◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Part One: Let Go I was born around 1260 in Thuringia, in what is now Germany but was then the Holy Roman Empire. I joined the Dominican Order as a teenager. I studied at Paris and at Cologne under Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. I held the Dominican chair of theology at Paris twice. Only Aquinas was given the same honor. I rose in the Order. Prior of Erfurt. Provincial of Saxonia. I administered the Dominican houses of much of the German-speaking world. My nights I spent writing in Latin for the academy. My days I spent preaching in German to Dominican nuns and to the beguines — the women's contemplative communities the institutional Church regarded with suspicion. I taught that there is a Godhead beyond God. The God you can name, the God who serves your nation, the God who hates your enemies — this is not God. God is the ground beyond every name. Anyone who thinks they know what God is does not. I taught that the eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. I taught detachment. Not from the world, but from the grasping after the world. The soul that becomes empty becomes receptive. The soul that is full of itself can receive nothing. I taught that God is being born in your soul right now. Not as metaphor. The Word is being spoken in you in this moment. If the noise within you would quiet, you would hear it. In 1326 the Archbishop of Cologne began an investigation of me for heresy. I had taught too much, too radically, in the vernacular, to too many women and laypeople. I had said too much that the institution could not contain. I defended myself in writing. I said: I may err, but I cannot be a heretic. Error is in the intellect. Heresy is in the will. I had no will to oppose the Church. I had only the will to teach what I believed was true. I appealed to the Pope. The Pope was John XXII, who lived in Avignon, deeply involved in the political and financial corruption of the Church. He was the kind of pope a mystic could not love. I traveled to Avignon. I died there, sometime in 1328, before judgment was rendered. In 1329 he condemned twenty-eight propositions from my writings. Seventeen as heretical. Eleven as suspect. My books were ordered destroyed. The books continued to circulate underground for seven centuries. PART TWO: The Merchant I am Meister Eckhart. In the first part I told you what I had said — about the ground, the eye, the God beyond concept, detachment, poverty of spirit, and the birth of the Son in the soul. Now I will tell you what I saw already in the fourteenth century that has ripened terribly in your time. I saw the merchant everywhere. The merchant is not a person. The merchant is a soul-position. The merchant approaches God as a partner in a transaction. The merchant prays for what he wants. The merchant offers piety in exchange for what he wants. The merchant tithes and expects blessing. The merchant sacrifices and expects reward. The merchant treats God as a business. I denounced the merchant in my sermon on the temple. Christ threw the merchants out of the temple because the temple was the soul, and the merchants had made it a marketplace. The merchant in the soul cannot receive God because the merchant is always calculating. Your country calls this the prosperity gospel. What I denounced in a sermon around 1300 has become an industry. Preachers on television promise wealth to those who send them money. Congregations calculate blessing. Politicians pose with Bibles they have never read and claim God's favor as their negotiating position. This is merchant religion in its fullest development. Your strongman is the ultimate merchant. He offers God as a commodity. He blesses those who serve him. He curses those who do not. He has no interior life to lose because his soul is already a marketplace. Your screen trains you to be a merchant. Every scroll is a calculation of like and unlike, mine and not mine. Every post is an offering to the algorithm in exchange for attention. You have been trained since you were small to be merchants of yourselves. Gelassenheit is the German word for what I taught. In English: releasement. Letting-be. Letting God be God, letting the world be world, letting yourself be yourself without grasping. It is the opposite of everything your moment trains in you. The little spark is still in your soul. The Grunt has not been destroyed. God's ground is still your ground. But you cannot reach it while you are a merchant. Put down the calculation. Put down the exchange. Put down the God you have been sold. Sit with what is left. If I had a God whom I could understand, I would no longer hold him for God. Let God be God in you.