God is born in everybody, not just Jesus

With the supposed day of Jesus’ birth about to be celebrated tomorrow, it’s worth remembering that God became human not just once a few thousand years ago but countless times. Such is the teaching of the German Dominican Meister Eckhart, one of my favorite mystical theologians.

Back in the middle ages he reached understandings about God, Jesus, and the incarnation that are much more spiritually advanced than the confused rantings of modern Christian fundamentalists, who mistakenly worship Jesus as if he was a one-time special deal.

Rather, says Eckhart:

People think that God became human only in the Incarnation, but this is not the case, for God has become human just as surely here and now as he did then, and has become human in order that he might give birth to you as his only begotten Son, and no less.

To you. And, of course, me. Not just Jesus. All of us. This is the true Christian teaching that has gotten hidden under masses of dogma. The organized institutions of Christianity have a powerful vested interest in keeping this truth under wraps (that’s why the Catholic Church accused Meister Eckhart of heresy).

For if people realized that the ultimate reality of God is directly accessible to them without a religious intermediary, the hold that churches have on the faithful would loosen greatly, if not be released completely.

So celebrate your own divine birth tomorrow. Jesus is dead and gone. As Eckhart says, you are alive and here. Forget about Jesus and remember yourself. You accomplish this, paradoxically, by forgetting yourself. And not only yourself, but you have to forget everything else that you think you know, whether it be about worldly or godly matters.

According to Eckhart, who often sounds like a Christian Zen master, God is only born in an absolutely empty soul that is free of thoughts, images, imaginings, and concepts.

For this birth to take place God required a bare soul, untrammeled and free, in which nothing is but himself and which is filled with expectation for nothing other than himself…God who is the master of nature, cannot tolerate emptiness in anything. Therefore remain still and do not waver from this emptiness, for if you turn away from it at this point you shall never be able to find it again.

I love how Eckhart would preach that the very sort of activity he and his parishioners currently were engaged in—namely, a church sermon—was completely useless in finding God. Those who stay serenely at home tomorrow, he implies, will be acting more divinely than the churchgoers.

God is no more likely to be found in external observances than he is in sin. But these people, who practice many external devotions, have great status in the eyes of the world, which comes from their likeness to it. For those who understand only physical things, have a high regard for the kind of life which they can perceive with their senses. Thus one ass is adored by another.

If you don’t want to be a religious ass, take to heart Meister Eckhart’s central teaching: there is no distance between God and you. Perhaps Jesus understood this also. But again, Jesus’ realization (whatever it may have consisted of) is of zero value to you and me. What we need are our own realizations.

So don’t focus on Jesus tomorrow. Marvel at the birth of God that is constantly taking place within you. Here’s my favorite Eckhart quotation:

The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge and one love.

Comments

[Bob]

Yes, you would be hard pressed to find a Christian clergy person or Catholic priest who recognizes the non-dual reality that Meister Eckhart spoke of (although I have met several Catholic sisters who are very savy). But, read St. John; it's all right there.

[Edw]

And this is Meister Eckhart less mystically:
"The nearness of God and the soul makes no distinction in truth. The same knowing in which God knows Himself is the knowing of every detached spirit, and no other. The soul takes her being immediately from God. Therefore 'God is nearer to the soul than she is to herself,' and therefore God is in the ground of the soul with all His Godhead."

This is from the poet Rumi:

In The Arc Of Your Mallet

Don't go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me, or on the ground,
in this world or that world, without my being in its happening.

Vision, see nothing I don't see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon, be that with me.
Be the rose nearest to the thorn that I am.

I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends,
when you go up on the roof by yourself at night.

There's nothing worse than to walk out along the street without you.
I don't know where I'm going.
You're the road, and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love.

Job does emotional judo when confronted by God's inquiry, because the universe literally realizes the need of God for Job. There is no separation from the Godhead, there is only identity. The creator is the only creator, and is the creator of all. The Rumi and Mclachlan poems are the beloved and the lover speaking with the same voice; Eckhart posits that there is only one eye beholding the seat of being; and the Book of Job cuts through the theological questions synthesized in the Manichean heresy: the material and the spiritual are identical, and it is the supposition of the "opposer" that inserts evil into the apprehendable world. We doubt God as and when God doubts us. We are separated from God as and when God is separated from us. We have the power to love God, in the same eternal grace with which we beg God to love us.

[Greg]

Eckhart also says more succinctly in one sermon we should love God as 'a non-person, a non-Spirit, as a bright One, with no duality.' This is because in Eckhart's view any idea we create of God, especially that of the rather childish idea of a creator sitting in heaven on a throne ruling the cosmos, is a human creation and not God, the One beyond all names, concepts and ideas. In this respect Eckhart is very similar to Plotinus, who often speaks in similar terms about the One.