prayer in a Distracting Word/The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-First Century Pilgrim (available for free download here).

In this essay, Dalrymple explores why the mystic arm of Islam, Sufism, makes a perfect bridge between East and West, moving beyond Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and secular extremism.  It's an apt corrective to so much of the mis-information being bandied about today, especially as September 11 draws near once again.

I commend not only Dalrymple's essay (reprinted from the New York Times), but also the website diversejourneys.com, and more, the Rand Corporation's 2007 Report, Building Moderate Muslim Networks.