Letting Go of God for God’s Sake
[“God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction. . . .The highest and most perfect thing that a person can let go is that he lets God go for God’s sake” (Eckhart).]
[“You cannot help us, we must help You to help ourselves. That is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves” (Etty Hillesum [7/12/42]).]
O Lover,
Much of each human life, particularly during the first “half,” involves adding to and reinforcing the egoic self in various respects: e.g., familial and educational relationships; professional achievements, affiliations, power, and status; financial security; supportive religious images, belief systems, practices, and devotions. Such individuated growth is part of human maturation and identity formation. It is such “additions,” often seasoned with the elixir of control, which are prominent in both Curriculum Vitas and obituaries.
The downside of this “addition” emphasis is two-fold: the temptation to presume such accomplishments to be the última, the acme, of human life so that we get “stuck” in that dimension; and, engrossed in the additive life, perhaps to the point of addiction, we are distracted from life’s core realities. For many of us the deity remains distant, other, and/or comprehended. It is this god, a pious construct outgrown by human experiencing of You, that we must let go of, this because of who You Yourself have self-disclosed as being. The additive life, while never fully satisfying, ironically can further thwart precisely the fulfillment for which it thirsts. That such relinquishment should elicit the charge of apophatic agnosticism should surprise no one, for letting go of you for Your sake is not for the faint of heart. But if we experience You repeatedly as vastly more than inherited forms, we cannot but follow You out into uncharted horizons.
Enter Meister Eckhart, a mystic whose spirituality is more of “subtraction” than addition, most notably his “let[ting] go of [you] for [Your] sake.” What do these words mean? What do we make of how he embodied them, especially in his final years? And why have I found this relinquishment to be so formidable yet riveting? While my response to these queries has but begun, their challenge, O Lover, is a pressing one.
As starters, Eckhart writes for the entire apophátic impulse in insisting upon the provisionality of all depictions of You. Thus “giving you up,” especially “giving you up,” includes de-absolutizing any and all representations of You—sensorial, intellectual, imaginative, affective—to which we with our penchant for comfort have become attached. In short, You as Love itself are incomprehensibly more than any or all of our finite languages or loves, whether tawdry or noble. While nudging us via sense and intellect, You as Love itself are unconfinable by logic or system. In the words of the late 14th C The Cloud: “by our love, the divine may be reached and held; by our thinking, never.”
So again: beyond finite depictions of You, what does it mean to let go of you for Your sake? In my anecdotage I am experiencing You unprecedentedly via the lens of the Christ, the embodied and deified closure of the finite/Infinite rift. Furthermore, as the showcasing of that materialized unítas he is also harbinger, first fruits, prolepsis of all gifted with being, preemption of the closing of the cosmos’s inexorable arcing toward Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:20-28). You, Abba of this Christ, are devoid of remove, antithetical to dualism, unknowable apart from embeddedness in us creatures. Even agapaic Love, inimitably rhapsodized by the Apostle Paul (I Cor 13) and uniquely equated with You (I Jn 4:8 &16), has an apophátic aura given the Christ’s embodied self-relinquishment and Your Self-outpouring (kenósis [Phil 2:7) which he models.
Yet again, beyond both anthropomorphic and dualistic images, what might Eckhart’s relinquishment of you for Your sake entail? Etty Hillesum lived and wrote out of the crucible of the Third Reich’s final solution. In the eighteen months spanned by her diary she moved astonishingly from fragmented self-absorption toward wholeness, from work with the throttled Jewish Council in support of fellow evacuees awaiting transport “to the east,” to her own entrainment to that destination. And across that diary’s journey she gradually surrendered the last of the “goodies” she had clutched: that You would shield her and her people from the future that was rushing toward them. In her embodiment of Jesus’ fíat volúntas túa in Gethsemane Etty was “letting go of you” as interventionist, extricator, “cavalry,” déus ex máchina. She was relinquishing you as overrider of the agency of both herself and the planet. Her life’s declaration that she could not live without You had been stripped of any expectation of You whatsoever. Finally there remained You alone (Tu Sólus), and for Etty Hillesum that was enough.
O Lover, in our own troubled time subtract from me farther along the path modeled by Eckhart and Etty.
