Anam Cara

Eckhart speaks beautifully of the birth of God in the soul. The incarnation of God in Jesus will make no difference to anyone if each person does not allow that birthing to happen within themselves. In an age which is very conscious of gender, it is so lovely to note that birthing is not a feminine prerogative. Both men and women can give birth to the divine within themselves. And you don’t need to go anywhere to awaken to the divine presence. So many people reach outside themselves for God—to institutions, pilgrimages, statues. Eckhart claims that all this externality is governed by the world of image. The image place is the famine field, whereas if you want real nourishment you must withdraw and come into the temple of your own soul. It is there that you will awaken what is eternal within you. Eckhart talks of “coming home to your soul, to the house that you never left…” I often think that the spiritual journey is about the conversion of a tiny splinter of our minds. Most of our mind knows that we are eternal, but there is one small splinter which is haunted by distance and exile. If we can bring that splinter home, we can be one in God again. And once we taste the God presence, nothing else will ever satisfy.

RHYTHM

Coming back home to the place in the soul where you are completely in rhythm with yourself, with everyone else and with God, is a very difficult journey. If you get hooked on the journey and its various stages, you will probably never get home. The journey will become the goal. Eckhart very radically states that there is no such thing as a spiritual journey. It is more a question of rhythm, rather than traversing a long landscape towards the divine. When you are in rhythm with yourself, you are untouchable. You are balanced and poised. Eckhart recommends a recovery of our ancient belonging and our ancient rhythm. In most people’s lives, the moment of “awakening” (as Eckhart calls it) is one of the most powerful moments that bring them back home again, out of the winter of exile where their minds would have been foraging for nourishment in the famine-fields of image. Eckhart’s mysticism is a very intellectual mysticism. It believes in the power of thought as a great light and as a power that can open the doorway to your own heart. If I may recommend a book to those interested in Eckhart, it is The Way of Paradox by Cyprian Smith, a Benedictine from Ampleforth College. He shows wonderfully how Eckhart’s thinking can answer so many of our modern hungers.

ECKHART FOR TODAY

I love the imagination and I love thought. It is thought that makes the world intimate and takes the anonymity out of it. In the engagement with Meister Eckhart, one’s thought becomes so refined and much of the dross is cleaned off. He has a lovely saying: “Thoughts are our inner senses.” Just as when an external sense like sight is impaired and we cannot see properly, so if our thoughts are weak or negative or impoverished we will never see anything in ourselves. It follows that one of our great duties as humans is to develop our own thoughts, thoughts that are adequate to us and worthy of the possibilities that sleep in our souls. One of the greatest tragedies of our times is that everyone is ripping off secondhand thinking from other people, thinking that is dead and does not fit them at all. We can liberate ourselves by trusting our own instinct and finding the thought-lenses which show us our world in the way we need to see it, that can calm us and bring us home and also challenge us where we are limited or deficient or where we don’t actually want to see.

Eckhart’s distrust of the world of image is truly relevant and profound. The Internet, for example, is a great facility, but as a friend said to me recently, “The fact that we have this amazing technological capability doesn’t mean that good work will actually be done.” I see the Internet as somewhat like Plato’s allegory of the cave. All it is, ultimately, is images. It is questionable whether such abstract images ever bring the complexity and depth of people to real encounter and intimacy. Likewise, the world of public relations is like the ancient art of sophistry. Socrates fought against this notion of making the weak argument look strong—that is what public relations is about. We have created an image world and it requires someone like Eckhart, with his fire and his clarity, to break through that false wall.