This is not a course for everyone. It is meant for those who want to risk going beyond the faith of settled “doctrine,” guided by the writings of a medieval mystic who reminds us that our journey into the mystery of God/self ultimately brings us not to language but to silence. If this makes no sense to you, this is not your course, but if you find it puzzling, perhaps even alluring, it might well be the right one for you. In one of his sermons, Eckhart (ca. 1260 – 1328) claims that we must “take leave of God for the sake of God.” What he meant by that points to the radical nature of his insistence that faith is not “thinking about” God or formulating an idea of God; that is what we must abandon to find the “God beyond God.” We come to know this through the deep experience of the radical (non-dualistic) oneness of being. He also insists that we must abandon the constructed “self” to find this truth—which is to say that we must also learn to “take leave of our self for the sake of our self.” Our exploration will always begin with excerpts from Eckhart’s own paradoxical writings, and then turn to poems from three books that Burrows co-wrote with Jon Sweeney (Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart [2017]; Meister Eckhart’s Book of Secrets [2019]; and, Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light [2023]).
- Instructor: Mark Burrows
- Instructor: Sharon Junn