Meister Eckhart: Session 2

James Finley (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/healingdashretreat. That's cac.org/h-e-a-l-i-n-gdashr-e-t-r-e-a-t.

SPEAKER_2 (0:41)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation.

James Finley (0:45)

To learn more, visit cac.org. 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, Meister Eckhart. In this session, I want to begin by refining our reflections on a theme we've already begun to explore in Meister Eckhart's teachings, namely what it means to be real. And Eckhart is saying that to be real in the fullest possible sense is to be the infinity of reality itself.

And if we define or understand reality in this sense, then only God is real.

God is that by which we are. We are by virtue of our existence, and God's the infinity of existence. So reality is understood in this way. Then we, as creatures of God, of ourselves, are nothing.

Because we have no reality of ourself. That we saw in the act of creation, what creation is, is God's infinite presence, presencing itself and giving itself away, in and as, the grace and the miracle of the very reality of ourself, the reality of others, the reality of all things, in our eternal nothingness without God. So in some sense, then, God's self-donating love, the glosenheit, the pouring out of the generosity of God, that we are the generosity of God, that God's very presence is the gift and the miracle of our very presence. In our nothingness without God, and this for Eckhart is the riddle that lies kind of at the heart of the mystery of our existence, of our reality.

So to a quote from Meister Eckhart on this understanding of creation.

Acting and becoming are one. God and I are one in this work. God acts and I become. Fire transforms all things it touches into its own nature. The wood does not change fire into itself, but the fire changes the wood into itself. In the same way, we are transformed into God so that we may know Him as He is. Another quote. All creatures are mere nothingness. I do not say they are small or anything at all. They are mere nothingness. For what does not possess being is nothingness, but no creature has been, for its being depends on the presence of God. Were God to have draw it for an instant, all creatures would be annihilated. I'd like to reflect on this.

See, acting and becoming are one.

And the act is this act of the infinite presence of God pouring itself out and giving itself away in and as the intimate immediacy of our very presence. The presence of others in all things, that is the act. And Eckhart says, this act of this generosity is not an act that God performs, it's the act that God is. God is the act of infinite generosity, giving the fullness of the mystery of infinite reality away, completely, as our very reality, the reality of others in all things and our nothingness without God. And this is another way of speaking of the ground. God's ground is my ground and God's ground is my ground. Only here is speaking of as a verb or as an eternal, Aristotle refers to energetic identity, that it's the act of infinite presence, presencing itself. But the becoming is ours. Our act is receiving the act of God's generosity, giving the act. And by the way, our receiving the act of God giving us a very reality is not an option. We can't say I'll pass on that one. I know I'm busy today. It's like you can't opt out of your next inhalation and have a good afternoon. You just can't do it. And so what this means then is that we and God are bound together, like woven together in a point. My ground is God's ground and my God is God's infinite unity. A quote from Thomas Merton on this. This is a theme we could quote the mystics. All mystics have texts like this. This is Merton.

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness, which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark, which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody. And if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given, but the gate of heaven is everywhere. So here's a poetic understanding then. So when Jesus says, I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly, the life that He came to give us is the life that is, at once, God's in our own. Bound together in this union, TS. Eliot talks about the still point of the turning world, like the axis of the turning world.