Meister Eckhart: Session 3

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.

Welcome to our time together, Turning to, For Guidance to the Christian Mystic, Meister Eckhart.

I think a helpful way to begin is to remind ourselves that the guidance that Meister Eckhart offers us in his sermons is attempts to help us deepen our experiential understanding of the depths of God's presence in our lives.

And we've been seeing how a foundational way that he voices this or helps us along these lines of this deepening is with his metaphor of the ground. The ground of God is the deepest depths of God. And in the generosity of God, the deepest depths of God is given to us as the deepest depths of ourself and our nothingness without God. So that our ground and God's ground is one ground and hidden down in the depths of ourself then is a union that's already present, awaiting to be realized, lived and shared. And so the path then is a path that helps us find our way to this ground. By overcoming what hinders us from finding our way to the ground and being liberated from the hindrances. And we also saw that for Eckhart, that God has given us a nature, a human nature with faculties or abilities, in his words, with powers, which is the kind of our soul, which is the interiority of our faculties. And has given us the capacity to live our life as human beings in our passage through time.

And it's in this, in the powers of our soul, it's a capacity to awaken to or to realize the ground's oneness with us, sustaining us in our powers.

And so the problem is, is that the powers are exiled from the ground, estranged from the ground. And so he says what we have, what we try to understand, we understand with our powers and not with the essence of the ground. And what we remember, we remember with our memory, but not the memory and oneness being illumined by the ground. And what we desire or what we love, we love in ways that's exiled from the ground. And because we're exiled in this way, we also tend to think then or imagine that we're nothing but the self things happen to. We're nothing but the temporal self, trying to understand what we understand or we can't understand or try to remember and we can't remember or try to love and we can't love or we lose love and so on. And because we think this is all that we are, we cling, we cling trying to hold as tightly as we can to our capacities to know, to remember and to love. And it is this clinging, this fear-based clinging, the possessiveness of heart, that's the fruit of this being exiled from the ground. It is this clinging is what hinders us.

And so what he's trying to do in this vision is he's trying to help us understand our situation in this way. And he's giving a sermon, he's preaching. And he helps us to understand that through faith, God illumines and accesses our powers.

So, for example, in faith it isn't just that I'm trying to understand, but in faith I know that I'm infinitely understood.

And how can I join God in knowing who God knows me to be before the origins of the universe, hidden with Christ and God forever. As Merton says, the spiritual life is freedom from the need to understand.

That when we pray, we pray knowing that we belong to God and we're infinitely understood by God.

And also in our memory, it's not just that we're holding on to our memory, but rather we know in faith that God eternally remembers us. God will never, never, never, never forget us. And so the way I am right now saying these words, the way you are right now listening to these words, God knows saying these words, God knows you hearing these words, and God will never, never, never, never forget this conversation between us. So when we die and go into God, we'll go into having this conversation forever because everything that's real is eternal and forever. It's like the eternality of everything passing away, realizing that in God it never passes away like this. And we know that in love our desire to love is that God is the infinite love who is infinitely in love with us and who out of love and the generosity of love creates us by giving us the gift of the very ground of God as our own ground. That the generosity of the infinite is infinite and has given us this nature, these faculties to realize it. And then seeing how the powers of the soul, the faculties are wounded, God comes to us and illumines our faculties through faith, through discipleship. So as in Amir Darkly, or as Gabriel Marcell says, is a kind of primitive inner assurance. We're illumined from within. And in this illumination of faith and a life of devotional sincerity, then the light of the ground, the powers start to become translucent to the ground. We don't yet see the ground. It hasn't come into view. But the powers are glowing with the unseen light of the ground, illumined by the life of devotional sincerity and discipleship following Christ. And this is our life that we're living. And Eckhart's giving a sermon. It's at the liturgy. And he's encouraging us along this path. Then Eckhart says that as we follow this way, he's inviting us to realize there can come a certain moment where in this kind of following Christ, the powers transformed and illumined by faith. We bring like to the edge of our powers. He talks about at the rim of eternity. And at the rim of eternity, these are the passages we read in the Advent sermon, where he says, I see something flash before my soul. And I know if I could seize hold of it, I would know all truth like this. And so this is the ground. And then the powers through faith have become so refined that the light of the ground shines through and overflows into the powers with the glimpse of the ground, proximity to the ground, and glimpsing it, this infinite plenitude, this abyss-like plenitude of the infinity of God given to us as the infinity of ourself and our nothingness without God. We long to go there. Because in sensing the incarnate infinity intimately realized, we know it is our homeland. And so here's the grace dilemma.