Entering through the narrow gate and going through the eye of the needle
This morning I was reading this poem by Meister Eckhart:
If you want to know God in this way or in that,
beware –
for your desire for such a narrow way
separates you from God by binding you to your own opinions,
pushing God under a bench.
For you’re the cause of the obstacles you find in your life,
so guard yourself against yourself,
and open your heart to the love that is present to you
in darkness and light, in sorrow and joy.
It reminded me about the passage where Jesus talks about a camel going through the eye of a needle and where he says, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
When I was a Christian, I thought and was taught that going through the narrow gate was all about the right belief. I had to believe in Jesus as my Lord and Savior, the one who died for my sins, the son of God.
One of the first big things I learned when my faith started to fall apart was this idea of “unknowing,” as described by the Christian mystics. It took me a while to catch onto what they were saying, but eventually I began to understand it as letting go of all the ideas I had about God. This was the opposite of what I had learned in evangelicalism, where we worshipped certainty: Do you know for sure that you’ll go to Heaven when you die? Do you know Jesus? Do you know Jesus as your lord and savior? Are you certain of your salvation? Pastors would say humble things like “God is beyond our understanding” but then they would proclaim this or that as right/wrong, good/bad, holy/sinful. On one hand, God ways were higher than our ways, but on the other hand, they could tell you with absolute certainty and confidence that homosexuality was a sin, sex before marriage was a sin, abortion was a sin, and rejecting Jesus was the sure way to an eternity in Hell.
When I stumbled into Christian mysticism and this idea of unknowing God, it was strange but compelling. The idea of who/what “God” was became a mystery again; granted, an uncomfortable one at first. It was so much easier when I believed I knew what God was and what He wanted from me, and how He operated. This mystery was uncontrollable, unboxable, wild. If I don’t know what God is, if I can’t name him and describe him and understand him, then I can’t control him. I can’t know how to judge others properly, or judge myself. Suddenly, unknowing God meant I had to let go of all the ways I had been judging myself and others based on what I thought I knew about God. It became harder to hold any opinions or judgments whatsoever because if my entire worldview was centered around this evangelical “biblical” God and I no longer claimed to know what “God” even meant at all, well then anything and everything was up for grabs.
An imaginary God will please and delight you, will satisfy and entice you, but when your thoughts pass away, this imaginary God also disappears. What you need is the essential God within you, not the imaginary one on your lips. ~ Meister Eckhart
As I’ve continued to let go of my beliefs/ideas about who/what “God” is and faith and spirituality and myself as a person, I’m finding that this is DEFINITELY a harder, more difficult way. The ideas I find myself contemplating now are so counter-culture, almost socially unacceptable, ideas that could make people hate me. Ideas like race and ethinicity and gender and sex are merely surface-level issues and aren’t actually essential to our true self or identity. Ideas like I’m not really a person, but a collection of ideas and memories disguised as a mind-body. Stuff that isn’t really a “belief” I’m taking on, but more an idea that my experience is resonating with more and more.
I used to believe that entering through the narrow way meant being sure that I was right about who God was and judging everything with that understanding. But when we are fat with opinions and conclusions, gorged on our own beliefs, we cannot possibly enter the kingdom of heaven. We probably wouldn’t even recognize it because it wouldn’t fit into our preconceived notions of what it should it look like! When we have clothed ourselves with our own knowledge of what is right and wrong, good and bad, holy and unholy; having put on layer after layer after layer of what we find acceptable and true; filling ourselves up with “right” beliefs and being stuffed with supposed certainty, do we really think we will fit through the eye of the needle?
What if the narrow way actually means letting all of that go? Willing to be completely naked, totally free of any limiting belief or thought or judgment… What if it means casting off all the ways we judge others, stepping outside the boxes where everything is neat and defined and controlled… What if it means standing alone, truly unable to name or define or judge anything because, somehow, we have humbled ourselves to the point that we cannot say whether anything is good/bad, right/wrong, holy or unholy because we can, by shedding all our layers, genuinely say that everything is acceptable exactly as it is? That somehow, when we’ve removed all our judgments and various lenses through which we’ve viewed the world, we finally are able to realize that everything is “God”?
Maybe it’s only when we are THIS naked, this vulnerable, this open and free of all encumbering judgments and beliefs, when we are totally EMPTY of any “knowing” or “certainty”, that we can slip through that narrow gate…
How radical.
How beautiful.
How paradoxical that the “narrow” gate could be the way that allows everything through.
If someone tells you that God is here or there, pay them no heed.
And if they tell you that God is this or that, ignore them.
For you will only find God when you remove every something and seek him in nothing, and you will only see him when you become blind and remove every something from him.
If you do this, you will finally have God, and God will have only you.
This is what matters; the rest will take care of itself.
~Meister Eckhart
** All Meister Eckhart poems are taken from Meister Eckhart’s Book of Secrets: Meditations on letting go and finding true freedom; Compiled and translated by Mark S. Burrows and Jon M. Sweeney.
