Anam Cara

The God that Eckhart believed in is an incredibly “wild” kind of God! For instance, he believed that everything had its origin in the mind of God—an old neo-Platonist idea. In every culture there are basic questions—the what question (what is a thing made of?), the how question (the process of making a thing), the when question (when does a thing happen?) and the luminous who question (who is the identity of a person?)—but one of the most fascinating questions of all concerns origins: where did things come from? The German word for this is beautiful—woher? Where does a thing come out of? The German word for origin is Ursprung—from ur, meaning “primal,” and springen, “to leap,” giving the idea of a primal well out of which everything sprang. For Eckhart, that place is God. When you look around and see people, landscapes, oceans, stars, birds, stones, flowers—none of them are here by accident, but each of them was born within the mind of God. In one of his beautiful Latin sermons, Eckhart says that “in the first glance of God, everything that is in the world was born.” It is a very artistic notion of the divine imagination. An awful lot of theology and spirituality goes badly to ground in an excessive concentration on the will of God—poor humans trying to beat their lovely complex minds into the direction of that will—whereas Meister Eckhart tries to awaken you to the divine imagination and to help you realize that that is where you have come from, that is what holds you together in the world, that is where your ultimate destination is.

“Wild” is something you cannot tame—and I suppose one of the things institutional religion does is to have a few “official tamers” on hand in case the divine thing wakens up in too wild a way. But the beauty of mysticism is that the mystic is someone who falls in love with God and who has a sense of the pulsing presence of God which no thought, feeling or category can ever come near. The mystic keeps the God question clean of all our unworthy and inferior answers. Eckhart is “wilder” in his thinking about God than even the best atheists. What you find in him about the wilderness and absence of God is so much more profound than the kind of vacancy you find in atheistic ideas. He says that God is that wilderness in which everyone is alone. God is only our word for it, and the nearer you get to the presence the more God ceases to be God and is allowed to become completely himself. So the spiritual life is about the liberation of God from our images of him.

THE DIVINE PRESENCE

So many people get totally hooked on a certain image of God and that is where they stay. It may be a negative image of a judge who is watching you, a parental superfigure that keeps your life crippled. For Eckhart, God isn’t like that at all. He is the ultimate welcome and hospitality to everything that is alive within you, so if you really live your life to the full, you are activating the presence of God within you. Eckhart also has this fascinating idea of the nothingness of everything. He talks of the umbra nihili, the shadow of nothingness under which all of creation stands so that there is a lonely edge to our lives which can only be filled by God. He develops the notion of the sisterhood of God and emptiness. In his wonderful teachings on detachment, he continually says that in order to come into the presence of God, you must free yourself from the grip of all external things—let things go and become completely detached. No prayer is more powerful than the prayer of the free mind, so we must unclutter our lives of all the false things which pretend to satisfy our spiritual hunger but can never actually do so. Eckhart would see our human destiny as that of awakening the presence of God within us, but also freeing ourselves of everything that is not God. He sees the soul as the place in which God is alive within us. This is very relevant for our time, as in much of contemporary American thought the soul is making something of a comeback. At school we were taught that the soul is somewhere in the body, and when the body died, the soul departed. Eckhart comes at it the other way and sees the body as being in the soul, so the soul presence both suffuses you and is all around you as well. There is a place in the soul—what Eckhart calls “the uncreated place within you”—that no darkness, shadow, suffering or separation can ever touch. If, therefore, you want to bring God alive within you, it is to that place that you must begin to journey.