The Heart of Joy: Soliloquies on Sorrow

Notes For the Reformation: an Appendix, part IV: The Prayers of Sorrow

...when I have true joy, when neither pain nor sorrow can take it from me, for then I am installed in the divine essence, where sorrow has no place. For we see that in God there is no anger or sadness, but only love and joy… And so, when you have reached the point where… everything is perfect joy to you, then your child has really been born.

Strive therefore to ensure that your child is not only being born, but is brought to birth, just as in God the Son is always being born and is brought to birth.

And that this may be our lot, so help us God. Amen.

—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 7. (Edited for brevity)

The ingestion of Sorrow carves a straight path to prayer within Being.

There is no other path; for this sweetness, which is far too great to understand or contain, gives birth!

And it gives birth freely and inevitably, for it cannot hold back what it is; that isn’t in its nature. Its nature is mystery; but it is equally a certain inner knowledge. That knowledge is a knowledge carried by higher feeling into creation; and it is not only higher feeling, but higher thinking. For it is the essence of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, together, fed to us in the smallest possible of measures (for we could take no more, so sweet is it!) and the finest of substances into creation and Being; fed into conscious awareness.

Conscious awareness has no choice in this matter, and indeed it does not need one: for love embraces without hesitation and does not admit of choice in its actions. Instead; it loves; and real love ever rushes forward into Being without hesitation.

That is in its nature. It has no other way to Be.