Session One
Foreword
“Religious experience is simply our awareness of communion with God.”
The mystics know God by experience, an experience is that beyond sensory acquisition. That is, they know God at a level that transcends the senses. They stay with that experience in a sustained way as they live their ordinary lives embodying the truth of that experience in all that they do and say.
Some mystics are given the gift of articulation. They put words to their wordless experience of God that we might see and hear their witness and be encouraged to assume our own stance of vulnerability to mystical encounter with God.
David Steindl-Rast (DSR) shares that he finds Meister Eckhart very difficult to read. He keeps coming back because the nuggets he finds in Eckhart are worth “all the soil he has to move” to find them. He recommends that the reader read with a highlighter and/or pencil in hand to underscore words, phrases, and images that resonate.
DSR warns that the detachment teachings of Meister Eckhart can be tricky. There is a subtlety at their core that is easily missed and misused. We’ll have to be careful when we get to detachment.
DSR counsels us to listen to Eckhart with compassion. Don’t just assume he’s wrong or too difficult or insensitive or that he doesn’t understand your particular life. Assume instead that he’s very in tune with who you are and what your life is like because he’s just like you. That is, he’s a human looking for God in this rough and tumble world. DSR also invites us to listen for the silence that sources and surrounds all of Eckhart’s words. Silence is the true nature and the primary language of the Divine.