The potential of receptivity

We create space through silence and stillness and await a birth within us

The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart may have been one of the most emphatic on in encouraging unknowing. 

He says that the place where God speaks, and works has 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.” 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.” 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.

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, understanding, intellect, memory, sense perceptions, imagination and even ideas about God being good or compassionate.

Pope John XXII issued a bull (In agro dominico), 27 March 1329, in which a series of statements from Eckhart is characterized as heretical, another as suspected of heresy. Many today consider him to be one the great mystics.

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

Not finding the lost

We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.

To love someone long term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily flood the room with a perfect a necessary darkness. - Heidi Prebe This is me Letting You Go.

Slain from the foundation of the world

The act of death is foundational to the very creation

Long before the incarnation of Christ or the crucifixion of Jesus, the death of Christ was at work.  In the book of Revelation, the author in his vision says that life is given by the “Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world.” (Revelation 13:8, KJV)

The act of death is foundational to the very creation. In order to create, an infinite God, who filled all space and time had to make space for something else to exist – had to die in order for the world to live. It is this foundational death act that creates and gives life.

This is a revelation of the reality of things. We can see this in our bodies - cells have to die to allow cells to renew. When they don’t it’s a deadly cancer. All aspects of nature have to die in order for nature as whole to live. Plants die when they are eaten, leaves die on the trees each year, seeds fall to the ground in death. The engine of death is held in the DNA of life.

If we refuse to participate in this death, consent to this death - if we hold on tightly to power, control, certainty, survival in all its forms, no space is made for anything new to be created.

The impulse to reject

Grace must be emptied of power.

Grace must be emptied of power.  To be emptied of power, grace must first be entirely unconditional. Conditions to grace are means by which we “make sense” of something that offends our sensibilities of justice and fair play. Grace that requires action on the part of the individual is no grace at all, as it becomes tethered to an act of power on the part of the recipient.  Unconditional grace must also be unrelated to ideas of judgement of good and evil. 

The perceived knowledge of good and evil is a means by which mankind gains power over unknowing. It is the means by which we make meaning by assigning values to all things.  One thing is better than another, more beautiful, more desirable. Unconditional grace allows us to practice consent to reality without wanting to tamper with it by making it better, purer, holier, or safer. It is grace that allows us to see beauty in ugliness and God in all things and enables us to stop rejecting one thing over another. It is grace that enables us to cease crying out, as Peter did when he rejected the idea of Christ crucified, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:22, NRSV). It is this very impulse to reject and the lack of consent to reality that Jesus rebukes as Satanic in this story.