Sunday
In theological study one can easily get trapped inside of endless discussions about abstract ideas with little emphasis on experience or practice. In contrast, mystics honor the experience of the essential mystery and unknowability of God and invite us to do the same.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
I burn in the sun and the moon and the stars. The secret Life of Me breathes in the wind and holds all things together soulfully.
—Hildegard of Bingen
Tuesday
The inner person is the soil in which God has sown the divine likeness and image and in which God sows the good seed, the roots of all wisdom, all skills, all virtues, all goodness—the seed of the divine nature.
—Meister Eckhart
Wednesday
For Mechthild of Magdeburg, God’s desire for humanity is incompatible with sheer omnipotence, not because God has less power but because it is a different kind of power. God renounces power as “might,” in favor of love.
—Wendy Farley
Thursday
There arises the struggle of love, for in this most profound meeting, in this most intimate and ardent encounter, each spirit is wounded by love. This makes the two spirits—our spirit and God’s Spirit—incessantly strive after one another in love.
—John of Ruusbroec
Friday
I find that all my thoughts circle round God like the planets round the sun, and are as irresistibly attracted by [God]. I would feel it the most heinous sin were I to offer any resistance to this compelling force.
—Carl Jung
Week Nine Practice
A Willing Image of God
James Finley offers a practice to help us understand Meister Eckhart’s teaching that we are the image of God:
This is a paraphrase of Eckhart: Imagine you’re standing before a full-length mirror, and imagine the image of you is conscious, that it can think. And this image of you has been through a lot of therapy; it’s taken a lot of courses on being an insightful image. And it has come to a point in which it informs you that it doesn’t need you.
You say to the image of you, “Well, you know, this is going to be rough, really, since you’re an image of me.”
“No,” the image says, after a pause. “I’ve worked on this; I’ve come to this point.”
And so, to gently help the image out, you step halfway off the side of the mirror, and half the image disappears. The image has a panic attack and goes back into therapy and says to the therapist, “I’m not real! I’m not real! I was working on my affirmations. I bolstered up my confidence, but I don’t know where I went. I buckled!”
Now, the image was real, but the image wasn’t real in the way that it thought it was real. It was real, but not real without you. It was real as an image of you. See?
Eckhart says, “The image owes no allegiances to anything except that of which it is the image.”… There is nothing that has the authority to say what it is except that of which it is the image. And so it is with us, Eckhart says, that we are the image of God. Without God, we are nothing, absolutely nothing. In being the image of God, we owe no allegiances to anything but the Infinite Love in whose image we are made. And the idolatry of diversions of the heart where we wander off into cul-de-sacs with the imagined authority of anything less or other than Infinite Love to name who we are? This is the problem.
Reference:
James Finley, Following the Mystics Through the Narrow Gate: Seeing God in All Things (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2010). Available as MP3 audio download.
Image credit and inspiration: Augustin Fernandez, Untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. With the Rhineland mystics, we share the ability to gaze with love at the plants of the earth, appreciating the food we eat, and across time and place, we are invited to step through the doorway into the Great Mystery.
