Meister Eckhart’s God
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you,
it will be enough.”
Meister Eckhart is known as a Christian mystic and a poet, as a spiritual genius and a declared heretic. The tradition he represented can be called “creation-centered” since, unlike the fall-redemption tradition that begins with humanity’s sinfulness, the creation-centered tradition begins with humanity’s potential to act divinely both by way of compassion and of beauty-making and sharing.
According to Eckhart, our spiritual journey consists of the following four stages:
1. Creation: Our first experience of God is creation itself with its beauty and glory, its power and potential, and its vastness and brilliance. The cosmos and ourselves as microcosms and as images of the Creator are experienced not as objects out there but as God-bearing sacraments.
2. Letting Go and Letting Be: Since all creation is divine, the human person must learn to let go of things in order to let things be. Things in themselves are not bad, but when we cling to them, we create dualisms that result in confusion and suffering. When we let go and let be, we learn new levels of trust including trust in the dark and in our experiences of nothingness, both personal and political.
3. Breakthrough and Birth of Self, God and Self as child of God: The emptying (through letting go) of the previous stage brings about union of the individual soul with the Divine. For Eckhart, all experience of union is meant to bear fruit and creativity is as much a test of true spirituality as it is a result of it.
4. The New Creation: Eckhart insists that our spiritual life is not ended with creativity but rather we are to employ creativity for the sake of personal and social transformation. Furthermore, according to Eckhart, justice and compassion are the tests of this authentic deployment. He adds, “The person who understands what I have to say about justice understands everything I have to say.”
Although the spiritual journey is a spiral that returns us to our starting point, it is also an ever-growing and expanding spiral in which our growth knows no limits.
Eckhart points to the futility of “seeking” when he says, “The more you seek God, the less you will find God. If you do not seek God, you will find God. God does not ask anything else of you except that you let yourself go and let God be God in you.”
He further probes us with such elegant and profound wisdom bringing us face to face with the soul’s bittersweet longing for the non-dual:
“I pray God to rid me of God. The highest and loftiest thing that one can let go of is to let go of God for the sake of God.”