I’ve been waiting for the apocalypse for some time now. One of my favorite
games as a child was to pretend that it was the end of the world and the goal of play was
to not be seen. Cars were government vehicles, driven by Nazis, fascists and big-brother
types who cruised the streets in search of the few rare individuals who had managed to
stay free. People on foot were zombie ghouls, of course, looking to nibble on some tasty
brains or innards. I was pretty good at not being seen, moving amongst the shadows,
being able to outrun cars on my bike by the sheer virtue that I knew my neighborhood
well, along with all of its shortcuts and hidden places. Thirty years later and I still feel
like the end is near, though the thrill of a child’s game has given way to anxiety and fear.
It does though seem like the end of the world has turned into professional sport
these days. We all know it’s the end, the main questions are when and how? The latest
sign of impending doom is the Dow Jones which, for a while at least, seemed to be
plummeting at the speed of angels falling from heaven. Along with this descent into
economic darkness, the country is bleeding jobs at the highest rate in sixty years, making
it clear that this is no mere flesh wound we are dealing with. The number of homeless is
staggering. On any given day in Los Angeles County, there are over 88,000 men, women
and children with no place to live. That is four times the population of the small town
where I was born and raised and played my apocalyptic games. This number is only
going to increase. Americans are loosing their homes at an unprecedented rate and tent
cities are appearing across the land, making many exiles in their own country.
While the majority of the cable news programs and newspaper editorials continue
to speculate and prophesize over the cause and cure of the economic collapse, a few
turned their attention to another story to emerge the first week of April; one which spoke
of the nation’s soul. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, America
is also undergoing a subtle religious transformation – it is becoming less Christian. The
number of Americans who identify themselves as Christian dropped from 86 to 76
percent in 2008. It is not the case that this decrease was the result of conversion to other
religions or religious movements, the largest increase in the study was persons who
claimed no religious affiliation at all, a group which grew by 37 percent in ten year’s
time. America, it would seem, is loosing its religion. 1

I can’t help but to consider connections between religion and the state of the
nation. I am not going to argue that people are becoming less religious because of the
economy, or that in their desperation, more people will turn to God. Nor do I plan to
lament the decrease in Christians since, truth be told, I am glad to see many of them go.
Instead, I want to argue that we are in a unique point in history to re-examine the
foundations of both our economy and religion. Indeed, it would seem that we need to
consider both simultaneously.

America has been, and continues to be a nation of Christians. We are also a nation
of capitalists. It has been 100 years since sociologist Max Weber demonstrated how
capitalism emerged out of the protestant ethic. Though he believed that the religious
underpinnings had long since vanished, it is not difficult to see how even today
capitalism is informed by an often unconscious moral attitude. For example, linguist
George Lakoff has pointed out that embedded within conservative political language is
the attitude that those who are self-sufficient are moral persons; those who need help
from the state are not. It was this kind of moral turpitude which allowed Ronald Reagan

to unabashedly claim that homelessness was a lifestyle choice, and as such the state need
not extend a helping hand.

This is America at the start of the 21 st century. Churches have taken up residence
in shopping malls and the homeless push shopping carts along city streets. These are the
images projecting from the American dream, and all dream images are apocalyptic, as the
word literally means “to uncover,” “to bring out of darkness.” They are revealing
unconscious truths; there is no longer any distinguishing Christ from commodity, in our
greed we have decimated the environment and our consumption is costing us a place to
call home. It does seem that the end is truly nigh. If there is to be any salvation at all, it is
going to require radical shifts in consciousness. We are being called to create a new
world. We cannot rely on failed ideologies, it is time to take risks and explore
possibilities long thought impossible in an attempt to give birth to an economy based on
equality, justness and sustainability and that allows for the honoring of the creative
human spirit and its connection to the divine. Perhaps we should look to voices from the
past that have been silenced and shut away, condemned to the edges of history, to see if
what was rejected could be the foundation stone for a new society.

A candidate who fits this description is Meister Eckhart a fourteenth century
Dominican priest and mystic. He was condemned by the Catholic Church, in part because
he preached to the poor using their German language rather than the official Latin of
liturgy. The message he delivered was not one of damnation and separation from god, but
one of blessing, union and justice. According to Matthew Fox, a former Dominican like
Eckhart who is now an Episcopal priest, there are four primary themes found in the
sermons of Eckhart which create a four-fold spiritual path. These are 1) creation (the via
positiva), 2) Letting go and letting be (the via negativa), 3) breakthrough and giving birth
to God (the via creativa), and 4) re-creation in compassion and justice (the via
transformativa). Embracing Eckhart’s mystical vision just may be the key that can free us
from our economic and religious malaise and provide the support for a new American
economy and spirituality.

According to Fox, Eckhart is a panentheist, that is, that God is in all things and
that all things reside in God. God can be found in creation and therefore, the world is
inherently good. Being is holy. The human soul is a spark of the divine and as such, we
are born into goodness. This is the antithesis of the view that we are all born into sin. It is
an optimistic imagining of the human condition that stands in direct opposition to the
pessimistic stance injected into modern political and philosophical discourse by Thomas
Hobbes.

In his political treatise, Leviathan, Hobbes famously described the human life as
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The world is a hostile place with everyone
always, at all times, acting out of selfish motivation. As such, it becomes a moral
imperative to act to protect your interests and ensure that no one takes advantage of you –
because everyone is out to do so. This is the underlying world view beneath Reagan’s
comments on the homeless as well as those who argue against universal health care or
welfare because the assumption is, others will take advantage.
Obviously, Eckhart would not agree with Hobbes’ assessment of the human
condition. For Eckhart, the soul was noble so the human was noble. Furthermore, the
world, being a product of God’s creation and at the same time containing God, is
therefore divine. Because nature is full of God, Eckhart would encourage us to love

nature as the believer loves God. I wonder what would follow from a shift in
consciousness where people began experiencing nature as containing God, rather than
treating it as nothing more than lifeless substance to be exploited for personal gain?
Could it not set the stage for an earth-honoring economy and politic? Much is being said
about transforming the American economy into a Green Economy, that is, one which is
based on sustainability and sound environmental practices. It seems to me that Eckhart’s
path of creation will lead us towards this goal.

Scholars and commentators have written much about Eckhart’s second path, the
via negativa. It has often been compared to Buddhist, and in particular Zen Buddhist
thinking, especially since Eckhart employs terms like “nothingness” and encourages his
listeners to “let go” and “empty themselves.” All creatures are “nothing” because they do
not and cannot exist without God, which is the ground of all being. In order to fully
experience the divine, we must go beyond God and empty ourselves of all our previous
understanding in order to allow Being to flood our souls. As Eckhart preached “I pray
God to rid me of God.” America too needs to rid ourselves of God, to let go of our self
identity as a Christian nation, abandon fatuous fundamentalisms and false piety in order
to truly experience ourselves as citizens of a promised land. Likewise, we need to
dismantle outdated social structures which serve only the wealthy and elite in order to
construct a system truly based on equality and justice.

Weber lamented that capitalism had lost its religious foundation, creating a world
of alienation where modern workers were not religious ascetics but angels transformed
into automata after being conscripted into corporate service.
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism
was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly
morality, it did its part in building tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order.
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine
production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into
this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with
irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal
is burnt. 2

Americans define themselves by their work. Most of us typically spend more
waking time with co-workers than family. When we are not identifying ourselves with
what we do, it is because we are busy identifying with what we own. We are consumers
trained by a lifetime of advertising and public relations to never be satiated. We are like
the hungry ghosts of the Preta Loka, one of the Hindu and Buddhist hells, where souls
condemned to eternal hunger reside. We must release our identifications of vocation and
consumer; we must abandon the drive to accumulate of excessive wealth in order to
discover the treasure of our souls. Yet, fear and greed often divert our attention from
devotion. As Eckhart noted, some people are “more afraid of losing a piece of money, or
even a danarius, than God. We condemn Judas because he sold Christ for thirty silver
pieces, and yet many persons sell God, truth, justice for a single quarter or eve a penny.” 3
Even if we can find the courage to embark on the mystic’s path, the world does
not allow much time for spiritual endeavors. Personally, I have spent the past 15 years
studying the world’s religions and religious teachers, yet have devoted little time to my

own spirituality. My days are filled with work and deadlines and distractions leaving
hardly ten minutes for silent meditation. Yet I carry with me, every day, the need for
stillness. I suspect I am not alone if feeling like this. As well, I also feel the desire to
create, to write, to paint, make music, yet that too remains unrequited.
Karl Marx argued that when workers are forced to create items for another’s
profit and not in order to fulfill their own creative needs, they will become alienated,
strangers to themselves. Again, when we do not know ourselves, we cannot know God.
Any model for a new economy will have to be one which allows for the free expression
of our innate urge to create.

Eckhart saw creativity as a spiritual practice. Once we have emptied ourselves,
and let go of the notions that we are separate from creation then we can be filled with
God. When we find stillness, we can experience a breakthrough, an awakening to the
mystery. We finally experience the truth that God is in us and we in God. Our will
becomes God’s will. God flows from our every action, we give birth to God and like
God, we become creators. However, we are not to remain in constant rapture. Too many
who have had an experience of the ineffable remove themselves from the world, they are
“blissed out” and in their desire to linger in transcendence, they remove themselves from
the divine and become trapped in a narcissistic quest for ecstasy. For Eckhart, it was
essential that we be in the world.

The final path of Eckhart’s mysticism, the via transformativa, requires that we
“recreate creation.” 4 We are called to give birth to the world, just as we are now. For
Eckhart, this world is one where equality reigns. All creatures participate equally in being
and as such, all are connected. Eckhart taught that there is a reason why the Lord’s prayer
petitions “Give us our daily bread” and not “give me my daily bread.”
We say “our” in order that we might remember that all people are our brothers and
co-heirs and thus we might love them and persevere to the end with them as brothers,
keeping also in mind that other verse: “All of you are brothers.” 5

Later, in the same sermon, Eckhart, citing the Church Father Chrysostom, declares
We might understand that bread is given to us so that not only we might eat but that
we recognize others in need, lest anyone say “my bread” is given to me instead of
understanding that it is ours, given to me, to others through me and to me through
others. For not only bread but all things which are necessary for sustaining this
present life are given to us with others and because of others and given to others in us.
Whoever does not give to another what belongs to the other, such a one does not eat
his own bread but east the bread of another along with his own Thus when we justly
eat the bread we have received, we certainly eat our bread; but when we eat evilly and
with sin the bread we have received, then we are not eating our own bread but the
bread of another. For everything which we have unjustly is not really ours. 6

The social structure that Eckhart would have us build is one where it is ensured
that everyone has their basic needs met; food, shelter and health before anyone could

begin compiling and collecting excess. It is a scandal that America, one of the wealthiest
nations in the history of the world, has denied so many what is essential for survival. It is
not that those in need are lacking virtue. The sin lies with us, not them. We are failing to
act with compassion. Eckhart would rightly see us for what we are, a nation of people
who pray for “my bread” not “ours.” In a sermon which clearly demonstrates Eckhart’s
contemporary relevance, he states “it is a great crime to give the wages of the poor to the
rich and from the livelihood of the poor to increase the luxuries of the powerful, taking
water from the needy earth and pouring it into the rivers.” 7

Writing from Birmingham Jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. commented
that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and so it is for Eckhart. Acting
out of compassion, we will feel a compulsion to social justice. The apocalypse is a
necessary deconstruction; we are required to remove that which is useless, outdated and
unjust before dreaming a new America. This is the nation Eckhart would have us build;
one based on equality, justice and compassion. None would go hungry or homeless. All
will receive the care they require. Alienation will be exorcised as every person will be
allowed to fully embody the creative energy flowing through their being. Realizing that
all things are connected and sacred, we will build community and honor the earth and all
its creatures and create an economy that is sustainable. If this is revealed, then the
kingdom of heaven will surely be on Earth

1 http://livinginliminality.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/aris_report_2008.pdf
2 Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (London: Routledge. 2001) 123.
3 Fox, Matthew. Passion for Creation. (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions) 459.
4 Fox, Matthew. “Meister Eckhart on the Fourfold Path of a Creation Centered Spiritual Journey.”
5 Fox, Matthew. Passion for Creation. 496
6 Ibid. 499-500.
7 Ibid. 422.