We are considering with Meister Eckhart the deeper meaning of winter, Advent and entering the darkness of the season and the darkness or depths of our souls. Eckhart is explaining how the soul enters God and God enters the soul, with the result being peace and repose.
In telling us how the soul “enters God,” he is surely naming a “panentheistic repose,” panentheism being about how God is in us and we are in God.
He continues:
After knowledge has conducted the soul to God the highest power comes forward—this is love—and penetrates God and leads the soul with knowledge and with all its other powers into God, and is united with God.
Love does the work. Love is in us and we are in love. God is love after all. God “loves himself in all creatures, she is seeking also her own repose in them.” The divine nature itself is shared in creatures.
It follows that the soul is there submerged in God and baptized in the divine nature. It receives there a divine life and takes on the divine order so that it is ordered according to God. We become divine in a way and Divinity becomes us.
Grace and the Holy Spirit, he says, “shape the soul according to God.”
All creatures experience this divine repose, as Eckhart sees it.
All creatures seek repose from their efforts, whether they know it or not. They prove this through their deeds. A stone will never be deprived of its drive to fall constantly to the earth so long as it is not right on the earth.
Some creatures rise instead of fall, however, such as fire.
Eckhart is saying that gravity is a kind of universal repose in nature and that all creatures participate in the divine repose. Even the law of gravity is a law of pleasure and repose. Pleasure is a divine likeness in all things. “People can never feel joy or pleasure in any creature if God’s likeness is not with it.” And God’s likeness is repose.
Fire acts in the same way, it strives to rise, and every creature seeks its own place according to its nature. In this they reveal similarity with the divine repose that God has allotted to all creatures.
He ends his sermon with this prayer: “May God help us to seek the divine similarity of divine repose and to find it in God! Amen.”
Adapted from Matthew Fox, Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 382f, 385f.
Also see Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells, p. 154ff.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE.
Banner Image: Bonfire at night. Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Are there times when you experience your soul being shaped according to God by grace and the Holy Spirit? What follows from that?
Recommended Reading
Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart
Matthew Fox’s comprehensive translation of Meister Eckhart’s sermons is a meeting of true prophets across centuries, resulting in a spirituality for the new millennium. The holiness of creation, the divine life in each person and the divine power of our creativity, our call to do justice and practice compassion–these are among Eckhart’s themes, brilliantly interpreted and explained for today’s reader.
“The most important book on mysticism in 500 years.” — Madonna Kolbenschlag, author of Kissing Sleeping Beauty Goodbye.
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths
Matthew Fox calls on all the world traditions for their wisdom and their inspiration in a work that is far more than a list of theological position papers but a new way to pray—to meditate in a global spiritual context on the wisdom all our traditions share. Fox chooses 18 themes that are foundational to any spirituality and demonstrates how all the world spiritual traditions offer wisdom about each.“Reading One River, Many Wells is like entering the rich silence of a masterfully directed retreat. As you read this text, you reflect, you pray, you embrace Divinity. Truly no words can fully express my respect and awe for this magnificent contribution to contemporary spirituality.” –Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit
10 thoughts on “The Panentheistic Pleasure of Repose”
Today we continue to consider what Meister Eckhart sees as the deeper meaning of winter, Advent and entering the darkness of the season and the darkness or depths of our souls. Eckhart is explains how the soul enters God and God enters the soul, with the result being peace and repose. In telling us how the soul “enters God,” he is surely naming a “panentheistic repose,” panentheism being about how God is in us and we are in God. It follows that the soul is there, submerged in God and baptized in the divine nature. And so it is that we become divine in a way and Divinity becomes us. All creatures seek repose from their efforts, whether they know it or not. They prove this through their deeds. A stone will never be deprived of its drive to fall constantly to the earth so long as it is not right on the earth. Eckhart is saying that gravity is a kind of universal repose in nature and that all creatures participate in the divine repose. Even the law of gravity is a law of pleasure and repose. Pleasure is a divine likeness in all things. “People can never feel joy or pleasure in any creature if God’s likeness is not with it.” And God’s likeness is repose. In this they reveal similarity with the divine repose that God has allotted to all creatures. He ends his sermon with this prayer: “May God help us to seek the divine similarity of divine repose and to find it in God! Amen.” And that’s what you said in a nutshell Matthew !!!
“We Become the ‘Living Faith’ That We Have So Long Sought”
We like to compartmentalize our faith and place it in ‘a tightly covered box’.
The ‘box’ in which we store our faith can be developed in stages. The first stage is to ‘blow the lid’ right off the top of the box. Now, it becomes easier for us to keep the box nearby and pick things and throw them out, and place new items and experiences in our ‘box of faith’. We start an active cleansing process if we stick to it and ‘keep the lid off the box’ and ourselves open to explore the world of faith beyond that to which we have only been exposed up to this point. We may find that we want a bigger box as we expand our faith and bring other practices, experiences and understanding into our realm.
When our faith develops to a point where we are getting most comfortable in it and it alone, we can ‘empty the box’ and get into it ourselves. Now we are fully immersed in our faith, alone but not alone, tied to the infinite and unshackled from the temporal tools, beliefs, creeds and crutches that we had placed our reliance on. We become the faith that we have so long sought. Faith is the pure experience of the unseen and unheard eternal reality in which our soul, in repose, resides. Faith is our ‘homecoming’ and unites us to all else that exists. We need to decide whether we will be attending ‘Homecoming’ in this lifetime or in the next or the next. — BB.
Daily, through everything that I experience and encounter in life, my soul is offered the opportunity and possibility of being shaped and formed by the grace of the Holy Spirit’s essence and presence within myself, the other and the all and the everything of creation. What follows from this is a new way of seeing, hearing, knowing, becoming and being… from the heart of love, compassion and mercy, not only our humanity, but also the divinity of the nature of our true soul sense of self; dwelling within oneself, each other and the all and the everything of creation.
There is both joy and suffering, laughter and tears, creation and deconstruction, peace and unrest, life and death, wounding and healing; basically a vast and diverse range of changing, transformational experiences that unfold, evolve and emerge through the grace and work of encountering and engaging in RELATIONSHIP WITH. Relationship with, is the formational Beauty Way of the essence and presence of the Holy Spirit working graciously within, for and through everyone and everything that lives, continously shaping and revealing the eternal mystery within all, whom are a neccessary part of the Great Webb of existence.
Divine LOVE—the more we know, the less we “know”…
Divine Love~Wisdom~Peace~Justice~Suffering~Compassion~Healing~Transformation~Creativity~Joy~
Beauty… in our hearts, among us, and in our on-going co-Creation within our Creator’s Loving Diverse Oneness and Eternal Sacred Presence & Process… Being & Becoming… GOD IS ALL IN ALL, Immanent and Transcendent… Cosmic Christ Consciousness….
🔥💜🌎🙏
So grateful for all these reflections as they nourish my soul and I will it pass on as best I can.
The word and experience that come to me is Surrender in Love.
Thanks Matthew. Yes many are starving for rest that this system will not afford them like the train workers. This issue really bothered me. They were simply asking for time to heal and rest from sickness. If they take too much rest they get fired. It’s a shame Joe and the politicians could not do better for them. This consumerist exploitative system where scarcity is the rule really has a firm grip on us and stands in stark contrast to the generous communal spiritual life Eckhart and Jesus are preaching.
As for experiencing my soul being shaped by the Holy Spirit, I’m not sure if I’ve yielded to that “shaping” all that well, not for lack of the Spirit/Soul’s trying. I absolutely believe I was carried through the mystical experience, being unknowingly given a compressed lesson on mysticism, “everything just right”, which I could later begin to unpack and continuously learn from (and I’m still unpacking, decades later). I’ve learned (slowly) to not only go deeper into contemplation for wisdom, rest and for un-be-ing, and to (sometimes, at least) act from those inner places, but I’ve also learned to try to open up to spiritual lessons available in everyday life events. Some of those events also felt “orchestrated,” taking me, clueless and bewildered, to be carried along through them. I’m not sure if I’m being “shaped,” which sounds like the creation of a grand artistic masterpiece, so much as patiently nudged and sometimes downright pulled through some of the deep lessons. All the lessons I’ve managed to learn have been VERY slowly unwrapped over the years. If I’ve learned any wisdom, it’s probably in spite of myself.
I am with you, being tugged along in spite of myself!
Melinda, You write today: “I’ve learned (slowly) to not only go deeper into contemplation for wisdom…. but I’ve also learned to try to open up to spiritual lessons available in everyday life events.” I just wanted to say a couple of things about how I relate to these points. First, I have learned to go deeper into contemplation, in that now I find that when I am contemplating a certain thought, my mind almost just explodes with new understandings and awareness. Secondly, One of the most important lesson I ever learned for “learning lessons from everyday life” was an old professor I had in Clinical Pastoral Education who taught us to “read” the patient as a “human document”–remembering that the human document is one of the most important documents to read…