Meister Eckhart: Listener Questions (Part 2)

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

How do you tell the story of your inner journey? Join James Finley for the Healing Stories Online Retreat, Saturday, August 26th, from 9 to 5 Pacific. Inspired by his memoir, The Healing Path, Jim offers guided reflections to help you become more conscious of the thread of your own sacred journey. The event will be recorded and all registered will have access to the replay.

Register today at cac.org/healing-retreat. That's cac.org/h-e-a-l-i-n-gdashr-e-t-r-e-a-t.

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James Finley (0:49)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:52)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:54)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (1:04)

Welcome, everyone, to season seven of Turning to the Mystics, where we've been turning to the German mystic, Meister Eckhart.

And this is part two of our question and response session.

We had so many questions come in this season, more than we've ever had. And we're so grateful for that. We've read all the questions, and we've put them into themes. And unfortunately, we won't be able to address every question, but we have read every question. And they're such a helpful grounding for us as we continue forward with the podcast. So I'm here with Jim, Corry in the background. And Jim, we're going to ask you to respond to some more questions.

James Finley (1:46)

Yes, yes, of course.

Kirsten Oates (1:48)

So we're going to start with the theme of the ground and the powers. And so the first question is from Rebecca. And she asks, how did the powers become exiled from the ground?

Or is that part of the mystery that we will only understand once the powers are fully reunited with the ground?

James Finley (2:11)

Yes. Here's the kind of classic Christian way of understanding this mystery about the estrangement. Like where did the estrangement come from? Like how did this happen? And Eckhart goes into this and looks at this. He says that God's ground is our ground, our ground is God's ground, the mystery of the unit, the mystery of the person, this trans-objective mystery of the person.

Then we're given a human nature that's empowered by God to realize that, which is the soul or the interiority of the self.

And the powers of the soul, the intellect, the memory and the will, the higher powers, so the thinking self and all that it thinks, remembering self, all that it remembers, the desiring self and all that it desires. And then the feelings itself and all that it feels, and then the somatic self, the bodily self, so these are the powers of the soul. So in the mythic story of the Garden of Eden, it's a mythic poetic story, that for Adam and Eve, their nature, the powers of their soul, were translucent to the ground. And as it shined out through, they saw the divinity and the earth and each other and God and so on.

And so they were created by God in the image and likeness of God, and it shined out to the powers translucent to the ground. But the whole mystery of the fall is trying to be like God without God.

Just trying to be like God without God is like in a strange state that we find ourself in. And it isn't as if there was some kind of sin and we're carried on, our original parents, like some blight that we deal with that. It's like a poetic way of understanding what our situation is. And our situation is, is where we start, is that our powers are estranged from the ground. That is to say, not just are our powers estranged at the psychological level of psychological symptoms, like depression, anxiety, addiction, I mean, there's all that healing of the ego in the ego, but rather the powers of the soul are living in an exiled, traumatized state, are living in an underlying habitual state of the ground, shining out through the powers, empowering them to say yes to that and so on. So that's the poetry or the poetics of the origin. And so Eckhart would say really is that the issue here is not how do we understand it, but rather since this is our situation, what's our response to it, which are the teachings. You know, Carl Barth, the great evangelical Protestant theologian, said once that he was being interviewed by a somewhat cynical interviewer and questioning him about scripture. And she asked Carl Barth, she says, you don't honestly think, do you, that a snake talked to Adam and Eve in the garden. And Carl Barth says, well, I don't know if the deep question is whether or not the snake actually talked. I think what matters is what the snake said. See, that's the point. Because it's a poetic metaphorical way of getting at the condition of where we find ourself, strangely exiled from the very foundations of ourself. And our response, with God's grace, is to be liberated from it, which is the walk, through Jesus and through faith.