Mechthild of Magdeburg: Session 3

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time together, turning for guidance to the Christian mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg.

As Mechthild continued writing The Flowing Light of the Godhead over the years, on up to her death, really, she continues to share these ecstatic exchanges between herself and God.

And as we read or as we listen to these exchanges, even though we may not be experiencing God's intimate oneness with us, with the depth or purity that she does, the extent to which we're moved by the beauty, by the poetic beauty of that union, bears witness that we're already on this love path of which she speaks and offers us guidance, being receptively open to it, that it might deepen throughout the course of our life.

And as the years went on, these exchanges continued, but she begins to layer in other aspects of love. For example, she starts layering in the difficulties and challenges of everyday life in which this love is experienced. You know, at the beginning, they didn't take vows. They lived in community, but they did vote for someone to act as their superior or guide. And so she talks about the troubles of just the politics of things and personalities and so on in life, just the complexities and challenges of life. And also she talks about problems with the church, the fear of persecution that we said earlier, you know, the Dominicans supported Eckhart and so on, supported the Beguines. But the church persecuted the Beguines, and eventually kind of shut the movement down for reasons due to the fact they weren't directly under the bishop and they weren't directly under a religious superior in their vows and so on. And being questioned, like, what right do you have an uneducated woman to be claiming to know God's love in this way? There was all of that.

And then she goes also, which I want to focus on here, into kind of deeper dimensions of this love.

And in these deeper dimensions of this love, the first theme I want to focus on and explore with you is found in section 24 of the second book, which is on page 91 and 92 of the text.

She begins at the bottom of page 91 Lord Heavenly Father, between you and me, there goes unceasingly an imperceptible breath in which I come to know and see many marvels and inexpressible things. Unfortunately, they do me little good because I'm such a worthless vessel that cannot endure your slightest spark.

And so she starts out by acknowledging this sweetness of this breath between herself and God. It's always there. It's always there. But also in her wavering ways that she's not able to consistently be one with this love breath between herself and God that's always there. And so the path then is being healed from these hindrances to move into an ever more habitual underlying awareness of the ever present generosity of God's loving presence given to us as our very life. It's a passage of time of all things and our nothingness without God. And in this, then, she helps us to understand the degrees of this process of the purification of this love. And she speaks about it in the terms of bound love and unbound love. Concerning unbound love, she writes in this same section, Unbound love dwells in the senses because it is still mixed in such a way with earthly things that a person can cry out. Love is in grace. Distant in the senses has, alas, not yet climbed atop the soul. That is, this love is not to be understood as the love that I'm able to feel, although it spills over into feelings. It's the love that is in this communion with God that is the very life of God shared with us as our life. And the very senses, although it spills over into the senses, the senses aren't capable because they're finite, are not capable of sustaining that ever-present love that's always there as life itself.

And so, insofar as it's still mingled with the senses, that wavers, comes and goes, there's the inconsistency of the ability to abide in the love that eternally abides with us moment by moment by moment. She continues, Many people have fallen because their soul remained unwounded.

Solomon and David received the Holy Spirit in their human senses, but when the senses changed, they fell into love. God knows their soul had not sunk into the lowest depths beneath all creatures, nor was it wounded by the powerful part of love, for he who never tasted the best wine often whoops it up the most. This unbound love, then, there is a kind of a failing just through human weakness, but the failing doesn't go so deep that we fall through the bottom of human failing into the infinite love that is waiting for us and sustains us in the midst of our failing. We go into the failing, then we stop there. We kind of get stuck in this wavelength of failing, and we don't pass all the way through the failing into the depth of the love that sustains us unexplainably in our failing. And this she refers to as bound love. Concerning bound love, that is, this bound love of God bound us invincibly precious in our wayward ways. Concerning bound love, she says, bound love dwells in the soul and transcends the human senses and concedes the body nothing at once. It is restrained and very calm.