I suppose the tender mercies stand in obvious contrast to the suffering of our days. So we must say thank you for both, I’m told:
I think that the overarching point of this sermon is that everything that ever took place or takes place or will take place is part of God’s will. This means that even the awful and evil things that befall this planet and mankind in its affairs are God’s will. This is not reassuring for most of us, and yet it does indicate that God has inscrutable purposes in everything that happens, which we will never see or understand clearly, being the tiny creatures that we are. And so, standing on the shores, the apparently desolate shores of this vast sea of grief and anguish that we face, being alive on a planet where life is, for most of us in one way or another, quite difficult. How does Meister Eckhart see this question? Well, Sermon 10 is brief, …
“ What does he mean by saying Moses besought the Lord his God? Truly, if God is your Lord, then you must be his servant. And if you then work for your own good or your own pleasure or your own salvation, then indeed you are not his servant, for you seek not only God’s glory but your own profit. Why does he say, the Lord his God? If God wills you to be sick and you want to be well, if God wills that your friend should die and you want him to live contrary to God’s will, then God is not your Lord. If you love God and are sick in God’s name, if your friend dies in God’s name, if he loses an eye in God’s name, with such a man it would indeed be well. But if you are sick and pray to God for health, then health is dearer to you than God, and he is not your God. He is the God of heaven and earth, but not your God.”
And I think you can already see the difficulties with these passages, both the ones we just read and the ones that will follow; because they propose that we assume a form of equanimity in relationship to grievance, sickness, and even death, and that we accept them as God’s will.
Well, how many of us really do that?
Do we come to an inner stillness that allows the world, which is God’s will in its entirety, to flow into us without interference?
Do we form a deep spiritual relationship with that state?
Is our sensation feminine and receptive enough to receive the world as it is rather than the way we wish it were? I say feminine because Eckhart always refers to the soul as female.
And indeed, this question is not a matter of our own will and our attitude, but a question of the soul itself and what it is nourished by. And Eckhart proposes, as I think he ever and always does in his sermons, that the soul is best nourished by God’s will, as it is. If we come into alignment with that, this is the highest form of prayer we could achieve.
Lee van Laer substack Inner Christianity, God’s will, June 6, 2026
So TYJ for all daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debts leave us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil amen
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