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    Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom
    Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom
    Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom
    Ebook230 pages1 hour

    Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom

    By Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows

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    About this ebook

    "I think Mark Burrows and Jon Sweeney achieve something quite rare and wonderful here. They make Eckhart clear, concise, and very compelling!" —Richard Rohr, OFM, bestselling author of Falling Upward

    An elegant rendering of the great mystic's thoughts on the mysteries of authentic life

    This is a little book about soul freedom. It is a book about discovering the secret to all the things we most desire: contentment, meaning, peace of mind, and true freedom. This skillfully edited translation of selections from the writings of Meister Eckhart provides a roadmap to the spiritual life for contemporary seekers. Eckhart takes us on a journey of discovery; a journey in which we learn to let go, relinquish our need to know everything, and lose those things that we think are important for a life of worth. And in the end he shows us that the true secret is this: to find yourself, you must lose yourself.

    Here is timeless wisdom from a medieval mystic who has influenced a wide range of spiritual teachers and mystics both inside and outside the Christian tradition. Erich Fromm, Arthur Schopenhauer, Dag Hammarskjöld, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, D. T. Suzuki, Rudolf Steiner, and Matthew Fox have all credited Eckhart as being an important influence on their thought. In addition, his work has influenced the development of 20th-century American Buddhism and the Theosophical tradition.

    Divided into five sections—Seeking the Light, Facing Darkness, Risking Love, Knowing Nothing, and Embracing Everything—the book leads readers on the path to an authentic spiritual life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHampton Roads Publishing
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9781612834290
    Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets: Meditations on Letting Go and Finding True Freedom
    Author

    Jon M. Sweeney

    Jon M. Sweeney is an award-winning author who has been interviewed in the Dallas Morning News and The Irish Catholic, and on television at CBS Saturday Morning. His book, The Pope Who Quit, (Doubleday/Image) was optioned by HBO. He is also author of forty other books on spirituality, mysticism, and religion, including Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, with Mark S. Burrows (Hampton Roads), the biography Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Catechist, Saint (Liturgical Press), and Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life and Practices (St. Martin’s Essentials and Penguin Random House Audio, 2021). His bookish reputation is nothing new. In 2014, Publishers Weekly featured Jon in an interview titled, “A Life in Books and On the Move.” He began the 1990s as a theological bookseller in Cambridge, and ended the decade founding a multifaith publishing house, SkyLight Paths Publishing, in Vermont. He’s worked in books and publishing ever since. Today he writes, reviews, edits, and recommends books, speaks regularly at literary and religious conferences, is a Catholic married to a rabbi, and is active on social media (Twitter @jonmsweeney; Facebook jonmsweeney). Sweeney lives in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.

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      Book preview

      Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets - Jon M. Sweeney

      Copyright © 2019

      by Mark S. Burrows and Jon M. Sweeney

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

      Cover art: Brother Pedro Machado (d.1604), by Francisco de Zurbaran,

      (1598-1664) © Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando,

      Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Images

      Typeset in Truesdell

      Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

      Charlottesville, VA 22906

      Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

      www.redwheelweiser.com

      Sign up for our newsletter and special offers by going to

      www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter/.

      ISBN: 978-1-57174-847-8

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      available upon request

      Printed in the United States of America

      M&G

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Prologue: There Is a Secret Hidden in the Heart

      1. Seeking Light

      2. Facing Darkness

      3. Risking Love

      4. Knowing Nothing

      5. Embracing Everything

      Epilogue: Come Home to Yourself

      Notes and Sources for the Poems

      Index of Poems

      INTRODUCTION

      There is a secret hidden within each one of us. Meister Eckhart knew this, and never tired of speaking about it—in sermons delivered before ordinary people, for special audiences of cloistered nuns, and in the intellectual halls of his day. What is this secret? It is many things, and it is nothing at all.

      The secrets that Meister Eckhart speaks of are similar to ones that Jesus alluded to when he taught the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl of great price. In the first tale, a pilgrim discovers treasure hidden in a field and immediately seeks to purchase that field. In the second, the pilgrim discovers a pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. But, of course, these secrets aren't really for sale.

      No one can buy what's spoken of here. On the contrary, to discover these secrets, one must be willing to give up a great deal. There's giving up, for instance, the effort we expend trying to build up a self-image. There's giving up the need to justify ourselves. There's letting go of everything we thought we had, in order to hold on to what actually gives our lives meaning. If this all sounds intangible, that's because it is. But it is no less real for that.

      When it comes to the treasure upon which our worth depends, the pearl that finally matters, the work before us is not that of accumulating, which is so much part of our consumer culture, but rather that of letting go—of what we think we need to make sense of things. For much of this is finally little more than a barrier to the very thing we most desire: contentment, peace of mind, rest in our heart. The Meister knew about this, reminding us that the secret to such things is generally out of reach only because we have sold our soul to bidders who cannot deliver what they promise: true freedom. Or what we once spoke of as soul freedom.

      What is this freedom? It is the open secret of our true nature, that within us is the treasure, the pearl of great price, buried in the field of our lives. And that we are the only ones in a position to let go of what we do not need to gain this treasure, opening ourselves to the true self that was within us from the beginning.

      Eckhart knew much about this as a Dominican friar, often called upon to teach students in Paris and Cologne as well as preaching to congregations far and wide, including many in the convents of the province of Thuringia and later Saxony, which he served as provincial. He was tireless in speaking of our essential nobility at a time when much of the church's rhetoric gave little attention to this ancient wisdom. One of his favorite themes, which had become something of a secret in the hands of many theologians and preachers of the day, was that each of us has what he called a noble soul. No, more than this: that each of us is such a noble soul, and that this is the pearl of great price that lies in our heart.

      This inner self—or ground, as Eckhart often called it—is the one treasure God desires us to find, a gift given at the beginning that abides within us all along this

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