Meister Eckhart
Meister Eckhart was a German Dominican friar of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a preacher whose words still burn with startling freshness. He was a scholar of the highest order, trained in Paris and steeped in scholastic theology, yet his sermons spoke not to academics but to ordinary people hungering for God. And what he offered was not a distant deity on a throne, but God as the very ground of our being.
Again and again, Eckhart urged his listeners to discover God not “out there” but within: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” For him, union with God was not a rare mystical privilege but the hidden truth of every soul: “The ground of God and the ground of the soul are one ground.”
He was not afraid to challenge conventional images of God. “I pray God to rid me of God,” he said—meaning that we must let go of our false projections and idols, so that the true God, beyond all images, may break through. This was his lifelong theme: letting go. “To be full of things is to be empty of God; to be empty of things is to be full of God.”
When I first read Eckhart, it was like hearing someone name aloud what I had always suspected: that much of what I had been taught to believe about God was too small, too harsh, too human. I carried so many demands for perfection, so many fears of getting it wrong. Eckhart’s preaching cracked that open. He invited me to imagine God not as a judge watching for mistakes, but as life itself—closer than breath—loving me not because of what I achieved, but simply because I am.
He understood how deeply we hide from this truth. “A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or bear’s, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.”
Eckhart was bold enough to say that our truest nature is divine: “The seed of God is in us. Now, a pear seed grows into a pear tree, a nut seed into a nut tree, a God seed into God.” And he knew the cost of this teaching—his words drew suspicion, and after his death some of his propositions were condemned. But he died insisting on his faithfulness, and his voice still carries the ring of truth: “No one knows what the soul is. But what we do know is, the soul is where God works compassion.”
Eckhart reminds us that God is not a far-off monarch waiting to condemn. God is here, in the very act of being. “God is nearer to me than I am to myself. My being depends on God’s being near me and present to me.”
I think of him as a spiritual midwife, guiding us to let go of our fears, our rigid concepts, even our images of God, so that the God beyond all images can be born in us. His sermons echo like an invitation across the centuries: “When the soul wants to experience something, she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it. If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you.”