Life is a Boiling Up
The 14th century German vicar Meister Eckhart was in many ways a 21st century Progressive Christian. Although highly educated and an admirer of Thomas Aquinus, Eckhart also realized the limits of formal education, once telling the Paris elite that not one person among them could conceive with all their learning what God was in the meanest creature, not even in a fly.
An indomitable spirit, with seemingly limitless energy and passion, Meister Eckhart’s entire life can be seen as a personification of his realization of the living God. Eckhart wrote:
Life is a boiling up and pouring out of itself, scalding and melting and bubbling within itself, light penetrating light. For life is as it were a gushing up, a thing welling up in itself, pouring a part of itself into another part, as it runs forth and bubbles over beyond itself.
Today our lives, all too often, run contrary to the boiling life. We’ve set the heat down low and covered the pot to gentle simmer, so that nothing escapes, nothing gushes forth and bubbles beyond itself. The living God finds no home there, but in those uncovered souls that joyfully turn up the heat.1
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- From everyone to whom much has been given much will be expected, and to those whom much has been entrusted the more will be demanded. I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what more can I wish, if it is already kindled? – Luke 12:48-49 [↩]
