Meister Eckhart Archives - Page 3 of 3

True Self and False Self: Freedom to Be Our True Self

07/15/2019

Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues exploring insights on the true self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas Merton. Merton quotes Meister Eckhart as saying, “For God to be is to give being, and for man to be is to receive being.” [1] Our true self is a received self. At each moment, we exist to the extent we receive existence from God who is existence. Our deepest freedom rests not in our freedom

Path of Descent: A Clod of Earth

07/23/2018

The path of descent involves letting go of our self-image, our titles, our public image. I think this is one of the many meanings of the First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). What is at stake here is not just false images of God (which mostly serve our purposes), but also comfortable images of ourselves. That’s probably what the saints meant when they said we have to move to

We Are Two-Way Mirrors

08/16/2016

There is only one thing you must definitely answer for yourself: “Who am I?” Or, restated, “Where do I abide?” If you can get that right, the rest largely takes care of itself. Paul answers the questions directly: “You are hidden with Christ in God, and God is your life” (Colossians 3:3-4). Every time you start hating yourself, ask, “Who am I?” The answer will come, “I am hidden with Christ in God” in every

Mary the Contemplative (Part III)

08/03/2016

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT Mary like any Christian contemplative had to learn to walk by faith. We can believe that the great faith she needed to give her fiat to the message of the angel had been prepared by series of acts of faith developed throughout Mary’s life as she contemplated God’s message unfolding in her life before the Annunciation. We see her deep spirit of contemplative faith when we examine Lk 1:37, “For nothing

Nineteenth Day of Christmas Advent, Meditation: Why Did He Come? (Part V)

12/03/2015

Meditation: Why Did He Come? Christmas means that there are two births of Christ: one into the world at Bethlehem; the other into the soul when it is spiritually reborn. Through the Holy Mysteries of Baptism and the Eucharist, Christ is born in the second Bethlehem. i.e., our hearts and minds, our souls and bodies. He that is the pre-eternal God becomes a newborn babe that we might be converted and become babes in Christ.

The Eastern Fathers on the Trinity

09/21/2015

Just as some Eastern fathers saw Christ’s human/divine nature as one dynamic unity, so they also saw the Trinity as an Infinite Dynamic Flow. The Western Church tended to have a more static view of both Christ and the Trinity–theologically “correct” but largely irrelevant for real life, more a mathematical conundrum than invitation to new consciousness. In our attempts to explain the Trinitarian mystery, the Western Church overemphasized the individual “names” Father, Son, and Holy

A WHEEL FULL OF SPOKES

09/18/2014

Indeed silence does more than tiptoe around the house. Silence moves through all sound like water through netting. The deeper our own interior silence, the more we take on its gracious ways of opening up the tight mind that clenches its teeth around what it wants and spits out what it doesn’t want. The optimal environment for prayer is physical silence. Saint Augustine, surely one of the most eloquent people in history, thought it was

THE SILENCE OF THE ELECTRIC SAW (Part II)

08/26/2014

Gareth’s in ability to cope with the sound of the electric saw disrupting a contemplative prayer retreat resulted from his spasms of preference for only sounds that pleased him, such as birdsong, the rustling of leaves, or rain. Apart from his inner contortions during this one hour of outrageous disruption, there was nothing else going on just then except a saw making the sound saws make when they’re switched on and sawing through timber. The

“BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK” (REV 3:2, Part I)

03/05/2013

“Delve deeply into the Jesus Prayer,” says the Russian monk Theophan. He obviously intends the Jesus Prayer as the prayer word. At an earlier doorway of practice such a statement would have made no sense. We might have recited it, been dedicated to it, been consistent in bringing the attention back, but to “delve deeply into” it would imply that the prayer word had some sort of dimension or depth. This is precisely the sort

Archive

True Self and False Self: Freedom to Be Our True Self

Path of Descent: A Clod of Earth

We Are Two-Way Mirrors

Mary the Contemplative (Part III)

Nineteenth Day of Christmas Advent, Meditation: Why Did He Come? (Part V)

The Eastern Fathers on the Trinity

A WHEEL FULL OF SPOKES

THE SILENCE OF THE ELECTRIC SAW (Part II)

“BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK” (REV 3:2, Part I)

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