Richard Rohr's Thoughts on Eckhart

While doing a bit of research on Richard Rohr for the last post, I realized that I have run across him before in my Internet travels.  He wrote an article entitled Eckhart Tolle and the Christian Tradition. It was a well balanced article...and Fr. Richard stated that rather than something new age, as many Christians believe, Eckhart is teaching something quite old...

The process—and that is what it is—that he is teaching, can be traced through the Greek and Latin traditions of contemplation, the apophatic tradition in particular, and the long history of what was sometimes called “The Sacrament of the Present Moment” (Brother Lawrence, OCD, Francisco de Osuna, OFM, Jean Pierre de Caussade, S.J.).

So why does it seem so new age? Fr. Rohr explains that the church got off track in the years around the Reformation of the 16th century, and after the Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries. The focus became more about being right (and proving it)and less about the more spiritual aspects of religion.

So for at least 400 years, we have had neither an understanding of infused nor acquired contemplation! It is such foreign terrain to almost all Protestants, and most Catholics and Orthodox that they immediately think it is heresy or even pagan, when in fact, it is the solid tradition of the first 1400 years of Christianity!

Following are a few assorted (very balanced) thoughts of Fr. Rohr about Eckhart, his purpose and what he is trying to teach us. The question is; are we ready to learn it. 

• Eckhart Tolle is teaching a form of natural mysticism or contemplative practice.
• He is teaching a morality and asceticism of recognizing and letting go of “the self that has to die” (Matthew 16:25), which he calls ego and Jesus calls the “grain of wheat” (John 12:24) ; so that another self can be born, which he would call “consciousness” and we would call the person born again in Christ, or something similar.
• He is giving us some practices (Similar to how John Wesley gave “methods” or Ignatius gave “exercises”) whereby we can be present to the grace of the moment and stop the “passions,” the “egocentric mind,” or the “prideful self” which keeps us from true goodness (or God, as we would call it). Each tradition uses different language for what is to be overcome, but it is always
  some form of “un-love” and selfishness (which he calls ego).
• He does assume and imply a worldview that is foreign to many, if not most Christians. 
• Tolle is probably not pantheistic (all things are God) as much as panentheistic (God is IN all things).
• His brilliant understanding of the “pain body,” as he calls it, is actually very close to the Catholic notion of Original Sin.

Fr. Rohr believes that Eckhart provides Christians with

.....an opportunity for us to understand our own message at deeper levels.

He goes on to say that he is

....willing to hear truth today wherever it comes from, as long as it does not compromise the Gospel.

Me, too.....