Keeping Our Center ~ Day 72

Theologian Meister Eckhart once said, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting.” It seems to me that this is true. 

In my humble opinion, religion has often asked people to add all kinds of beliefs and practices to their lives in order to find God. It’s become a list of hoops one must jump through, or a ladder one must climb. If you go to worship, give money, confess your sins, believe the right way, read scripture, serve at the food pantry, pray daily, receive communion, behave the right way, and so on and so on… then God will reward you, bless you and save you. You aren’t even promised to find God or to know God, because that hasn’t been the goal. Forgive my cynicism here, but the goal was to keep you coming back and perpetuating the institution.

Now, it’s not to say that you can’t experience God in these things, but, religious institutions don’t want you to know that God can be found without any of them. In fact, knowing God in the depths of one’s soul is an interior journey that entails stripping away our belief that we ever needed an intermediary person or practice to reach God. Instead, it requires stripping away the layers of baggage covering our authentic selves in anger, grudges, shame, guilt, fear, and lack of self-esteem. It requires stripping away the desire to judge or blame or exclude others. It requires letting go of the concept of duality: us and them, mine and theirs, good and bad, spirit and flesh, mind and body, God and humans, light and dark, and so on.

When we’ve subtracted all these things and are left with our most bare, vulnerable, true selves, it is then that we also find the Divine within.

Love & Light!

Kaye