Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Always Learning

November 4, 2005
Rev. Darcey Laine

Sabbatical Episode 4: Eckhart and nieces

My academic advisor had strongly encouraged me to take Matthew Fox’s class on Meister Eckhart. “Eckhart is where Matt really shines,” she said. Eckhart was a Dominican Priest who lived and preached at the end of the 13th Century. Fox has traced Creation Spirituality back through mystics in several traditions during this historical period, but as a former Dominican priest himself, he found it particularly important to trace the Creation Spirituality tradition through the Christian lineage: “This is not something that sprang up at Esalen in the 1960s.” Our assigned reading for the class, Passion for Creation, was a collection of Eckhart’s sermons translated from German into English, and commentaries by Fox. The reading was slow and dense (which some might say is characteristic of the sermonic form in general). You could almost hear each pregnant sentence hanging in the hushed air over the congregation of Beguines. (Beguines were a lay sisterhood often at odds with the Catholic Hierarchy, as was Eckhart himself.)

One of the characteristics of Eckhart’s theology is that, being creation centered, it encourages awe and wonder for the world (creation) in which we live, and for our own being. Eckhart often uses imagery of birth to describe both the process of ongoing creation, and a kind of spiritual emergence that happens continuously in our lives. It happens that at the time of this Intensive, both my sister and my sister-inlaw were each imminently expecting their first child. In traditional form the morning seminars with Fox were followed by an afternoon of Art as Meditation, in this case mantra meditation with Russell Paul. The experience of being immersed in theological metaphors of birth, of awaiting my nieces’ births, and the long periods of meditation led to a revisiting of the birth of my son in a profound and surprising way. It was as if some deep psychological work had remained unfinished and emerged in this setting. The work was powerful, painful and cleansing.

The image of birth creates a language for people to speak metaphorically about life. But the metaphor can only go so far, because it is the extraordinary particularity of birth, of life, that is so powerful. Ask to hear the story of a child’s birth, and you will hear a story absolutely unique to that particular moment shared between mother and child.

As spring break began the next week, my little sister (the same sister I held in my arms when she was an infant and I was the age my son is now) went into labor with her first child. She was early, and the prodromal labor went on for several days. When finally she and her husband were admitted to the hospital, I left home before sunrise determined not to return until my niece was born. How different it was to be with someone in labor, when I had only ever been in labor myself. And how different is each child’s birth. What a gift and a blessing to witness a new life entering the world. What a gift to be with my sister and her husband as they became parents. I could not be with my sister-in-law as she went into labor (late, and under threat of a New York blizzard) a week later, but shared as best I could the birth of my second niece. Two births so close to my heart, and yet each unique as those two new lives beginning. This is truly religious education &mdash learning on every level of your being, integrating mind, body and heart. No one could have designed a more powerful learning experience.

Stay tuned! In our next installment I learn about Peak oil and find art in the dump...