Meister Eckhart: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:49)

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

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time here together, Turning for Guidance, to the Christian Mystic, Meister Eckhart.

One of the patterns that we've seen in the teachings of the mystics, that they all share and express each in his or her own way, is the importance of doing our homework in grounding ourself in psychological, spiritual maturity.

Because the mystical dimensions of experiencing, understanding and responding to God's oneness with us arises out of the ordinariness of our lives, out of the substance of the ordinariness of things, of just who we are day by day. And so Eckhart expresses this first, the level of human experience in which he responds to a series of questions presented to him.

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, in the miracle of our life that we don't know. My word, I don't know. This I don't know is gonna be very important for Eckhart. The mystery of the I don't know, in the hidden depths of what we do know.

A second aspect, I think, of Eckhart, on building these foundations of psychological spiritual maturity, is found in the beginnings of the first sermon and the collected sermons, the Advent Sermon.

Meister Eckhart bears witness that, along with being grateful for the gift of being alive, that it's important that we become an introspective, reflective person. Like, know thyself. We know thyself. There's a kind of a meditative attentiveness to the inner architecture or the interiority of ourself, that we become aware of that and responsible for it and aware of it. And so Eckhart, in regards to that, writes, Whatever the soul affects, she affects with her powers. What she understands, she understands with the intellect. What she remembers, she does that with the memory. If she would love, she does that with the will. Unless she works with her powers and not with her essence. Every external act is linked with some means. I'd like to reflect on this passage. In the powers, this is a classical way of understanding the interiority of ourselves. It was very pervasive throughout the Middle Ages. We see it in all the mystics. It runs through the background of their teachings. The power to understand refers to our understanding self and all that it understands.

And with memory, it refers to our remembering self. And all that our remembering self remembers. And with love, it refers to our loving self and all that we love.

And that's how we work with our powers. But then he says, we should be grateful for the powers because it's the gift of being alive. It's the human experience. We're using the powers right now by talking and reflecting and thinking and so on. He says, we work with our powers, but not with our essence.

So the essence is the hidden thing. And the I don't know about why we love to be alive and the love of God. Because what's hidden is the essence of ourself, which is deeper than the powers. That it's kind of beyond, it's qualitatively beyond what the powers can attain, what thought can comprehend, what words can say, beyond memory because it's timeless and so on.