LANDSCAPE
Humans have tamed landscape. They have floors, which make the ground level. There are roads and streets which make it easy to walk on. In a way, when humans are in the land, they are always on their way to somewhere else, whereas the ultimate faithfulness in life is the faithfulness of landscape. Landscape is always there. It has a Zen-like stillness to it, and when you come back after ten years or forty years, you’ll always find it in the same place. That is captured in the old Irish seanfhocal, which says, Castar na daoine ar a chéile, ach ní chastar na sléibhte ar a chéile—people meet, but the mountains never actually meet.
I love mountains. I feel that mountains are huge contemplatives. They are there and they are in the presence up to their necks and they are still in it and with it and within it. One of the lovely ways to pray is to take your body out into the landscape and to be still in it. Your body is made out of clay, so your body is actually a miniature landscape that has got up from under the earth and is now walking on the normal landscape. If you go out for several hours into a place that is wild, your mind begins to slow down, down, down. What is happening is that the clay of your body is retrieving its own sense of sisterhood with the great clay of the landscape. Water in a landscape is a fascinating thing as well. I often think that water is the tears of the earth’s joy and sadness. Every kind of water in a landscape has a different kind of tonality and a different kind of presence to it. You think of the stillness of a well, of the energy of a stream, of the totality of the ocean or the singularity and memory of a river. I also think that trees are incredible presences. There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life, between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and grows down at once and produces enough branches to incarnate its wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself—it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one seamless kind of movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you. One of the lovely developments in consciousness as we come towards the end of the millennium is this dawning recognition that we are guests of the universe, and that landscape was the firstborn of creation and was here hundreds of millions of years before us. It knows what is actually going on. To put it in a theological way, I feel that landscape is always at prayer, and its prayer is seamless. It is always enfolded in the presence. It is a high work of imagination, because there is no repetition in a landscape. Every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eye begins to become attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realize what a privilege it is to actually be here.
For a New Beginning
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
From To Bless the Space Between Us
MEISTER ECKHART
“There is a lonely edge to our lives which can only be filled by God.”
As the second millennium drew to a close, I conceived the idea of a series entitled “Millennium Minds.” Who were the “great minds” of the millennium and why? I put that question to a range of contributors and they chose a wide selection of minds—poets, economists, composers, politicians, saints. John O’Donohue chose an obscure medieval mystic…
Meister Eckhart is for me one of the most fascinating minds of the Western tradition—a mind that had its flowering in the early part of the millennium. He was a priest, a mystic—and officially a heretic!
Several people had recommended Eckhart to me over the years, and while looking around for mystical reading I stumbled on his sermons in a London bookshop. When I finished my doctorate on Hegel, my professor in Tübingen University suggested a post-doctorate dissertation on Eckhart. In the little town I was living in at the time, there was an antiquarian bookshop run by a cranky little man, a very conservative type. I happened to ask him one morning if he had anything on Eckhart. He disappeared upstairs and came back with seventeen dust-covered volumes which he had had for years. It seemed providential, so I set to work on Meister Eckhart.
A PEN PICTURE
Eckhart was born around 1260 in the village of Hochheim, near Erfurt in Germany. He became a novice at the Dominican house in Erfurt around 1277. In the 1270s he studied arts in Paris. He also studied in Cologne under Albert the Great, who had taught Thomas Aquinas. From 1293 to 1294 he lectured in Paris on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In 1294 he became prior of the Dominican house in Erfurt and also vicar of the Dominican house in Thuringia. In 1302 he was called to the chair of theology in Paris, which was recognition in his time and among his peers that he was indeed a brilliant mind. From 1303 to 1311 he was the provincial of the Dominican order in Germany, and he set about reforming that province. He was back in Paris in 1311 as professor of theology. At that time too he was very active in spiritual direction around Germany. From 1322 to 1326 the first censure of his teachings took place and he made his first defense in Cologne. In 1327 he appealed to the pope, alleging delays in his trial. He went into the pulpit in Avignon (where the papacy resided) to defend himself. At that time another man, who would have no sympathy with Eckhart’s teaching, William of Occam, was also defending himself. Eckhart died in 1328 and after his death the papal document In Agro Dominico, condemning him as a heretic, was published. What is remarkable about Eckhart is the balance in his life between the most intricate, profound intellectual work—which is particularly evident in his Latin sermons—and his very fluent and caring and involved pastoral approach. He traveled and preached widely, when travel was particularly difficult. He came after the great flowering of Greek philosophy, particularly neo-Platonist philosophy. Thomas Aquinas preceded him, so he was heir to a fascinatingly complex philosophical system.