All the three articles
considered in the general teaching of Eckhart, and even by themselves, reveal the essence of prayer, exactly as is revealed in
St.
Peter Damascene’s words of prayer:
“Such a person (a person
of real faith) will not worry at all anymore about anything whatever. Do
you wish to comfort me in Your knowledge? Be it as you wish. Do you wish
to let me in temptations in order to humiliate me? The same I follow you.
... Do with your creature whatever you like. ... I don't want anything
at all. I stay before you like something soulless. I put my soul into
your inoccent hands, in this age and in the age to come.”
To worship God and to pray
to God is to love him, and as
St. Maximus Confessor writes, “when our mind, by
loving God goes out of itself, then there is no sense at all of itself or of any
of the creatures, because it is enlightened perfectly by the divine and infinite
light and becomes empty of all beings that God made, just as the visible eye
doesn’t see the stars when the sun rises”.[2]
