Meister Eckhart

Eckhart was a Christian mystic around the 13th century. Some people seem to think a mystic pulls rabbits out of a hat (😀) but in this context it simply means a human being who seeks to experience the divine rather than just write/create theology. To live truth rather than just think it.

Like many Christian mystics, he sailed close to the wind as far as heresy is concerned. But that seems par for the course. We all need a dash of heresy before any attempt to swallow anyone elses "only way"......😀

Eckhart is seen as a "dharma brother" by many of the Buddhist Faith, and the "zen man" D.T.Suzuki said that certain of his utterances mirrored the prajna wisdom of zen - direct seeing, when concepts fall away and only the constant advance into novelty remains.

Eckhart once said that if the only prayer we ever said was "Thank You" it would be enough. I think this is so. It certainly corresponds to my own Pure Land faith, where the Nembutsu is in effect a cry of gratitude - felt in all circumstances.

Again, he said:- "Love has no why". Which I find profound. Make of it what you will. We are what we understand.

Another of his phrases was "Nothing that knowledge can grasp or desire can want is God. Where knowledge and desire end, there is darkness, and there God shines."

Anyone familiar with the "anatta" (not-self) teaching of Buddhism will see why Eckhart is seen as a Dharma Brother.

Enough for now. My coffee is getting cold. Shopping to get, grandchildren to collect and cook for.

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SW-User

The Sermon mentioned before on "True Poverty" is Sermon 22 of Eckhart's German sermons. It is truly radical. True poverty to Eckhart is to desire nothing, know nothing and to possess nothing.

He even goes further:-

Now listen carefully! I have often said, as great masters have said, that we should be so free of all things and all works, both inner and outer, that we become the place where God can act. But now we put it differently. If it is the case that someone is free of all creatures, of God and of themselves, if God finds a place to act in them, then we say: as long as this exists in someone, they have not yet reached the ultimate poverty. For God does not intend there to be a place in someone where he can act, but if there is to be true poverty of spirit, someone must be so free of God and all his works that if God wishes to act in the soul he must himself be the place in which he can act, and this he is certainly willing to be. For if God finds us this poor, then God performs his own active work and we passively receive God in ourselves and God becomes the place of his work in us since God works within himself. In this poverty, we attain again the eternal being which we once enjoyed, which is ours now and shall be for ever.

Obviously many will balk at this. See it as the total abdication of the self, even its obliteration. Certainly it calls into question modern ideas of the individual, of what being an individual means or entails. But like many others, Eckhart recognises the difference between individualism and personalism. The individual remains alone. A person can only be in relationship with other persons - and God (or Reality-as-is) expresses Himself - or itself - in persons.

Thomas Merton has much to say on this, speaking of a form of consciousness that assumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self which is its own justification and its own center. Merton speaks of the individual that is aware of themselves as a self-to-be-dissolved in self-giving, in love, in “letting-go,” in ecstasy, in God. "The self is not its own center and does not orbit around itself; it is centered on God, the one center of all, which is “everywhere and nowhere,” in whom all are encountered, from whom all proceed. Thus from the very start this consciousness is disposed to encounter “the other” with whom it is already united anyway “in God.” The metaphysical intuition of Being is an intuition of a ground of openness, indeed of a kind of ontological openness and an infinite generosity which communicates itself to everything that is."

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

(St John's Gospel)