[NOTE: After more than six years, we are trying out an amended title for this Journal adding the phrase Radical Loving Care up front. Our work is best known by this phrase yet we still wanted to retain the Journal name so they have been combined. Our top line has also been changed from red to black as we seek out design alternatives.]

  When I was the stream, when I was the forest, when I was still the field, when I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing, when I was the sky itself, no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever wondered was there anything I might need, for there was nothing I could not love. – Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

     Meister Eckhart is one of the great mystics of history. The radical nature of his writings so provoked the Catholic Church of the time that they suppressed his work. Much of it was not discovered until the 1880s. More recently, the Dominican Order has sought to establish that Eckhart was an exemplary Christian mystic and priest.

   It is easy to see why Eckhart's work scared the reactionary church of that time. For example, consider the passion in this lines of his: "…Communion, first seek that from your lover's soul before offered from a priest."

   The manufactured skin that wraps our cities and suburbs and cars and bodies can seal us off from the truth of the earth. Even religion can blind us into thinking that God lives only in the soaring cathedrals we build for worship.

   Seven centuries ago, Eckhart saw things otherwise: "Is this not the holy trinity: the firmament, the earth, our bodies? And is it not an act of worship to hold a child and till the soil and lift a cup?"

   The more we seal ourselves off from the earth the more we distance ourselves from life. Love rises from the ground, wraps the trees, massages the oceans, stirs the fires of love and paints our hearts with the only colors that are real.

   "One day," Eckhart wrote, "the wind will show its kindness and remove the tiny pathes that cover your eyes, and you will see God more clearly than you have ever seen yourself."

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Forest Embrace" – copyright erie chapman 2012