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.
Editor’s Introduction
“It could be said that Meister Eckhart was a man of one idea - one very great idea, to whom nothing else much mattered. That idea was the unity of the divine and the human.” R. B. Blakney
Sayings
In these notes on the Sayings I will not explain the meaning of the sayings. I can’t. I don’t know what they mean. I only know how they strike me and make a little incision or crack in the hard shell of my way of seeing. I will therefore offer a sentence or two of reflection on each saying and invite you to do the same in your own journal in words that spring forth from your own heart.
I will define one term here - Truth. For Eckhart Truth is the Divine Word itself. The hidden marrow, Christ, the Truth. The Truth is the silent being of the Divine that precedes our giving the name God to it. It is an intimacy with being before the describing and naming begins.
Contemplation should always lead to action. If it doesn’t it’s not contemplation. Service is everything. Much later Teresa of Avila said from the joyful depth of Divine Union in the 7th dwelling in the Interior Castle of her own soul, “How can I be helpful?”
Be patient in your searching. God is everywhere, but seldom seen or tasted.
The only place you ever are is in the arms of God, but sometimes your arms are too full of things, so you don’t realize you’re the one being held.
Letting go of my separate self sense is crucial to union with God.
We let go of all attachments and discover God at our own ground, then we proceed From that place of oneness to love all creation With God.
Until you see God as useless you do not love God. When you are compelled with longing for God without any desire for God to do anything for you then you are finally in love.
To live and love without a why is to actually be present.
Only the present is real. And when you’re here in the present you’ll discover that Christ is here with you animating you to life moment to moment.
When we turn our back on all creation (detach) then God floods our emptiness with his presence. We then turn back to all creation with God
I want to want what God wants. This is happiness
When my separate self sense dies God is all in all. I am in God and God is in me.
In the silence our letting go is consummated with the light of God which now shines through us as us.
We are all nothing without God. Thus our nothingness is our greatest treasure.
Your soul has an essence and that essence is Christ - the Truth.
Letting go is all. Don’t worry you’ll quickly be given back to all that you’ve let go of.
My will, that ingenious device of our species, must be relinquished that it might be dissolved into and thus united with the will of God. Then God’s will be done.