The Open Soul - Part 6

Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even God .

Immediately following Peter’s rejection of reality, Jesus speaks to his disciples about self-denial, 

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”  (Matthew 16:24-25, NRSV).

The self-denial that he spoke of was not fasting, or sexual abstinence, it was not giving up sleep or fun as many of the church fathers presumed, but was the emptying Miester Echkart described - an emptying of self, a kenosis that consents to be nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing.

Jesus was inviting them to let go of everything – even God (himself). In this kind of emptying, the self becomes a no-thing, sin becomes a no-thing and even more radically, God becomes no-thing.

Peter Rollins states that “speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.”[1] Our self-denial must be absolute, including even our ideas of God and our grasp on God. Our ideas of God are idols.

Simone Weil echoes Eckhart again when she says that God cannot be contained and thus our intuitions are tainted by human imagination and fantasy.[2] In this way, faith requires that God must become a no-thing to us, because God is necessarily not an object.[3] Weil adds that the object of attention must be nonexistent for another reason as well. Spiritual life is perfected in attention made of God’s love for God. Thus, the subject and object are identical with the activity of attention itself. This attention leads us deeper into the nonexistence of the object of attention.[4]

Perhaps the most radical aspect of this is the letting go Eckhart speaks of – letting go even ideas about God being good or compassionate.[5]

[1] Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 34.

[2] Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 147-149.

[3] Hase Shoto. “The Structure of Faith: Nothingness-qua-Love” in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajme: The Metanoetic Imperative. trans. T. Unno and J. Heisig (Berkely: Asian Humanities Press, 1990, 90-96.

[4] Simone Weil. Waiting for God. (Pennsylvania: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1st ed., 2009) 107, 112.

[5] Eckhart, 55.

The Open Soul - Part 1

We must let go - even of our ideas about God being good or compassionate

The pursuit of spirituality at its core, is for most, an attempt to connect to the transcendent. From the first story we read in the Judeo-Christian scriptures about Eve who eats the fruit in order to “be more like God,” to modern day spiritual leaders and practitioners, we see the common theme is the human being trying to figure out what mindset, what actions, what emotions one must have to access the divine. The medieval theologian and mystic, Meister Eckhart put forth that the place where God speaks, and works had less to do with right action, right emotion or right mindset and more to do with space. Eckhart calls this open space the “potential of receptivity.”[1] He says that we create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us. “There must be a silence and a stillness, and the Father must speak in that.”[2] Eckhart affirms that this birth has nothing to do with good deeds or religious purity as we think of it but rather, it occurs in both sinners and saints – even those in hell.[3] Eckhart speaks of creating a space through the practice of silence and stillness that is absolute and is far more extreme than most Christian practices. It includes letting go of images,[4] understanding,[5] intellect,[6] memory, sense perceptions, imagination and even ideas about God being good or compassionate.[7]

Can we really let go in this way? Images? Understanding? Intellect? Memory? Sense Perception? Imagination ?

Even our ideas about God being good or compassionate?

How could this be possible?

This kind of extreme emptying of the self is a radically different approach from what is typically seen in religious pursuits. Throughout history, followers of the Christian faith have attempted to understand and control connection to the divine not by letting go of images, understanding, and ideas about the goodness of God, but by pursuing and refining them. Asceticism, holiness, purity, good works, right theology, liturgy and iconography have all served as means by which the religious observer might access God. Beliefs that it is the holy person who will be capable of miracles and who will receive good things from God, or that it is the one who believes rightly who will be saved, or that sin and error will separate us from God are central to most Christian doctrine and practice.

But ….

Christian Scripture disagrees. Much like Eckhart’s ideas about the birth of God occurring equally in saints and sinners, the Scriptures tell us that “the Spirit blows where it wishes,” (John 3:8, NRSV), and God blesses both the evil and the good (Matthew 5:45, NRSV).

The idea of access to the divine being entirely unconditional and free and being disconnected from ideas and actions is a difficult one for most. To disconnect ourselves from ideas about good and evil, light and darkness, right and wrong action  – even the goodness of God seems not only counterintuitive to the pursuit of spirituality, but counter to our very nature as thinking humans. Paradoxically it is the move away from such ideas that is at the heart of Christianity in the doctrine of grace.

[1] Meister Eckhart. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart with foreword by Bernard McGinn, trans. Maurice O’C Walshe. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 56.

[2] Ibid, 32, 33.

[3] Eckhart, 40.

[4] Ibid, 34.

[5] Ibid, 36.

[6] Ibid, 49.

[7] Ibid, 55.