Coming Soon: Turning to Meister Eckhart

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Coming soon on Turning to the Mystics.

When I read Merton in the ninth grade, it had such a deep effect on me. And I graduated from high school and entered and lived there in the community, and got to sit with him personally. And I saw him as a living mystic. He held the lineage of the Christian mystical tradition. He's the one who led me into these classical texts that we've been studying here. And so with Eckhart, when I read Eckhart, I just access to one translation at the time. I could tell he said beautiful things. You know, for example, he says the eye, the EYE, the eye. The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me. I like that. But I couldn't see how it fit. So I want to say this though. Let's say, like Rainer Sherman says, he risks under the guise of speculative mysticism, under the guise of this metaphysical language which we'll look at, the joy without a cause.

And what we're after here in the podcast is the joy without a cause. So I want to be emphasizing that when we hear Eckhart say things, we'll hear it and give examples where we can say, I've experienced that. I've experienced that where I think what Eckhart is doing is helping me find a language to understand that and he's also providing a way that I can deepen it. That's the emphasis here. So I'm emphasizing this kind of experiential simplicity to it.

Why do you love God? I don't know because of God.

Why do you love the truth? Because of the truth. Why do you love justice? Because of justice. Why do you love goodness? Because of goodness. Why do you live? My word, I do not know, but I'm happy to live.

So I think here a lesson that he bears witness to in himself and he invites us to be faithful to is knowing just that life for all of its troubles, for all of its troubles, that it's a gift to be alive and real in the world. That it's a gift and we should honor that gift therefore and watch over it and be responsible for it and fidelity to the gift of life itself.

But notice too there's a subtle point here in this passage because when he says, why do you love God? He says, I don't know. Then answers, because of God. And then at the very end, why do you live? He says, my word, I don't know, but I'm glad to be alive. So he's suggesting that in the gift of life itself and in the gift of our love for God, there's something in the love of God, our love for God that we don't know.

And there's something in the gift and the miracle of our life that we don't know. My word, I don't know. This I don't know is going to be very important for Eckhart. The mystery of the I don't know in the hidden depths of what we do know.

SPEAKER_1 (3:39)

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