Being Known by God: Preaching Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart wrote how God is a "great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop." The mystic's goal is to drown himself in this river of God; to lose himself in order to be filled with Christ; and not in any metaphorical fashion, but actually, organically, visibly, and passionately. When most Christians speak of a "personal relationship with Christ," we speak of it in terms of good friends or a pleasant parent-child encounter. Mystics, however, employ the language of lovers. They acknowledge that sense of being completely captured by another, the inability to think about anything else, of being lost in another person and no longer yourself. Meister Eckhart wrote that, "It is the nature of the Holy Spirit that I should be consumed in Him, dissolved in Him, and transformed wholly into His love."

John Tauler, a disciple of Eckhart, described the mystical experience as being "sunk and lost in the Abyss of the Deity where you lose your consciousness of all creature distinctions. All things are gathered together in one with the divine sweetness, and your being is so penetrated with the divine substance that you lose yourself in it, as a drop of water is lost in a cask of strong wine." Have you ever felt as though you were so close to God as to be lifted out of yourself? Have you ever felt "lost" in awe of God, or caught up in worship or wonder at His majesty of creation, be it through the unspeakable beauty of a sunset or the rush of standing at the edge of a high cliff? Such rapturous wonder and lostness is what mystics enjoy. It offers unassailable certainty to their faith and fearless complacency in the face of death.

Meister Eckhart taught that achieving such mystical connection with God began by understanding that God Himself exists as pure, sacred nothingness; nameless and hidden in a super-essential invisibleness; infinite and ultimately inaccessible through any finite, human effort. Since God created all that is out of nothing, Eckhart asserted that the eternal nothing that preceded creation comprises God's pure, unmediated essence. However, don't confuse this sacred nothingness with absence. Far from it. What Eckhart meant by nothingness was that God is no-thing; He is actual rather than analogous, He defies human metaphor, projection, imagery or idealization. How then, you ask, can a finite creature, bound by images and concepts, ever know the infinite and actual God? You can't.

Instead, Eckhart argued, knowing God is ultimately being known by God. This happens only once we become nothing ourselves, debasing ourselves of our fanciful ideas and mediated notions of God and His attributes, allowing our own pure nothingness to emerge and then dissolve into God's essential nothingness. "If you humble yourself," Eckhart wrote, "then God cannot withhold His own goodness but must come down and flow into the humble person, and to you who are least of all he gives Himself the most of all, and He gives Himself to you completely. What God gives is His being, and His being is His goodness, and His goodness is His love." Humbling yourself is not a psychological move (thinking yourself unworthy by focusing on your sinfulness). Instead it is a metaphysical move (making yourself receptive by not focusing on yourself at all). "Only the hand that erases," Eckhart said, "can write the true thing."

I know, all of this probably sounds like some sort of Christian Zen; you know, light some candles, strike up the sitar, cross your legs, and empty your soul. But Eckhart's goal was not emptying the soul, but rather filling the soul with God's spirit. It was Meister Eckhart who coined the phrase, "let it go and let it be." To have faith in God is to have faith in His purposes; to trust that He is competent to accomplish His will.

"The more you can withdraw the agents of your soul and forget things and the ideas you have received hitherto," he said, "the nearer you are to hearing God's word and the more sensitive to it you will be." The ever creating and energizing word of God, Jesus himself spoken within, empowers the Christian to follow Christ effortlessly and joyfully. Jesus permeates you and radiates from you. No longer a split personality, sinner and saint, you find yourself at one with God. "God expects but one thing of you," Eckhart wrote, "and that is that you should . . . let God be God in you. What are you afraid of? Give yourself up to God and He will give up to you . . . and there will remain between you an indivisible union. From this union . . . the Holy Spirit blooms."

If you've ever been in love, then you can empathize with the mystics' passion for God. If on the other hand all of this sounds like a bunch of hooey, then you can empathize with how problematic mystics have proven over the centuries. Many have written them off as basically psychotic and delusional fanatics. Yet given the contributions mystics have made to Christian theology, it's probably unwise to dismiss them too easily as crazy.