Otto Rank and Meister Eckhart on Our Creative Work

Eckhart addresses both our inner and outer work when he teaches that

…God does not desire that people reserve a place for God to work in.  Rather, true poverty of spirit consists in keeping oneself so free of God and all one’s works that if God wants to act in the soul, God’s self becomes the place where God wants to act…God’s very self is the place of the divine operation.

Eckhart is describing how the Holy Spirit works through us and our work.  He is also suggesting that we let go of God and our God concepts, as he puts it, “I pray God to let go of God.”

We carry the lessons learned in the Via Negativa of letting go and emptying and trusting, into our work in the world.  

People must be so empty of all things and all works, whether inward or outward, that they can become a proper home for God, wherein God may operate. 

God operates in both our inner and outer work. 

And what is the ultimate of God’s work? “The fullest work that God ever worked in any creature is compassion.” Compassion is working us even as we are working for others. 

Furthermore, says Eckhart, “Our work draws all its being from nowhere else but from and in the heart of God.” Our work derives from the Source of our work—the heart of the Divine. 

We truly become co-workers with the Spirit, for “God and the soul are very fruitful as they eternally do one work together.”  Such a work bears fruit.  And the fruit remains.  It is one work—ours and God’s.

In discussing work Otto Rank links creativity to struggle and conflict.  The artist “produces collective values, which, though akin to the traditional in form and content—because in principle they spring from the same conflict—are yet individual, and new creations of these collective values” because the creative person is a “representative of one’s age.”  

If we are living with our hearts and minds open, we indeed take in the struggle of our times. We wrestle with those conflicts so as to produce some kind of resolution or gift.

According to Rank, the work of the creative person “reveals his/her struggles in love and life, which” in a healthy person “spring from the impulse to create….This conflict arises from an intensification in him/her of the general human dualism,” which is the struggle between living and working.

In a time of pandemic like ours we are all experiencing an intensified struggle around the human condition. But the conflict need not be a negative thing; indeed, it is part of our deeper journey. “Only through (our) inner conflict” do we “gain the courage, the vigor, and the foresight” to bring about a new future.

In times of pandemic are we all called to pay more attention to our inner conflict?  To let the Via Negativa speak its truth to us and through us?

Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work, pp. 53, 64-67, 118f.

Banner Image: Translating the struggle. Photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash

Queries for Contemplation

Be with Eckhart’s teachings that God works compassion through us and with us in both our inner and outer work.  How real is that for you?

Be with Rank when he teaches that conflict lights the fire of our creativity within us.  Is that your experience also?

Recommended Reading

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science 
by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

Natural Grace, a 208 page inspired dialogue between theologian Matthew Fox and scientist Rupert Sheldrake, unites wisdom and knowledge from unconventional angles. Considering themselves heretics in their own fields, Matthew and Rupert engage the conversation from postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives, deconstructing both religion and science—while setting the foundation for a new emerging worldview. Having outgrown the paradigms in which they were raised, both Fox and Sheldrake see it as part of their life missions to share the natural synthesis of spirituality and science rooted in a paradigm of evolutionary cosmology.