Jon Sweeney is an independent scholar, critic, writer, and publisher. Mark Burrows is a poet and scholar of medieval theology; he is professor of religion and literature at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany. Together they have done the seemingly impossible —put together a soul-stirring, unconventional, and playful collection of poems by Meister Eckhart that equals the renditions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky. Turn any page in these "Meditations for the Restless Soul" and you will discover poetic gems that sparkle and shine with an uplifting radiance!

Meister Eckhart (1260-1329) was a Dominican priest and theologian whose mystical musings got him in trouble with the Catholic Church. We see in these short poems glimpses of the many sides of this Renaissance figure: controversial philosopher, mystic, preacher, theologian, poet, and administrator. No wonder Eckhart's visionary spirituality has been heralded by the spiritually independents, modern day theosophists, and American Buddhists.

In the introduction, Sweeney and Burrows describe the poems in the book as "not a translation, narrowly construed, but rather our attempts at voicing – or re-voicing – his thought." They describe Eckhart as the "Christian Rumi, the ecstatic Catholic's Kabir, the Dominican Hafiz." These meditations explore the "art of being authentically human."

Here you will find poignant insights into the central place of love and divinization, the unknowable dimensions of God, the paradoxes at the heart of the spiritual journey, and the importance of letting go and resting in the warm embrace of grace. Here are two examples:

Forgetting To Remember

Too often I forget who I am,
and begin to listen to what

they say about me, and so
forget what is my one and

only work: to remember
that I am the one You love,

which is all I have ever
been and all I need to be.

Leave God Alone

The greatest honor we can pay to God is
to leave God alone and so be free of God.

Only then can we be true beyond all our
knowing and desiring, and only then

can we find ourselves and

let God be God.