Union with God: The Eyes Have It
One Eye, One Love, One Knowing, One Being
In his sixteenth sermon, the great German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-ca. 1327) said this:
If my eye is to perceive colour, it must be free of all colours. If I see the colour blue or white, then the seeing of my eye, which perceives the colour, is exactly the same as what it sees, as what is seen by the eye. 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. — Meister Eckhart
If I want to hear you speak, I must give you my attention, and not just focus on the never-ending commentary in my own mind. Likewise, if I want to see, or hear, or experience God, I have to create the space within to perceive that which is already there.
Eckhart has only a medieval understanding of how the human eye is engineered, but he intuits that we hold an image in our eyes that reflects our external reality. Of course, the eye which beholds God is th eye of the imagination, the “mind’s eye” — yet we cannot imagine God except that God resides within us, inviting us to imagine the infinite transcendent cradled intimately within us.
Is Eckhart boldly proclaiming that we are one with God? Of course he is. But he’s also being coy, since in his day such a bold proclamation could lead to getting burned at the stake. Yet he can’t resist expanding on what is already a daring statement: not only do God and I share the same eye, but also the same knowledge and love.
“We love because God first loved us, “ the Bible promises us, and Eckhart seems to understand that all love comes from one source. Even the most selfish and wounded person there is has some capacity to love, even if it’s just a primal self-love or narcissism: yet even in its most self-serving form, the love we experience is the experience of God — if only we had eyes to see, and a heart to truly discern.
Carl, I thank you for your beautiful writing and the generous spirit that motivates it. I always enjoy it. I hope you don’t think I’m nitpicking. I just wanted to say that there is nothing of God in narcissism. Of course everyone else can be narcissistic at times, the full-blown diagnosis of Narcissism is the epitome of what the Bible would call evil. There is nothing of God in it. While God may be in the person, that person has no interest in God because they are a God unto themselves. They have no empathy no conscience no ability to change. I have been working with survivors of narcissistic and other forms of psychopathic relationships for over 18 years.
If you know any survivors of these types of relationships , they need to be in psychotherapy with a trauma specialist. Only if they were in therapy, would I recommend that they read the book women who love psychopaths third edition by Sandra Brown. This is a landmark book because it’s the first study of survivors of these types of relationships. I pray that God continues to bless you and your work because it’s so valuable and important for people to know about the richness of the mystics who are the direct opposite of the evil described in that book. God continueto bless you your loved ones and your work.